At the end of October, as Locust Walk’s trees hit their peak bloom of red and orange, students were submitting their midterm essays and Esha Pathi, W’25, was getting ready for her team’s midpoint presentation.
“We’ve conducted a ton of interviews with other students and are hoping to share our findings in a clean, synced way to the client,” she explained. “It’s a chance to recalibrate the scope – midpoint is a great sanity check, touching base to see if the client wants you to dive deeper or completely pivot for the final presentation.”
She spoke with the fluency and professionalism of a seasoned consultant while describing how Snider Consulting manages relationships with their clients. To be fair, she is a seasoned consultant. This is her fourth year in Snider, and she currently serves as her team’s engagement manager (EM). As an EM, she oversees her consulting group to ensure they are on track to accomplish their weekly and semester goals.
Snider Consulting is a four-year program in Penn’s Venture Lab that hires Penn student consultants to provide “tailored research, analysis, and execution support to meet clients’ needs.” As a part of Penn’s expanding entrepreneurship opportunities for students, Snider Consulting not only utilizes students’ unique experiences and knowledge but also hires them directly as paid student workers.
The way it works is teams of students work with companies to solve strategic problems for them. The students meet weekly within their teams, with Snider Consulting as a whole, and with their clients to deliver those results.
Jon Potter, Snider’s growth program director, explains how the program has changed over the years: “It’s evolved to the point where the undergrad program is pretty much exclusively focused on Penn startups, from students or faculty, companies coming from the Penn ecosystem.”
They have worked with a variety of clients, ranging from global consulting firms to growth stage startups that have raised eight figures and early-stage clients that have since gone on to raise Series A and B funding from venture capital firms.
Both Esha and Shivani Desai, a fourth-year who is an engagement manager and leading the first-year training program, have felt the impact of working for high-growth Penn enterprises and the accountability of Snider Consulting being a paid, high-responsibility job.
Shivani says that “it’s put a sense of responsibility on me from an early stage, and it was nice to receive formal feedback my first year. I carried myself better at Penn.”
The four-year aspect of the program is especially compelling. The tangible impact that Snider provides to companies is incredibly valuable, and students often report that it has far-reaching implications beyond their first year.
“As much as college is really important, a lot of it is kind of low stakes because you’re only doing things for yourself,” Esha said. “Snider was the first time that I did something for the success of someone else’s company. There’s a lot of additional pressure to execute at 120 percent and that’s the attitude that I’m going to take into the future.”
As Shivani and Esha discussed their progression through the program, they continually mentioned that they gained a sense of tangible confidence that allowed them to carry themselves with more professionalism in the workplace. However, having such early access to Snider Consulting’s network has also allowed them to explore which workplaces to channel this energy towards.
Through their four-year experience in Snider Consulting, students wear a variety of hats. They start out learning by doing—training their financial analysis skills and interfacing with clients and their real-world challenges. As they progress, they begin to take on mentorship roles with the first-years and lead the processes that accomplish real impact for Penn startups.
Shivani declared her concentration in entrepreneurship because of her experiences working with these startups, and through Snider, she gained exposure to Venture Lab as a whole. The summer after her first year, she participated in Venture Lab’s Bet on Entrepreneurship program that connected her with an internship at a venture-capital firm in San Francisco.
When Esha was looking for internships, she “tapped into the Snider network, a really great community of alumni that have gone on to do such incredible things. Everyone in Snider pays it forward.”
However, this focus on “paying it forward” doesn’t stop at the alumni network.
Michael Sarboraria, a first-year in the Life Sciences and Management program, began his time in the Snider Consulting training program in early October. In high school, he worked on a passion project that produced braces for multiple-sclerosis patients, and he came into Penn looking to gain exposure to life sciences entrepreneurship.
Of his time in the training program so far, he mentions that his biggest takeaway is the willingness of upper-level students like Esha and Shivani to serve as mentors in his professional and personal development.
“The training really starts from the ground up,” he remarked. “The fact that they’re willing to put aside time and actually invest in the younger students in the program is the most positive form of mentorship I’ve had.”
However, the mentorship extends beyond professional into personal. Shivani says that Snider “sets up coffee chats where students can grab a coffee or meal, and the upper-level students get to know them outside of the projects that they do.”
Students also learn the necessary business art of the coffee chat and get to earn that coffee money themselves. Michael has done a few coffee chats and gotten the inside scoop about course selection and life at Penn, but he’s excited to “graduate” the training period.
“I’m looking forward to completing the training program,” he said. “My next step is actually getting involved in the program and trying to make an impact for some of these startups that I’ve been really excited to see passing through.”
—Alex Zhou, C’25, W’25
Posted: December 4, 2024
