So, one of the readers of my blog hit me up after my last entry asking me why I didn't think I'd be able to accept the offer from Infosys and I thought it would be a decent story to tell on here. I hope y'all get a kick out of it.
OK, for those who haven't heard of Infosys, they're a GREAT company with a major name in he IT space. Their main focus is IT consulting, but they also have a pretty large research arm that looks into emerging trends in IT to determine how the company can spin up in those areas and use them to provide value to clients. I was in NYC for my BCG 2nd round when I received the email telling me that I'd gotten an offer and I was excited because they would offer a chance for me to get some strategy experience using my tech background as a foundation. The email said that they wanted me to work in Bangalore, India and had instructions for me to take care of the arrangements (their travel dept's information, how to get an Indian work visa, etc.). In my excitement, I overlooked the fact that the email didn't say anything about how much I'd be getting paid. I never even thought to wonder about that until one of my peoples asked me about it upon my arrival back in Cali.
When I realized that oversight, I emailed the recruiter from infosys and asked her to give me an update on how much the salary would be. Instead of answering me directly, she referred me to the lady who was in charge of the internship program, who called me up at 1:30am to answer the questions that I had. When we spoke, she told me about all of the perks involved with the internship: free housing, free food, free cab fare around the city, an opportunity to hang out with interns from 70 B-schools around the world, etc. The one thing she didn't seem like she wanted to touch on was the salary, so I directly asked her about it. She started off by saying "Infosys pays based on the cost of living in the city where you're working", which should have set off some alarms in my head. She continued by saying that "the monthly stipend will be 20,000...", which momentarily had me geeked up at the thought of bringing in $20,000...she dashed all the excitement away when she hit me with "...rupees". My first thought was "what is a rupee?", but I didn't make any sort of reaction to her statement because i dind't immediately know the exchange rate for rupees to dollars. Once I got off of the phone with her, I found an exchange rate calculator on the Web and discovered that the stipend of 20,000 rupees would convert for $458.17 in American dollars...that shook up my excitement and made me really sad.
For the past week or so, I've been thinking long and hard about this and, although I know it'd be a gret experience to work over in India, I don't know if I can afford to work for less than $500 per month. In addition to getting good experience in an internship, one is also supposed to be making money to survive on when the school year starts. Less than $1000 total from an internship won't even pay my car note and insurance over the summer (and I haven't even factored in the amount that the gov't would take for taxes). I guess I'd better get my hustle on because, if I'm going to pass on a good internship, I'd better be able to secure another one that is just as good.
In the aftermath of the OCR process, I've declared myself the king of the second round knock-out.
Here are my stats so far:
-10 first round interviews
-1 offer awarded after first round (with Infosys, but it looks like I won't be able to accept it)
-5 second round interview invitations
- 1 second round invitation rescinded because I wouldn't cancel one of the my other 2nd round trips
- 4 second round dings
Now, I'm settled with the fact that I'm going to have to do the job thing on my own and this will definitely help me strengthen my hustle skills. It turns out that only about 30% of my class has internship offers that they've gotten through OCR and, now that that's run its course, there are 70% of us who have to do it on our own. Fortunately, the Career Management Center is being great about giving advice and helping us in any way that they can. It's just tough because I fully expected to be finished with the recruiting process by now. I'll let y'all know if/when i find something good.
On other things, i just left Bishop Auditorium at the GSbB where I participated in our presidential candidate debate. I've decided to throw my hat in the ring to run for co-president of the school with my man Cameron who is also a Princeton alum. We're one of four teams running and I think we're coming in as underdogs because we have neither a female (the other three groups have a female and, traditionally, you have to have a woman to win) nor international student (same sort of historical trend) on the team. Recognizing that we'd be fighting against those historical trends, we decided to run anyway because we're both passionate about doing some good for the school and our platform (focusing on class unity and diversity) is pretty strong. The elections will take place on Sunday and Monday with the results coming out on Tuesday. I'm not really sure if I'll win, but, if I do, I'm looking forward to helping to make this palce even better than it already is.
...and they dissed me too. It looks like I'm back at Square One in this recruiting process. The guy who called me was one of my interviewers and he said that they "strongly encourage" me to reapply again for a full-time position in the Fall. Overall, I was very impressed with the internship recruiting process at McKinsey, so I do plan on trying again with them in the Fall.
Making it to the second rounds at companies is a great feeling, but getting turned down by all of the second rounds you get is rough.
...and it wasn't good news. They decided to take a pass on me for this summer. The NYC recruiting coordinator gave me some good feedback, but some of the things that he stated as problems with my approach were things that I'd picked up as a result of feedback from other companies. Also, he said that I should have concentrated on talking about the actually software engineering work that I'd done more, but just about everyone else I talked to advised me to focus on my leadership stuff, which really didn't come out at all in my actual project work.
Worst of all, I had to wait all weekend to get this news. The guy tried to call me on Friday afternoon and left me a message to call him back, which I tried to do several times in the past three days, but it turns out that he'd gone away for the weekend. It was not a great feeling to spend a holiday weekend in anticipation of finding out my status. I really wish that he would have just left me the bad word on that message instead of having me wonder where I stand for so long. I guess it isn't BCG's style to leave those sorts of messages, but I think it's better to just let someone know what's up as soon as possible.
Damn, I'm really starting to wonder if I'm really meant to be doing Consulting at all. I'm still waiting to hear from McKinsey at some point today, but I'm not very optimistic about what I'll get from them either. Maybe I should have just dropped my resume for high tech jobs since that's what I know instead of trying to jump into a new industry that I don't seem to be best equipped to get into.
I just got in from ATL last night and I'm still tired. 4 cross country flights in 4 days is no joke! Unfortunately, I don't think I did very well on the McKinsey second rounds. I was there interviewing with 3 of my classmates and they didn't think they did really well either. The common theme was that we thought that we performed well on 1 or 2 of the cases, but struggled on at least two of them. I guess I should talk a little about the format to make it all easier to understand.
The second rounds for McK involve four separate interviews: 3 standard case/fit combo joints and then a special one called a McKinsey Day 1 interview where we are given a slide deck that has a bunch of blanks in it and a separate deck with data in it that we were supposed to use to fill in the blanks in the first deck. The office space at their ATL office is gorgeous and the people there were so nice that I could see myself fitting perfectly, but I might have to wait a year to get that chance. All of my interviewers were nice folks and didn't really give away whether the times that I slipped up in my analysis were killers or not. One big difference between this round and the first one was that the cases were a lot harder this time around. Some people may say that they were easier, but I was knocked back flat by a couple of the ones from yesterday. I'm supposed to hear about how I did by Monday, but I hope they hit me up today so I can enjoy the holiday weekend and plan for more job hunting if that turns out to be necessary.
On the BCG front, I got a voicemail message from the NYC office recruiting coordinator asking me to call him bck, but it was after 10pm EST by the time I received it. His voice didn't sound excited to me, so I think he was calling to give me the bad word on how my chances at BCG stand. I really hope he doesn't want me to call back to get dissed when he could have told me that on the voicemail, but I realize that companies like BCG don't leave that sort of information on messages. He may just want to talk to me to give me some feedback that might help me next time around. Who knows...as soon as I find out, y'all know that I'll put the news up on here *stressing out*
I'm writing this post from a hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton in ATL where I am for my second round interview with mcKinsey. This is seriously the nicest hotel that I've ever stayed in. We did a case on their quality management program in class today and it's great to be able to see how they get down. They treat everyone that stays here like a king and I'm loving it. I NEED to get one of these consulting gigs so i can stay in places like this regularly :-)
I'm trying my best not to be nervous, but it's hard because this is the last company I have left from my on campus recruiting process. If I don't get this, then I'll be stuck looking around on my own for a summer gig and, with all the school work and other stuff I have on my plate, it'll be hard to find the time to do that. I can't afford to have another B performance like I did at BCG, so i've got to get my game face on and show McKinsey how The Kid can break it down. I'll be damned if I'm not shook at the thought of this final round. From what they've told us, there will be 3 one-hour case/fit interviews and then a 1 1/2 hour one that they call the McKinsey Day 1 interview where I have to use a set of data to complete a presentation with holes in it. I think this may be the toughest interview day of all the others I've had so far.
I'm still waiting to hear from BCG about my status, so i will likely get a call from them tomorrow. I wish they would have told me today though because it would have helped a lot in my level setting to prepare for this McKinsey interview...Oh well, I just have to go in there and do my best. I'll give y'all an update on how I did when I get back to Stanford tomorrow.
I"m typing out this post while I'm sitting on the plane about an hour from SFO airport and I can't make myself go to sleep, so I thought I'd make good use of my time and put together a new blog entry :-)
Even though it's been almost 6 hours since it got finished, I can't get the thought of my interview with BCG off of my mind. The session was made up of three interviews that were part fit and part case and ran for about 45 minutes each. One thing that was common across the interviews was that each of the people I met with was incredibly nice, which was great but also made it hard to read them because I couldn't tell if they thought I was on point or not. I think I did OK on the first fit/case combination and the second fit, but I'm not so sure about the second case and the third fit/case combination. I could feel myself getting exhausted as the interviews went on and, as time progressed, my analysis started getting sloppy. The weird part is that I could sense that that was going on, but I couldn't do anything about it. That daggone jetlag really did a number on me. I'm going to have to remember to buy some NyQuil or Tylenol PM to take with me on my trip to ATL for McKinsey tomorrow because getting to sleep at 3:30am and then having to wake up early in the morning to prepare for an interview is NOT the clutch move.
When I left BCG's offices, I felt like I might have done pretty well and thought that I might be getting the good word sometime tomorrow or Friday. But, now that I've had over 4 hours on this plane to think about how I did, I have realized places where I slipped up pretty badly in my analysis of the business cases and in reading my interviewers. I don't think I did anything blatantly bad, but I can't see where I straight-up nailed anything either. I would grade myself as a B on my performance and I fear that that isn't good enough to get the "yessir" from a company like BCG. There isn't any reason for me to be worrying about it now because I can't do anything about it, but it is difficult not to think about it because I feel like I might have squandered a great opportunity to have the hookup for the summer. It looks like I'll know for sure in the next couple of days.
I need to get an internship with a company I'd be willing to accept a full time offer from because I definitely don't want to be going through this whole recruiting process again in the Fall.
I'm writing this post from a hotel room in NYC where I will be having my second round interview with BCG in about 2 hours. I arrived last night and it was tought getting up this morning because jet lag is a MONSTER!!! I'm trying my best not to be nervous, but I know that these second rounds are tough and, from talking to some friends who've already done BCG second rounds, they are pretty challenging. Although I want to come out of this with an offer, I realize that all I can do is give my best effort and nothing more than that. If it's meant for me to be here for the summer, then it'll happen. It would be nice to be here in NYC for three months though because I have quite a few peoples here that i haven't hung out with for a while and I could tear the city up if I actually have some money in my pocket to do so :-)
In other news, I JUST GOT MY FIRST JOB OFFER FOR THE SUMMER!!! I had a phone interview with Infosys last night at midnight EST with a project leader who was calling from their headquarters in India. When i woke up this morning, I had an email in my Inbox from their recruiter saying that they wanted to offer me a job for the summer. The job would require me to spend 8 weeks in Bangalore, India doing IT Strategy research for them to give them an idea of where they can add value to their clients in the future. I've never worked abroad before and Infosys is a great company, so i'm really excited about this opportunity. Also, it takes a lot of pressure off of me going into these second rounds with BCG and McKinsey this week knowing that I've got an option for the summer if they don't work out. I don't know if those folks in India are ready for me over there...I might just start wylin' out and start an international incident :-)
Today, I had two more interviews with smaller consulting companies, Katzenbach Partners and Strategic Decisions Group, that pride themselves on bringing in really talented people and giving them extra challenging work, both of which appeal to me. I felt terrified going into both of them because of the "3 strikes day" (I got dissed by Capital One via email yesterday too) I had yesterday, so I wasn't expecting to do to well in these interviews.
The Katzenbach interview had two parts, an initial 45 minute fit interview and then a 45 minnute case interview. I feel like I connected well with both the fit and the case interviewers, but I don't think I performed well on the case portion. katzenbach only accepts 1-2% of the people that apply for summer internships and I don't think I knocked the case out well enough to move on. I'd probably give myself a B on it, but I don't know if that's enough for them.
The SDG interview didn't have a case portion (THANK GOODNESS!!!) and was only a fit interview with a GSB alum. SDG is big on decision analysis to help companies make strategic moves and they are big on knowing the statistical stuff we did in our Data & Decision class last quarter. I felt like I vibed well with the interviewer and had a great conversation with him. At the end of the interview, he told me that the next step would be a second round that will includea business case, an analytical case, and another fit interview. When I left, I didn't know what to think because the recent dings have had me questioning my interpretations of my performance. I was ecstatic when I got the call earlier tonight that they wanted to invite me for a second round. I don't know if I'll get the offer, but it feels good to have broken the losing streak that started yesterday.
Just as I was posting that last message, my phone rang and one of my Mercer interviewers was on the other end. Unfortunately, I didn't make the cut to get an offer but he did give me some good feedback that I plan on incorporating for my other interviews. I'm really starting to wonder if Consulting is the way I'm supposed to go for my summer internship. The problem is that I didn't drop my resume for any tech companies, which would have been my strength, so now I'm getting more and more worried.
So, I had a second round interview with Mercer Management Consulting early this morning and I don't know how to feel about it. it started with a case interview, wich I think I did OK on. It was a technology case and it should have been right up my alley, but I don't know if my line of thinking was what the interviewer was looking for. next, I had a resume interview that didn't really touch on my resume at all. It was more of a situational one that hit me with some questions that I'd never faced during any of these joints, "Like how would you approach a project where you had a significant learning curve?". I left that one not knowing how it went either. My last inteview was another case and I felt like I was doing really well on it as time passed and the interviewer broke out a bunch of exhibits for me to interpret. When I'd given my recommendation, he went back through the exhibits and, out of 6 slides, it turns out that I'd interpreted 5 of them incorrectly. At that point, I started to feel like Mercer would be giving me the gas face. Overall, I left there thinking it could go either way, which worries me because I'm starting to wonder about whether I'll be able to get a summer internship that I want for this summer. They're supposed to call me by tomorrow afternoon with their decision so my stomach has been in knots ever since I finished it up at 10:30am.
I also had an interview with Deloitte consulting this afternoon and I knew from the time that I left the second portion (the behavioral portion) of it that it had gone badly. I don't know why, but it just seemed that I didn't connect with that interviewer. I was the same ol' friendly me, but the guy just wasn't vibin' with me. My feeling on that was confirmed about 10 minutes ago when I got the call saying they wouldn't be inviting me to a second round interview. I have gotten a couple of rejection phone calls from other companies, but this one really got at me because I'm starting to get shaky and wonder about my consulting case interview skills. It's nice to get invited to second rounds, but, if I can't close on them, then it's no good.
I am hoping that I get some good news from Mercer tomorrow because that'll allow me to start realxing again without the uncertainty of whether I'll have a job hanging over me. Plus, it'll make it easier to go into my two second rounds next week knowing that, no matter what happens in those, I'll have a job offer from a great firm. This whole process is making my head hurt.
OK, I know I've been really bootleg with giving y'all that update I mentioned in my last message. I guess this is as good a time as any to put it up here because I think it's a week from the day that I said I'd actually do so :-)
I left off in my last post talking about last Tuesday and how I'd had a so-so Bain interview, a terrible BCG interview, and had gotten the bad word that Bain had dinged me that night. I totally expected to get the ding from BCG too, so Wednesday started off as a really low day for me. It all turned around in the middle of that day when BCG's New York recruiter called me and told me that they wanted to fly me out there for a second round interview...I was SHOCKED!!! But that shock turned into elation and I went into my Monitor interview that afternoon and had the best interview performance that I've had to date at these consulting joints. I was vibing with the interviewer, I thought I'd cracked the case, and I felt so comfortable that I just knew I'd be getting the callback. I found out a couple of days later that Monitor was not checking for me and had given me the DING-DING-DING!!!
On Thursday, I had two more first-round interviews with Capital One and McKinsey. The Capital One interview came first and I felt like I bombed that one. There was no fit portion of it...as soon as I sat down, the interviewer startd in on the case and their case was the hardest one I'd seen up to that point and since that point. it was full of complicated math and, every time I solved something, he'd throw in another math curveball at me. At one point, I had to divide 1,111,111.11 by 52 using long division (that's right...long division). I kept on getting mixed up and stumbling over myself in the math and I felt relieved when the joint ended so I could just go off and expect my ding. To my surprise, the interviewer invited me to take their second round exam later that night (they don't do a second round interview) and, depending on how I did on that exam, I might be flying back home to VA for a third round interview sometime soon.
On Thursday afternoon, I had my McKinsey interview and I was terrified by this one. I'd been talking to people all day who had done theirs and the consensus was that they bring the ruckus with their interviews. From what people told me, they had the hardest cases, the most unexpected fit questions, and their name alone made some people shook going into it. Given how I'd done on the Capital One interview, I had no idea what to expect. I ended up meeting with two people for an hour each and answered both fit questions and did a case for each of them. I felt like I handled the fit questions well, but I stumbled a couple of times on both cases. I couldn't tell if I'd stumbled badly enough to ruin my chances, but, given that I'd heard they were the toughest interviewers in the business, I was fully expecting to get the "HELLZ NAW!!!" from them because there were just too many holes in my case game in their interviews. Needless to say, I was floored when i got the call the next day that their Atlanta office wanted to invite me to do a second round with them. Plus, the person who called me was one of my interviewers and he had nothing but good things to say about how I'd handled the case.
Finally, this brings us to today. I had my first round interview with Mercer Management Consulting earlier today and this was another one where I stumbled on the case. the case involved a restaurant chain deciding whether to move into a new line of business and I thought I'd nailed it until the very end when I realized that I hadn't done anything regarding the size of their market. I'd asked questions about whether they had any potential market data and was told that there was no information available, so I just moved on to other areas. As I was walking out of the interview room, it all of the sudden hit me that I was supposed to make estimates of that data and I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I got another shock about an hour ago when i got a call from my case interviewer and was told that they wanted to bring me in for a second round joint tomorrow morning. I'm going to have to miss my Operations class to do the interview, but it's a good feeling to know that I might be able to start off next week with a job offer if I can perform well tomorrow.
One thing that this whole interview process has shown me so far is that I'm a terrible judge of well or how poorly I do on these case interviews. I've been dissed by the two companies that I thought I'd done well on and been invited to move on by the four companies that I'd bombed. I'm going to have a heart attack before all of this is over.
One last thing, I want to give a shout out to one of my younger sisters, Monica, and her husband Frankie because I just found out that they are about to make me an uncle for the first time :-) From what she said, she's about 6 weeks along and the baby should be arriving around the end of September or the start of October...right around the time of my and both of my sisters' birthdays. Now that would be a hell of a birthday gift for all of us.
Yesterday was a rough day for The Kid. I had my Bain interview at 12:15pm and I was all kinds of nervous before I went in there. My fit interview went fine, but, when it came to the case portion, I stumbled a couple of times. In the end, I thought I'd done a decent job and had a chance to get a second round, but I wasn't too confident about it. Overall, I would have graded myself as a B on that joint.
45 minutes after the Bain interview ended, I had my BCG one and that joint was a disaster from the beginning. The first part of the interview began low when my interviewer's first question was "So what does a Sr. Consultant at Accenture do?"...When i got that question, I was shocked becuase I've never worked there and didn't have a clue of how to answer it. I thought that I'd slipped up because I hadn't looked at the roles of other companies and instantly thought I'd screwed up. I made up an answer that seemed serviceable and hoped that it would keep moving, but his next question was "well, what did you do in that role while you were there?". Atthat point, I told him that I'd never worked at Accenture and he realized that he had been reading someone else's resume and asking me questions about it...things that make you go 'hmmmmmm'. Anyways, the case that I did with that first BCG interviewer went OK but I did have a few ups and downs in there and there were a couple of times that he had to stop to explain what he was looking for because I just didn't get it. The second part of my interview was another fit/case mixture with a different interviewer. Once that second case started, it all went downhill. I thought I'd absolutely bombed it from the moment that she gave me the facts and I started talking. I left that session feeling like I'd been run over by a truck. Overall, I would have given myself a D on that BCG interview.
As I walked back to Schwab after the interviews, I felt like I wouldn't have a chance to get a job this summer. I honestly questioned whether I should be looking at Consulting at all becuase it seemed that I didn't have what it took to get through. I felt so bad that I crashed for over 3 hours when I got back to my room and didn't get up until after 7pm. Soon after waking up, I got a call from Bain and they gave me the bad news that I'd been dissed. They didn't even let 6 hours pass before dropping the bomb on me. Even worse, I hadn't even started studying for my Finance midterm yet, so I had to cram until after 1am for that with the feeling of possibly not getting an internship hanging over my head.
I've got to run out to a mixer that Capital One is giving, so i'll add another entry to give a summary of stuff today when I return.