Internship Spotlight: Aashima Dhingra ’26, Boston Consulting Group
Discovery Projects, an experiential marketing course offered at SOM, helped Aashima Dhingra cultivate the skills necessary to succeed in her summer internship.
Internship: Summer consultant, BCG Dallas
Hometown: Gurgaon, India
Pronouns: she/her/hers
The SOM classes you’re using on the job: Discovery Projects, Competitor, Customer, Innovator, Managing Groups & Teams, AI Marketing and Strategy
Go-to work lunch: Thai food or Cava
After-work routine: Dinner and drinks with friends
Favorite thing about Dallas: The dining experience, especially Tex-Mex, sushi, and Indian food
When I joined the Yale Center for Customer Insights (YCCI) Discovery Projects, I didn’t realize how closely the skills I would gain would align with my work as a summer consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in the firm’s Dallas office.
An experiential course offered through YCCI, Discovery Projects pairs students with real-life companies to work on marketing projects with tangible impact. My team worked with the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA). Our goal was to help the LPGA increase engagement among Asian American audiences, particularly for watching and attending women’s golf tournaments. We applied YCCI’s “Beliefs–Goals–Choices” framework to uncover what motivates and what hinders engagement within this community, then developed ideas to help the LPGA strengthen that connection.
As part of the project, we began with secondary research, immersing ourselves in cultural, demographic, and sports consumption trends within the Asian American community across social media platforms and online forums. We then conducted in-depth interviews to identify the key beliefs and goals driving participation in women’s golf. Once we synthesized these insights, we designed A/B tests to validate our hypotheses. Survey data analysis revealed which messages and engagement strategies resonated most strongly. Ultimately, we presented those results to the LPGA leadership team alongside actionable recommendations.
This hands-on process, from framing the problem to testing solutions and communicating insights, became a direct precursor to my work at BCG. This summer at the Dallas office, I helped a U.S.-based Fortune 500 utilities company accelerate AI adoption by identifying and prioritizing the initiatives most likely to succeed. We used A/B testing to evaluate adoption strategies and conducted in-depth data analysis to measure impact. My YCCI experience gave me the confidence to structure these tests, interpret results, and translate them into clear, strategic recommendations for the client.
Just as importantly, YCCI gave me practical experience in client communications, from running effective interviews to distilling findings into compelling presentations. At BCG, these skills helped me guide client conversations, ensure buy-in, and turn complex analyses into actionable decisions.
Looking back, my YCCI LPGA project was more than a marketing insights exercise. It was a miniature consulting engagement that built the analytical rigor, hypothesis-driven testing, and client storytelling skills that proved invaluable during my summer consulting internship.
