What's up, y'all. I'm writing this email from a hotel room in ATL where I am for second rounds with McKinsey tomorrow morning. This is my third trip to the east coast since last Thursday and all of this flying is wearing on me. Yesterday, I was in DC for my BCG second rounds and, as always, you know I've got to give y'all the goods on how it went down. To put it simply, I fumbled bigtime on that joint and I'm fully expecting to get dinged. Here's the deal...
The trip started out with me flying from SFO to Dulles on Tuesday night. As I've been planning these flights, I've been trying to miss as few classes as possible, so the earliest flight I could do out was at 4:15pm. By the time I got to Dulles, it was past midnight and it took another 35-40 minutes to get to the hotel in downtown DC. As you can probably guess, I was crazy jetlagged, so it was difficult to fall asleep once I got to the hotel. I think I got about 4 hours of sleep before I had to get up to get myself together for the interview. One thing that I should have expected is that very few companies that have "DC" offices actually have office in DC...this was true for BCG. Their office is really in Bethesda, MD, which was supposed to take 30 minutes by cab. As my luck would have it, my cabbie ended up getting lost and it took closer to 45 minutes for me to get to the office. He got me there with 5 minutes to spare before my interview, so I can't be totally mad, but I was ready to bug out if he'd made me late.
The interview day was set up with three interviews that each had a small fit portion and the remainder as a case discussion. by now, i've had a ton of interviews of this kind, so I was as ready as I could have possibly been. I got off to a good start with the first interview and I felt like I rocked the case as well as I could have...my interviewer seemed to be satisfied with my performance too, so I thought I'd be golden for the rest of the time. WRONG!!! my second interview was just as bad as the first one was good. I ended up making an incorrect assumption about the business problem based on some initial information that the interviewer gave me and went completely down the wrong track. Once the interviewer let me know what he was looking for, I let him know that that was one of the firs tthings I'd come up with, but had ruled it out based on earlier information that he gave me. I don't know if this made him mad, but the tone of things changed at that point. From then on, I couldn't help feeling like an idiot...everything I said for the rest of the case ended up being wrong and, when i got to the part where i asked him questions, I couldn't help but think that my questions weren't exactly satisfactory for him. After leaving that joint, I was frazzled and thrown off for the last interview. the third guy ended up coming out to meet me late, so we pretty much had to rush right into the case and I played his case wrong in every direction. I know that I broke the problem down well, but, everytime I made an assessment or gave a reason why something might be, he hit me with a "uuuuhhhhhh, I don't think so" or "I don't think that's right". After a while, it just got funny to think how wrong I was.
As I walked out of the BCG DC office to catch a cab to Dulles, I was SAD and couldn't stop kicking myself for how badly I'd done on those last two cases. I knew that I couldn't change what had already happened, but i was feeling low because getting an offer from that office would have given me a chance to be less than two hours from my family if I'd have taken it. Now, I'm pretty sure that it won't be an option. They said that I should find out my fate by next Wednesday, but I don't see the good word coming from them. I can't let that get me down though because I've got to hype myself up for the McKinsey joints that I've got in the morning. These upcoming ones will likely be the last interviews I do during my time in business school, so I'm looking forward to getting past them.