Name: Cristobal Palacios
Year: Junior
Major: Economics
Minor: Business Institutions
CFS Class: Business Field Studies
Employer: AVIA

For my Spring 2021 CFS internship, I worked at AVIA, a medical consulting startup based out of Chicago. I had previous experience in the medical consulting industry and wanted to further my interests in this field.

At AVIA, I worked on their HUB for Digital Transformation team were my primary task was to do market research for clients in advisory and consulting projects. I learned how to make client ready presentations with elaborate and clean graphics that clearly and thoroughly displayed the information we wanted to show. In addition, I was fortunate enough to sit in on weekly client meetings and help present the findings that our team discovered.

During my time at AVIA, I noticed and starting to learn that one of the most crucial and effective skills that my coworkers did very well and emphasized for me to work on was asking the right questions. I learned early on that asking the right questions is one of the quickest ways to get your superiors to trust you and think that you are capable of making quality work. It highlights your ability to analyze information and facilitate a conversation that can help clarify a long tedious meeting for not only the person asking the question but also everyone else involved in the conversation. This is a skill that I do not excel at yet, but it is something that I will be working on and try to be proactively work on in my future professional experiences