A Day in the Life of Vik
Vik
Vik Shah is a Senior Analyst at Avascent’s DC office. He graduated Georgetown in 2016 with a focus on Security Studies and started at Avascent in 2017 after doing research in Jordan for a year. His project work focuses on helping clients capture new business, price competitively, and expand into international markets. He also co-leads Avascent’s Diversity and Inclusivity Council.
7:45 AM
Wake up, shower, check to see if there’s a Capital Bike Share bike available near my apartment, and run to make sure no one grabs it before me.
8:30 AM
Get to work, read the news, and start project work. I always find that working earlier is a lot easier than working late so I try to get in early on days that I think will be busy.
9:00 AM
Start working on slides I have due for one of my projects. We’re looking at contracting opportunities for a federal agency which I thought might be boring but I’m finding pretty interesting. Every federal agency contracts differently so I’m enjoying learning about the nuances between them.
11:00 AM
Think about what to eat for lunch. Ask some friends and we decide on a place.
11:45 AM
Pick up sandwiches and eat in the cafeteria. Having lunch with friends and colleagues is always a great part of the day because it provides a break from project work and a chance to relax for a bit.
1:00 PM
Present my parametric pricing model to the MD. The model is basically a way we figure out how much a platform or service costs by adding up all of its discrete components and estimating the integration costs. On this project I worked directly with the MD on this which was both exciting and a bit terrifying.
2:00 PM
Work on edits for the parametric pricing model. Thankfully there aren’t too many!
3:00 PM
Finish the slides for my other project as the MD reviews the pricing model. At this rate I’ll be able to leave by 6pm!
5:00 PM
Present updated findings on the pricing model to the MD and the rest of the project team and decide how to translate these findings into slides. Turns out it’ll be a bit trickier than we thought given the fact that we’re looking at a few different configurations, so I’ll probably have to stick around for a while.
6:30 PM
Think about what to eat for dinner. Ask the friends that are left in the office what they want and then go get food. We meet back up in the cafeteria and talk about DC’s urban raccoon population (my favorite topic) and other, less interesting stuff.
8:00 PM
Finish the rest of my slides, send them to the Project Director and MD for review (there would normally be an additional consultant in between these two but we don’t have a consultant on this project), and head home via bikeshare because it’s a great night for a bike ride.