General Advice:

• Practice, practice, practice. I interviewed with MBB in college and went 0/3. I then got a job at BCG as a lateral hire. The difference? At UVa, I practiced <20 cases, mostly with friends who didn't know what good looks like and/or did not want to give me candid (harsh) feedback. Then, when prepping for interviews as a consultant elsewhere in New York, I did easily 100 cases, including 15 paid evaluations through CaseInterview.com + practiced mental math every morning for 15-20 minutes. 

• There are great consulting firms that are not MBB. Do McKinsey, Bain, and BCG have the most prestige & best exit opportunities? Broadly speaking, yes. But do not spiral into depression over not landing a job at one of these firms out of school. I did. And in hindsight that was silly. The firm I ended up joining (Marakon Associates) was an incredible experience, replete with personalized, in-depth mentoring (much easier in a smaller office where the dozen partners actually know all the associates by name), a 6 month project in London with travel around Europe, and a world-class education in financial modeling & valuation that serves me to this day. There are many boutique consulting firms out there that provide this quality of experience. And if you're as determined for MBB as I was, then you'll have an opportunity to lateral when the market picks up. The "tier 2" firms such as Deloitte, Kearny, Oliver Wyman, and EY-Parthenon are quite literally the exact same job as MBB.

• "Consulting" vs "Banking" - I get asked this question a lot, so here's my 2 cents:

  • Banking:​

    • (+) Higher pay. Roughly speaking, banking pays ~1.5-2.0x consulting. And in a boom year even more thanks to bonuses. Had a friend who's group had their best ever year when he was an analyst, so he got a $250k pre-tax bonus as an analyst less than 2 years out of school. You simply never stories like that in consulting.

    • (+) Better training for finance. If you want to go into private equity or hedge funds, then banking will be a much better training ground. I had to learn accounting & financial modeling on the weekend, and most of my bosses in PE still dug into my model a lot more than my co-worker's.

    • (-) Narrow experience, defined by the focus of your group + the quality of that time. Some of these have legendary reputations (e.g., Goldman Sachs TMT, Morgan Stanley or Evercore M&A), others... less so. Do your homework on groups (wall street oasis, networking chats).

  • Consulting: 

    • ​(+) Broad experience. Unlike banking, you are not aligned to a sector in consulting for quite awhile (i.e., the first 2-6 years depending on the firm). So by working across a firm's practice areas + industries, you can have a much broader experience, sampling paths & seeing what you like.

      • BCG's practice areas: AI, business & organizational purpose, business resilience, business transformation, climate change & sustainabnility, corporate finance & strategy, cost manager, customer insights, digital technology & data, innovation strategy & delivery, international busines, manufacturing, marketing & sales, M&A transactions & PMI, operations, organizational strategy, people strategy, pricing and revenue management, risk mgmt. & compliance, and social impact​

      • BCG's industries: aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer, education, energy, financial institutions, healthcare, industrial goods, insurance, principal investors & private equity, public sector, technology media & telecom, transpiration & logistics, travel & tourism, urban planning

      • ^^ are very similar across all the firms. You can think of a consulting project as a "practice area" x "industry" (e.g., AI x healthcare or customer insights x industrial goods. As you can see, there's a lot of combinations. The offsetting factor here is not every firm will have a big project flow in what you're interested in, so it's generally speaking good to prioritize an office in the city where an industry is big if you know that going in, e.g. Finance in NYC, public policy in DC, Healthcare in Nashville, Technology in SF, etc.).

    • (+) Better culture / training. Consulting firms place way more emphasis on regular 360 feedback + team satisfaction than banks. Meaning I was regularly required to fill out feedback on my superiors that would directly impact their compensation. You'll be lucky to find an investment banking group that cares what the analyst thinks about the VPs, much less creates a space to regularly gather this input. You don't see stories like this out of consulting firm after all: Group of junior bankers at Goldman Sachs claim inhuman work conditions 

    • (+/-) Harder to find the right it. Banking is a much more straight forward career path, insofar as every investment banking analyst, whether they are at Goldman Sachs or Harris Williams or some tiny bank you've never heard of, is doing the same job. Spreading comps, making pitch decks, financial modeling, etc. Yes, some banks model in billions and others in thousands. And your split b/w pitch work vs live deal will vary with your MDs book of business. BUT, it's basically the same job, developing the same skill set, at every bank. In consulting, however, your job looks very different if you are in MBB vs Deloitte Federal vs CapTech vs APT vs ZS associates vs IBM business consulting, etc. These aren't better or worst, just different. Yet, every year without fail, all manner of corporation journeys to college campuses, billing themselves "consulting" because they know students target their career path. So don't blind apply to every "consulting firm" in your school's career platform. Be thoughtful, do your homework, talk with current employees (or, pro tip, former employees, which are very easy to find with LinkedIn advanced search). Otherwise you may end up in a Government basement working as an outsourced temp via Booz Allen's federal consulting practice... far from what you envisioned if you watched Marty Kaan on House of Lies. 

    • (-) Lower pay. Including in T1 cities. Almost all consulting firms do not pay more if you live in New York or Atlanta. It was candidly a little tough for me right out of school in New York on the consulting pay band. I'm glad I did it nonetheless, but something to consider.

• Prep Fit Interviews. Leverage STAR method (situation, task, action, result). I recorded myself giving answers, you'll learn a lot by watching yourself speak. Do your best to get these stories down to 2-3 mins and have ~7 in the chamber. It's important to bring the structured problem solving mindset to this qualitative portion of the interview. Further, some interviewers won't interrupt you if you ramble for 10 minutes but you'll have prevented them from getting to the other questions that allowed them to assess important dimensions... not getting a chance to tell your story on "leadership" or "being a team player" is the same as getting a 0 for your story. So keep the stories high & tight, allowing the interviewer to get through all the questions / press deeper where they see value (which is often  based off notes from other interviews you've had). Also, try not to use the same stories with every interviewer, it's not the end of the world but it is tracked at a high level and if you all talk about is your 1 club/activity with each interviewer, that's not a great a look as a more diversified answer set (even if those additional answers are "lower quality"). 

• Coffee chat / network, effectively. Aim for at 2-3 conversations at a firm before you apply. Then name those individuals explicitly (first + last name) in your cover letter. Don't be afraid to reach out to alumni if rom your school on LinkedIn (I easily pinged 500 people while I was recruiting. Only ~50 replied to me, but that's the name of the game.). Ideally network in the spring or summer ahead of recruiting season, you'll get a much higher hit rate than during the fall when everyone is pinging folks all at once. Also, please don't be that student who makes poor use of a busy professional's time by showing up unaware of their career based off LinkedIn or without a good question list that shows you gave this chat/firm/person more than 10 minutes of thought. It doesn't bother me when students do this, and I'll coach them how to be better. But a great many of my friends do not view it that way, and that's fair. It's hard for a student how busy working a full time job is, but suffice it to say that "9 to 5" does not do it justice. So when a busy working professional has given you 20-30 minutes, make the most out of it.

  • + a good article on networking

  • + a decent question list

​​​

​​

Resources to get the job:

• Victor Cheng (ex-McKinsey) = ALL YOU NEED; my favorite resource by far

  • Case Interview Secrets Book. Read it cover to cover, more than once.

  • Look Over My Shoulder "LOMS" audio. This is Victor interviewing students & pausing the video to provide insight. Here's my notes but you should listen to each of these yourself.

  • Practice cases with the tutors on the site once you think you are ready / have done ~25-30. It's more than worth the money.

    • I'm always happy to practice cases as well :) (for free!) but please use this with discretion / after you've gotten a few under your belt / read the book

• How to Get a Job in Consulting (Stephen Pidegon)

  • Helpful, simple, quick read​

• Case-in-point (Marc Cosentino)

  • I personally did not get a lot out of this book but everyone reads it​

​​​​

Books to better understand the industry / job:

• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy (Richard Rumelt)

• The McKinsey Engagement (Paul Friga)

• The Lords of Strategy 

• The Mind of the Strategist (Kenichi Ohmae)

• The Art of Strategy ​​​

• Not a book but "House of Lies" on Netflix isn't that bad of a portrayal of what to expect in consulting. And it's funny.​

​

Resumes + Cover Letter

• My resume as an undergraduate at UVa

• My resume as a young professional recruiting for BCG

• Cover Letter

​

​

Link to accurate compensation as of 2025

​​