When I meet up with my family and friends whom I have not seen since starting my internship in June, I am invariably asked the question: “What aspects of your schooling have you been able to apply to your internship?” Not wanting to bore them with a nuanced answer, my standby generic response is “almost everything”.

To date, my work as a strategy consultant with the Multilingual Community Interpreter Services in Toronto has required me to use chunks of teachings from 75 per cent of the courses that comprised the first year of my MBA programme at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

MCIS is a non-profit, social enterprise organisation. It provides interpretation and translation services for non-English speaking people, so that they can use government and charitable social services. And, because my work at the organisation is focused on high-level strategic and operational activities, the courses on which I have mostly drawn are those in strategy, marketing, managerial accounting, operations and organisational behaviour.