As the title states, the interviewers I had on monday for BCG must've been hallucinating when they spoke with me because I somehow got invited for a second round. I got the call earlier today during one of my classes and the DC office is checkin' for The Kid. I was never able to get the recruiter back on the phone to plan everything out, but it looks like I'll be heading out there sometime in the next couple of weeks. It's a huge relief to have gotten the good word from them because I thought I'd completely bombed their interview. I was supposed to have heard from Bain by tonight, but I didn't get a call, so i'm starting to wonder whether I'd done as well as I thought on their interviews...I'm not going to put too much thought into it though because I'm turning out to be a poor judge of my performance on these interviews.
OK, as a way to round out this entry, I thought I'd respond to the questions that someone posed to me in a blog comment. As always, i'll answer them to the best of my ability, but there are some parts where I'll just have to say "who knows?":
>>Can you go into more detail on what the BCG and Bain interviews were like? What sort of questions did they ask you?
The interviews for Bain and BCG were similar in that they asked pretty challenging business case questions. If you've never seen a case question before, it's hard to understand how tought they can be. A couple of quick examples are things like "Our client is a paper manufacturer whose profits are going down but revenues are going up...what could the problem be?", "Our client would like to spin off one of their subsidiaries. what should they be concerned with in this scenario?", and "Our client wants to release a new product...should they do it?". Usually, you are given next to no information unless you ask for it and that's where the challenge comes in because knowing what to ask isn't always an obvious thing. There is also a fit portion to these interviews, but the case portion carries the bulk of the weight when they're critiquing you.
>>What do you think differentiated your consulting interview experience with your classmates that have done well? Are they taking different classes? Do they have a different background (i.e. consulting background)?
I don't really know how to answer this question because it looks like I've done a lot better on the interviews this time around than I thought. I think the main thing that is differentiating my classmates from each other during the full-time recruiting process is the amount of interview prep that they've done. Some people in my class have been running through practice cases since August and others had only done 2 or 3 cases to practice for these interviews. Practice makes perfect when it comes to case interviews. I only did 4 or 5 cases before the itnerviews, but I'd given cases to about 10 people and I got a lot of insight from how those people broke down the problems themselves. Also, i'd done about 100 cases by the time I got to the end of the inernship search process last year, so a lot of that insight is still in me.
When trying to get internships in consulting, one's background does matter a lot and people with prior consulting and/or banking experience have a leg up, but, if your case game is tight, you can still get a great internship in consulting. My problem was that I didn't have the optimal background to get a summer consulting internship and my case game wasn't tight enough in the early part of the recruiting cycle. By the time I got to Accenture interviews, I was on point though and, now, I'm just trying to get myself back to that level of performance in the interviews. I'm still not there yet, but I can feel myself getting close.
>>Where has Stanford done a good and poor job of preparing you for Bain and BCG? What more could Stanford have done to put you in a better position to do well in these interviews?
I think that Stanford has done a good a job as it could to prepare me for the interviews this year, so, if I don't end up getting an offer from these companies, I'll have no one to blame but myself. During last year's internship process, I was caught off-guard by the case interviews because we hadn't had Strategy or Marketing yet and I really didn't know how to break down a business case at that point. Once I got to the end of the Winter quarter, I felt that my analysis game was at a high point, but that came too late for me to have knocked out a lot of these consulting companies. This year, I think my biggest handicap has been connecting some of the info from the different Core classes to form my end-to-end business intuition. Remember, I had just about no business experience before I got to the GSB, so I'm sure that the business intuition will develop over time and I'm not too worried about it.
Honestly, all a business school can do is give you the business fundamentals and then everything else comes from how you use those fundamentals to break down problems. Aside from that, you can lean on your school's Consulting Club to provide copies of case books and plan case interview workshops and practice sessions and your fellow students to run through cases with you. When it comes to the case interviews, it's all about practicing cases to get sharper at breaking down the problems and developing your business intuition so you'll know what to do once you've got the problem broken down.
Posted by marquis930 at October 28, 2005 04:27 AM