We are back in Lausanne and entering the final stretch of the MBA. There is a lot on our minds: finishing the last few assignments, getting jobs (jobs! JOBS!), and making the most of the time we have left together. It has been almost a month since those of us who chose to do a summer internship returned and reunited with the classmates who spent their summer in Lausanne. For most of us “interns”, the experience already feels strangely distant. To be fair, we have packed quite a lot into the weeks since. So, what was my own internship like?
We were given what you might call a very efficient transition between Singapore and our internships. We landed back in Lausanne on a Saturday and our internships started on Monday. I still remember the chuckles in class back in May when we were told this schedule meant we would “have Sunday to rest before starting”. It was delivered somewhere between serious advice and a joke.
In my case, Sunday was spent travelling again. Almost exactly 24 hours after arriving in Lausanne, I reached my accommodation in Florence. The rolling hills and greenery were a familiar and very pleasant welcome. The drivers were less so. After months in Switzerland, where cars seem to stop if you so much as look thoughtfully at a zebra crossing, Florence quickly reminded me that crossing the road could require a little more conviction. On my first day, I decided to take the bus to my internship at Eli Lilly Italy. The first bus got me from the northern suburbs of Florence, where I was staying, towards the outskirts of the city, close to Lilly’s headquarters. The second bus never came. On day two, I bought a used bike.
The internship itself felt, in some ways, a lot like the learning curve at IMD. It started quickly and then kept accelerating. There was also the reality of doing an internship in Italy during the summer. August is not exactly the easiest month to coordinate office work. I had actually started working a few hours a day while we were still in Singapore so that I would not fall too far behind.
I arrived with a certain amount of swagger, assuming my biomedical background would give me an advantage in understanding the work and delivering good results. That confidence did not last very long. It became clear quite quickly that consulting skills, my old arch nemesis, were going to matter much more. Like many IMDers before me, I found myself reopening PowerPoints from earlier in the year and putting things we had discussed in class into practice: strategy, leadership, marketing and plenty more.
One idea from strategy that became particularly useful was the red ocean/blue ocean framework. At one point, I spent far too long chasing a lead around the question of ownership, only to find myself going in circles. I eventually had to make some difficult calls with incomplete information, and having a framework helped me think more clearly about the options in front of me.
I also had to accept that I felt permanently behind. Because I had spent the first two weeks working only part-time, I kept thinking of myself as ten working days behind everyone else. I would reach a promising idea and immediately think, “If only I had got here two weeks ago.” My supervisor at Lilly gave me some advice that stayed with me: stop worrying so much about the time you have lost. The deadline exists, and the task may feel impossible, but the useful thing is to focus on what you can do now, what the next step is, and whether you are still moving in the right direction.
Strangely enough, I was less anxious presenting my final findings and recommendations to the executive board of Eli Lilly Italy than I was presenting during our recent IMD integrative exercise. I will keep that one spoiler-free for next year’s class.
Looking back, stepping outside the IMD MBA bubble for two months was exactly what I needed. It gave me the chance to test what we had been learning against the messier reality of an actual organisation, with actual constraints, incomplete information and decisions that could not wait for the perfect answer.
Now we are back, with more projects, more case studies and, yes, more job applications ahead. But there is also something reassuring about facing this final stretch together, back in a familiar place, with the people who have been part of the year from the beginning.
Konstantinos Valtetsiotis is part of our 2026 MBA class.
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