Internship Spotlight: Kshitij Dutt ’25, Winnebago Industries
Kshitij Dutt ’25 says that participating in the Discovery Projects, an experiential course from the Yale Center for Customer Insights, equipped him with the skills to address complex organizational design questions at a storied company.
We asked rising second-year MBA students to check in from their summer internships, where they applied the lessons of their first year at Yale SOM.
Internship: Winnebago Industries, Eden Prairie, Minnesota
Hometown: Delhi, India
Pronouns: he/him/his
The SOM classes you’re using on the job: Competitor, Customer, Workforce, Executive, and Consumer Insights
After-work routine: Exploring Minneapolis and the neighboring locations
Favorite thing about Eden Prairie: Eden Prairie has the cleanliness of a small town, the buildings of a metropolis, the closeness to lakes and state parks, and affordability—all in one place
As an intern in the Strategy and Business Development unit at Winnebago Industries, I have the unique opportunity to design a strategy for a billion-dollar business.
I began my internship by closely examining Winnebago’s current challenges as well as the broader recreational vehicle industry. By the end of the first week, I decided that my project for the summer would be to implement an organizational design that helps Winnebago surmount those challenges. For the rest of the summer, I would be working on identifying the most important needs in the future, prioritizing areas of focus to achieve them, and creating a feasible roadmap to bridge the gap between the current reality and the vision for the future.
My internship has required me to consider questions that have more than one right answer. This is a stark contrast with my engineering background, where most problems have a single right answer, and the world is mostly black and white. My mechanical engineering education and experience as a rocket scientist at India’s premier space agency made me a proficient scientist, but before starting at Yale SOM, I was not ready to handle all the broader challenges an organization might face.
Fortunately, I have been able to draw on my SOM experience to think about solutions for Winnebago. One thing I learned soon after arriving on campus was that I cannot solve these complicated challenges alone. So I applied for Discovery Projects, a Yale Center for Customer Insights (YCCI) experiential course that allows students to work in collaboration with peers and faculty on a real-world business challenge, in order to better understand consumers.
Eager to apply what I had learned at SOM, I began searching for internships that would put my new skills to work. Winnebago offered a unique role: I felt that my background would provide me with an understanding of some aspects of the business, but the internship also offered new challenges.
Once I began work, I recalled not only concepts from core classes at SOM, but also what I learned through the Discovery Projects. Through the YCCI, I worked on a project for Mastercard, exploring how the company can make its Priceless Experiences initiative more memorable for customers. One lesson I learned during the project is the importance of building a narrative when presenting, especially leaning into the “so what” factor instead of relying on generic summaries or titles. Another invaluable skill I learned from the Discovery Projects was the importance of understanding consumers’ beliefs and motivations, and then using testing to determine the best way to address them. This skill has helped me conceptualize organizational frameworks and think about customer voice when looking at capabilities for organizational design.
Alongside insights from the Discovery Projects, invaluable mentorship from SOM alum Devin Kasper has helped me apply my academic learnings in real-world settings. Following my internship, I will be better positioned to not only identify challenges for firms by assessing the present and forecasting the future, but also to understand how much an organization can change over a certain period.
