Devina Singh

I attribute my success to a lot of things. One is definitely my parents, who really helped me grow a lot in life. I always got equal opportunities in my house, which was great. I would also attribute it to my own ambition and my own dreams. And then just overall getting the right guidance at the right time from my mentors at McKinsey.

The best career advice I received was to play your strengths. Always try to focus on what you're good at and try to amplify that, versus just always trying to fix your flaws. That's where I started to play. I realized that I do pretty good in strategy and corporate finance and M&A overall, so I started focusing on that and I kept growing there. I built a lot of client relationships there and have been here for about 5 years.

I think the biggest advice would be big picture thinking. What do I mean by that? First, try to identify what exactly you are striving for. I think sometimes you just get lost in the day-to-days and don't really realize what exactly we are striving for, and that's when you end up being in the same rut and not really achieving. My advice is to, one, do big picture thinking, and find aspiring people in the area that you want to grow in. Surround yourself with those people, and that's how you grow.

I think there's a lot of opportunity for women in general. I do think that finance as a practice is very male-dominated, so I sincerely see that there's a lot of opportunities for women. I do think that there's so much opportunity for just working on AI-based solutions, which is artificial intelligence-based solutions, that can help in improvising the workflows and helps with execution of a lot of work streams that we work here at McKinsey as well. I think for women particularly, if they don't get that nervous - I feel like women, particularly, I would say that it's more often so that they get nervous and they did not end up doing something that they aspire to, so I would say they need to push themselves a little bit more in that direction. And at the same time, if they're truly interested, work in tech, AI-based solutions that can be implemented across.

I think values - one is honesty and building genuine relationships. I do think that has helped me both in my personal life and my professional life a lot. Honesty and building good relationships are essentially the biggest ones for me.