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- Hi everyone, welcome. I'm Christine Ruzek. I'm one of the coaches in
the Career Development Office here at Yale SOM. We're thrilled to have you today for the consulting panel. I would like to give a quick overview on the CDO's offering, and then we'll go ahead and
talk with our panelists who are, we're so thrilled were
able to join us today, about their experiences
in their consulting recruiting process while here at SOM. The CDO office is actually has two silos. We have one that is focused on the coaches and one that is focused
on the employer partners. The employer partners will focus on bringing in opportunities
from different firms to SOM, so everything from job postings
to company presentations and building those relationships
and working with alumni, whereas the coaches, I work
one-on-one with students on their career paths,
anything from exploration to job offer negotiation
and how to be successful in your first 60 days. And this is a great pleasure that I get to work with these guys, so I'm going to have each one
of them introduce themselves and talk a little bit about their story. And we'll start with Andrew. - Yeah, cool, thank you. Hi guys, I'm Andrew Rosseau. I grew up in Chicago suburbs, and I went to school in Maine, studying East Asian
studies and Literature. The East Asian studies set
me up for my first role with American Express in Hong Kong. I spent two years there
working on China strategy. Two years later, I wanted
to flex different muscles. I transitioned to New
York, working in operations as a chief of staff. And I decided to come back to SOM sort of to learn the business stuff I didn't study during undergrad. I interned at McKinsey in New
York City while I was here. I'll be going back there full-time. So that's me. - Hi, I'm Nick. I grew up in Massachusetts,
went to college in Ohio, graduating with a degree
in management economics. I turned that into a career
in corporate finance, first in oil and gas and then healthcare, that spanned both the US and Canada. Not as fun as China, but
I tried one other country. After about five or six
years in corporate finance, I decided I wanted to do
a bit of a career pivot, which is what led me to
come to business school. Spent my summer with
Bain & Company in Boston, and I will be returning there full-time. - Hi everyone, I'm Shruthi. I also grew up outside of Massachusetts, or outside of Boston. Went to Boston College and
majored in finance and marketing. Started my career at
Citi in a treasury role and then pivoted to healthcare tech from an interest, from
a volunteer interest and came back to school. I'm in the dual program here
with School of Public Health because I wanted to further explore intersection of business and healthcare. This summer, interned
at Deloitte in Boston and will be going back
to Deloitte in New York. - Great, thank you. So I'd like, maybe Nick
can give us an overview about what the consulting
industry looks like from an SOM perspective. - Certainly, yeah. So quite a few consulting
firms recruit fairly heavily here at the School of Management at Yale. This spans everything from
what you might think of as the big strategy firms
being BCG and McKinsey, including the big four,
EY, Deloitte, et cetera. There's also more niche-focused firms, such as those in healthcare. You have Chartis Group, ZS, et cetera. And then of course, the
small boutique firms. Firms will put on a wide variety of events for the students here at school. It starts about three
weeks into the first year, and it'll be everything from
a large corporate presentation through small one-on-one or
one-on-three coffee chats, where you can get to
chat with a consultant on a bit more of a personal level. That's a pretty decent overview? - Yeah, I think it's a great overview. So tell us a little bit more
about the Consulting Club and how that played a role in, I guess it would be great
to hear from each of you, maybe on different elements of the club, and how that helped you be
successful in your path. - Sure thing, yeah. I can go ahead and start
on this one as well. So full disclosure, we're all
leaders of the Consulting Club here at SOM, so we all
think it's wonderful and certainly many of our
fellow students do as well. One of the main offerings that
the Consulting Club provides is a robust, 13-week curriculum, where we have one hour meetings each week to talk through the various aspects of the case interview process, the fit or behavioral interview process, and then tips and strategies
around networking with the various firms in order to get jobs. We have a few other aspects I think Andrew and Shruthi can talk about. - Yeah sure. I think for me, one of the
most helpful aspects of the Consulting Club during
my recruiting process was a case team. So a case team is where five, six first-year students who are
interested in consulting are paired up with a second-year who navigated the process
successfully the prior year. And what that, it creates
kind of like a small group community that is dedicated
to practicing together and learning how to case
together most specifically. So I think my team was paired up based on their dedication level. We said we were all in on consulting. And then we ended up just slotting times to case with each other almost ad nauseum throughout the weeks. So you get a lot of
practice with each other and then you get the
second-year to come help you, show you what best-in-class
casing might look like so you can kind of improve
and hone your skills. I think that's kind of like the curriculum side of the case team. On a personal front, I ended
up becoming great friends with everyone on my case team. I think these are folks
who really supported me throughout the process, gave
me confidence and courage, and I think I'm gonna
stay friends with them for probably the rest of my life. So it's a huge part of my SOM experience. - Yeah, and I would say outside of the curriculum
and the case teams, a huge aspect of what
Consulting Club offered was small group deep-dive sessions. So there were certain aspects
of the casing process that I struggled with, so it
was really nice to have one-on-six opportunities to practice that with second-years and people who had done consulting for quite a while. And then, of course,
there's also the community building aspect of Consulting Club. So that's something else
that we're trying to bring and do more of this year, just getting first-years and second-years to hang out together, talk about the stress level
of this recruiting process and also help cope with that. So that's been fun. - Outside of maybe the Consulting Club, maybe there's a class, a professor, or a conference you guys attended. Is there anything you'd like
to share that was helpful in helping you navigate this process? - Yeah, sure, I can. - Go for it, yeah. - So personally, I
think the first resource I took advantage of was actually the CDO. I think they helped me
a lot with my resume even before I got to campus. There's a beautiful Yale
template that you'll fill out. And then after that, I got
paired with a career advisor who went through my resume
with a very, very fine lens and pointed out all these
small things I should tweak. And then the next big
thing they helped me with was just rehearsing, well, first I guess, creating my own story and then kind of rehearsing
it and fine-tuning it so that when I showed
up to recruiting events with consulting firms, I felt prepared. I felt like, confident and ready to go and kind of talk about my
key strengths and interests. - Yeah, so I would add on that the classes that we offer
here also do a wonderful job preparing students for
consulting interviews, specifically the quarter
leading right into the January interview
season covers topics from marketing in Customer, finance and sourcing and
managing funds in Investor, and then economics and a bit
of game theory in Competitor, all of which tend to come up fairly frequently in
consulting interviews. And so, I think working
through all of that coursework, thinking about problems in
a structured, logical way really helped build all of
the skills and the terms that are really useful
in terms of success. - Yeah, and I just want to go
back to Andrew's point about CDO's help or resources
that I utilized last year. So CDO has these mock interview
sessions that they host, and that was really helpful to practice your behavioral questions and just get feedback from a third party that isn't your friends to give you real feedback that you can improve upon, so that was really helpful for
me in the recruiting process. - I think one of the
things we didn't mention, which was probably the
most crucial for me, was just the help from
the second-years on campus and then the actual alumni
network at the firms themselves. So second-years dedicate a
significant amount of their time to chatting with folks so
that they can learn about the consulting firms, how they operate, what it's like to work
there at a daily life, and also the differences between offices and things like that. Then they also volunteer
their time to case use. You actually get practice
doing some of these interviews. And then the alumni
network, in my opinion, was just super tight-knit. So specifically at McKinsey,
I think 50 alumni showed up for our presentation and
then have just been like, super helpful in terms of
staying in touch with me throughout the recruiting process. I definitely couldn't have
gotten through the whole process without their help. - So how do you think that recruiting, consulting recruiting is unique at SOM in comparison to another school? - So I would say the biggest theme here is the incredibly collaborative
nature of the student body, which manifests itself in formal ways, through the Consulting Club, which I would posit is
easily one of the most structured and robust clubs
of any top business school, but then also in more informal ways, sort of like to what Andrew
was talking about earlier, of you running into someone in the hallway and you have a quick
question for them about what they thought about at this stage in the networking process or how they worded such
and such in their resume or their cover letter. And students are just so
willing to give tips and advice to our fellow students. I think that that theme really shows through every aspect
of the recruitment process here at Yale. - I feel like that's the same with alumni. I hear students who come in and meet me, and they're like, I just wrote this alumni and they wrote me right back. I think that that
community is quite strong. If, for those of you
who maybe made a switch, I think all of you made a bit of a switch, can you tell me, and this is based on a question
that came in from a student, how, what was the challenge for you and how did you overcome that coming from not consulting? - So I think one of the biggest challenges is trying to figure out how to translate what I had done before school into what would make me a
good consultant after school. And those types of tips
around how to tell your story, how to frame the projects
that you worked on, the skills that you've built, knowing how to do that, I think, is A, something that's very
important for success, but B, something that we do a great job at preparing students to be able to do both through the club and CDO. - I would also say just for me, just getting the confidence
that the stuff that I had done before would
translate to consulting, so frankly, I wasn't sure what consultants do on a day-to-day basis. And it really helped me
to talk to second-years who would talk to me about
my prior experiences and say, oh yeah, that's exactly what I did as a consultant at this company, so the stuff that you were doing before is totally translatable. - Yeah, I'd agree. I had a little bit of an industry
shift before coming to SOM so I think a lot of what Nick
was saying about the story was really what I thought a lot about from switching from
finance to healthcare tech and then from healthcare
tech to going back to school and then now doing healthcare consulting, I think it really comes down to why this makes sense for you right now and leveraging, like talking
to second-years and alumni helps you get to that story
that's authentic to you. - Did you have a clear
vision that you wanted to do consulting recruiting when
you were applying for Yale? - Yeah, I think that was definitely, applying for business
school definitely was a lot of soul searching. And I think I thought about a lot of where I wanted to be after
the two-year investment. So for me, healthcare
consulting made sense because there was so much
within the healthcare space I wanted to explore and it seemed like the
best way for me to do that. And I think I came to that too from talking to current students at the schools I was looking at as well as friends who
were already in the field. - I fell on the opposite
end of the spectrum. When I applied to business school, I didn't know what consulting was, and it wasn't until I started here and heard about it from my fellow students that I thought, wow, that
would be a really neat job. I'd like to give that a shot. So it's certainly possible
to recruit into it whether you're thinking
about it at this stage or if you're fully committed. - Yeah, I feel like I'm actually like the poster child for success
for SOM Consulting Club because I interviewed
with McKinsey and BCG right out of undergrad and
didn't know what a case was and kinda got laughed out of the room. So I came here knowing that
I wanted to do consulting. I actually really enjoyed the interviews even though I had no
clue what was happening. And I think I came in here knowing exactly what I wanted to do, and I think it just helped me be really specific with how
I want to focus my time and ended up working out for me. - So what made you choose
SOM at the end of the day? - Yeah, so for me, I
think the first thing was, honestly, exactly what we
were just talking about. I knew I wanted to do consulting. I looked at SOM and said, will that help me get
into a consulting firm? At the time that I applied,
about 35-36% of folks were going into consulting, so I thought, I want to
be part of that cohort, and it looks like they're
helping other folks. Why not me? I think the second thing is the community was just
amazing and phenomenal. I learned that when I
came up here to visit. I reached out to folks who
made time to chat with me while I was here. I knew that they were
gonna be collaborative and help me on my recruiting journey. And then the last thing for me was just personally the location was great. I wanted to be close to New York. That's where my fiancee is, and it's like a two-hour train ride away. - So you certainly hit on a couple of the big ones for me too, the student community and the location were both pretty high on my list. But a few other things that I considered that were fairly important were the level of access that we have to the broader Yale community, whether that be the
resources of the school, things like we can use the
libraries and meeting rooms and all those facilities, but also just being able
to meet other students through cross-school clubs
and things of that nature. And then the second piece
that I found really attractive was the focus on the & Society portion. I felt like a lot of business
schools will teach ethics, but it's like a course
that's part of their core, whereas we work really hard
to weave the social impacts of various business decisions
into the classes, the clubs, the general ethos of SOM. - Yeah, I totally agree. I think when I was looking at schools, the mission of SOM really
stood out from the beginning. And then another priority
for me was the dual program, and SOM, I believe, has
the highest number of duals than any other business school, so that was really exciting for me and that kinda ties to the whole integrated in one Yale component too. So I was excited for those reasons and also leveraging the resources, like having a hospital where you could do a practicum as a class was exciting, so I felt like those were opportunities that were unique to Yale. - So I have some more
questions from our audience, which I think would help us dive a little bit deeper
from where we've been. One potential student is asking about the Yale Consulting Club curriculum and if you could sort of
give a little bit more of an example of what that looks like. - Yeah, certainly. - To prepare yourself for
an internship specifically. - Right, right, right, yes. So there's two main interview types that you have to go
through in order to get a consulting job. There's what's commonly
called a fit interview or a behavioral interview, and then there's also a case interview. The case interview can be broken down into a number of different components, starting from a framework and
working all the way through the meat of the actual
case, brainstorming, understanding charts and data, and turning all of what
you learn into a crisp, polished recommendation at the end for what the client should do in this particular business scenario. So our 13-week curriculum
addresses every aspect of both the case interview as well as the fit or behavioral interview. So we'll spend each week focused
on one particular session. So for instance, I mentioned frameworks. We spend one hour of one week just solely talking about frameworks, how to make them, how to make them better, the types of things that
you should think about when you're actually
writing out your thoughts in the case interview. I can certainly go into more detail, but I think that that's probably a good. - Yeah, I think that's a great overview. If somebody has any deeper questions, they can certainly ask. But for instance, last
night's maybe even program, so for the hour that we were together with the Consulting Club, all the first-years and the leaders, can you maybe talk about
what the curriculum was for that particular day or
that particular session? - Definitely. So there were two main
things that we talked about last night. The first one was a bit about the stress in the overall recruitment process. Consulting recruiting is very intense. It's gonna take up a lot of your time, and sometimes it feels like all your peers are doing
all of these great things, they're having a wonderful coffee chat, they just had a great case, and you're just dealing
with a lot of stress. That's totally normal. So we spent a bit of time talking through stress management tips as well as the various faux pas we've made throughout our own processes last year. And then the second part we talked about what we call casing 2.0, which is really how you bring
deeper business insights or other outside knowledge
into the actual case interview, which can really impress the consultants that you're interviewing with. - With the demands of on-campus
networking for consulting, is it difficult to balance studies and global studies specifically? So, IE or Global Network Week. - So for the global studies for me, it wasn't difficult at
all because I did an IE, international exchange program, I think. I think that's like a week,
week and a half program where it's essentially like almost
built in to the curriculum, where you've got time just
to focus on that trip. So I went to the Balkans. We went to three different countries, learned about the history,
the politics, businesses. And it was the only thing I
was focused on for that week, so it was not, it didn't detract from anything else I was doing at all. - Yeah, I will say, first,
the fall semester first-year is an exercise in time management, so it is helpful to come in and have sort of a priority
list in where you want to focus your energy. For me, since I knew that I was gonna do consulting recruiting,
that was top of the list. Classes probably fell third on that list. So I think just having a general idea of where you want to allocate recruiting versus extracurriculars,
social, and classes is helpful. Obviously you don't have
to have it all figured out before you come onto campus, but you're not gonna have enough
time to do everything 100% and I think part of going
through first semester is being comfortable with that. - I would also add that
there's a lot of resources to help with time management, both informally from students but also our Academic Affairs
and Student Life Office will put on speaker talks of how did someone manage their time or best practices around thinking through how to deal with group work if you're also recruiting
for consulting or banking or one of the other very
highly structured industries. - Yeah, I think that last one
is actually really important. A lot of the ways that I managed my own competing time priorities was by just being frank and open with my team. I think it speaks to
the collaborative nature of the students here. But I would say like, hey guys, I'm doing consulting recruiting,
I'm really busy right now. Maybe I'm gonna contribute a little bit less to this group project,
and then once I'm done and you guys are busy, I
will start contributing more. My team was super open to
that and really helpful. - So how difficult, from the students that you've worked with who are internationals, how difficult or what's that process look like for them if they're interested
in a consulting career? - Yeah, so I think
there's really two paths that international students tend to take. So they either are gonna
recruit for a US office or they're gonna recruit for an office likely in their home country or the country where they have
most of the work experience. I'd say generally the
path looks fairly similar doing either one of those. The same type of skills
that they're gonna test for, the same tools that you need to succeed. And then there's certainly nuance between recruiting in the US versus
recruiting internationally, whether it be cultural, work
authorization, et cetera. But there are a high number of students that have gone through
both of those paths, and so, a wide variety of resources exist to help support that. I didn't do that, so I can't
really go into too much detail. I don't think it applies to any. - And I work with students
who do that quite often, so I certainly have
seen them, students here recruit internationally as
well as maybe they have some oil and gas background
and so they focus on the Houston office for
one of the firms as well. When you have your application, you have, you weigh locations of interest, so you can put multiple locations. And certainly have offers from full-time and have gone to, for full-time,
international offices. So hopefully, that
clears up that question. There is a question about do all consultants start in sort of a general management role or are there opportunities to specialize right in as an intern
or full-time out of MBA? - I think this differs across the different consulting firms. So let me tell you about McKinsey since that's the only one
I can really speak to. So for McKinsey, you can
apply as a generalist, where you will start on any project. It could be oil and gas,
it could be in healthcare, it could be in private equity. So that's one route, and you're
kinda open to any project and any different function. You can also apply to a
specific role and team. So you can apply to be
on the digital team, you can apply to be on
the corporate finance and strategy team, the marketing and sales team, the operations or implementation team. So it's up to you. I would say even in the specific role, you might do generalist stuff. It's just gonna be less frequently, maybe 10% of your time as opposed to 80. - Yeah, go ahead. - No, no, please. - I was just gonna say, so within Deloitte's strategy and
operations practice, you, everyone comes in as a generalist, but if you have, for example,
since I'm a dual student, it was kind of guaranteed or given that I would want to be
on healthcare projects. And if that was true, that's
where I was aligned to this summer and that's where
I will be for full-time, doesn't mean that I have
to stay in healthcare, but they do take into
consideration your preferences especially if you're kinda
tailoring your education towards one industry. - So yeah, I would just echo that the firms will fall on a spectrum from fairly generalist
to pretty specialized. Bain falls quite far on the
generalist side of the spectrum. McKinsey and Deloitte it
sounds like are in the middle but still there's quite
a bit of a focus on being more generalist with
opportunities to specialize. And then if you were to look
at a healthcare consulting firm or a really small boutique firm, you might encounter a
bit more specialization. I would generally say if
you want to specialize, if there's a type of work that you are really interested in doing, you're probably going
to have the opportunity to do that at virtually any firm. But if you're concerned about like, I'm going to be forced to specialize just because my background, like for me, it was in corporate finance, I didn't want to do finance type work, that's also generally not a concern. - So why did you target the
firms that you each targeted? - Yeah, well. - We talked a little bit about this. That's a good one. - Totally. Yeah, so for me, I think first of all, I think you need to think about the
probability of getting into some of these firms and you
kinda want to cast a wide net. If we're being honest,
they're pretty selective. And then the second thing is, you want to evaluate your
interactions with the firms as they are interacting with
you and getting to know you. So for me, I actually
really loved all of my chats with McKinsey folks. I kinda had like a stereotype about them before I came to SOM that
was completely untrue and just loved the people
that I was meeting. I imagined that they were
gonna be super smart and sharp, but was not expecting them to
be so friendly and personable and just fun to hang out with. - I would agree with
everything Andrew said. I think generally speaking,
there's your professional goals and there's also fit
and your personal goals. I think both of those are
important to consider. It's gonna vary person to
person how much you care about being in a specific industry
or working for a specific firm versus the experience you're going to have being at that firm. I certainly fell further
on the experience end, and so, I just loved the
folks that I met from Bain, very similar to Andrew with McKinsey, which made my choice quite easy. - Yeah, and similar for me. It was a lot of the fit aspect of it. I had a chance to go
to a women's conference that Deloitte hosted, which really gave me a deep dive into what it would
be like to be at that firm, which I loved. And then, it was also really appealing that I had the opportunity, that I would have the
opportunity to specialize within healthcare from the beginning. So those were kind of my top reasons. - So how important are
GPA, GMAT, GRE scores? - With the consulting firms or with? - With the consulting firms
and your applications. - Not as important as you think. It matters, but the internet
will have you believe it matters a ton, like it's 90% of whether
you're gonna get in. Our experience anecdotally
has not been that. There's certainly plenty of
people with high GMAT scores that don't end up with even
first round interview invites, and there's people with GMAT
scores that fall well below the SOM median that ended up
with more than one offer, so I wouldn't be too concerned
about GRE, GPA, GMAT. - So in regard to some networking and the proximity that SOM, where SOM sits in relation to New York and Boston, can you talk a little bit about how that played into your opportunities to connect
with firms and alumni? - Yeah, I can definitely
start with that one. So I actually went down
to New York a lot to do recruiting type networking. At one point, someone
from BCG offered to do a case with me over the phone, and I was really excited about that and I just kinda put it out there that I would also be willing
to come down to New York. So he kinda took me up on it. He invited me to the office. I went in and did like
an actual case with him, which was super cool. Really helpful and nice of him. Also an alumni, which was great. And then I took advantage of it multiple times with McKinsey as well. I would connect with someone on campus, and they would invite me down to the office for lunch
or something like that. I think I did that on two occasions. - Yeah, I had a similar experience with the Boston office
for some of these firms and so had a chance to
connect with an alumni when I was in Boston as well as attend certain firms had some Women's Day events that would happen on a Friday, so I was able to go
down or go up for that. So yeah, it's nice definitely
being in the middle and access to both cities. - I think the inverse is important too. It's based on where we are, it's a lot easier for some
of the firms just to send up reps out here and be on campus
and be available for us. - Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah, I would agree with that, for sure. So, has anybody taken any
classes outside of SOM that maybe helped with this process or feel like will help
you be a better consultant in the path that you're chosen? - Definitely. I don't know if you want to start.
- Across the aisle, anywhere across the aisle. - So I definitely have taken a bunch of public health classes, but in terms of what has
been most helpful with the consulting process
was, I mentioned that part of our curriculum
is to do a practicum, and I did this
mini-externship last semester with the Yale New Haven Hospital, so it wasn't necessarily for credit, but it was interesting because
it was essentially like an internal process
optimization type of problem and very real problem
that the hospital was trying to explore so it kinda gave me a good taste of what my work would be like in
healthcare consulting. - So one of my favorite classes
that I've taken here at Yale that also I expect to be
quite useful in consulting was actually the School of Forestry. It's a course called Renewable
Energy Project Finance, where we worked through
both the legal and financial implications of putting
together a wind farm and how you could actually finance that, how you could build a
financial model to support raising debt for that wind farm. I think a lot of those technical skills are going to be very useful in consulting but also recognizing how
those models that you build relate back to the actual question at hand and to the actual industry
that you're working with are two really huge skills
that I learned from that class. - How much pressure are students under to consult on the industry
they worked for pre-MBA? No? Because you're a generalist, right? - Yeah, I haven't experienced any. I'd sort of return to what
we said before, which is, if you are interested in
specializing, generally speaking, you're going to have the
opportunity to do so. If you're concerned
about being pigeonholed, it's anecdotal but I
haven't heard of anyone, of any SOM student being
sort of forced into something just because they did it beforehand. - Maybe it would be useful to
tell them how we got staffed. - Sure, yeah.
- Oh, there you go. - So the way each firm
staffs people differently. The way it worked for me was I just had a conversation with a professional development manager who's supposed to lead my
development as a consultant. She talked to me about
what my aspirations were in terms of which industries
I wanted to explore, which functions I wanted to learn, and which different skillsets
I wanted to pick up. And then, essentially what she did is she matched kind of my
goals with the firm's needs in terms of the projects
that were available and the expertise that
they needed on the project, and she prioritized my stuff usually and got me on a perfect project for me. And that's kinda like typically
how staffing works for us. - Yeah, mine was almost exactly the same. - Yeah, ours was similar. - Yeah. There's a question about if there is a cap on the number of students
who can be selected each year for consulting internships and jobs. I have not heard of any, but I'm wondering if you have. - Cap? - A cap on the number of people selected in terms of head count,
how many they can select. - It's gonna depend on
the firm's needs, right? So how many folks are
they hiring that year? - Yeah, I would agree. I don't really think there's
much to worry about there. - So what support does
Yale SOM offer to students who are interested in recruiting into offices outside of
New York and New England? - Quite a bit. So actually, I was just talking with the Bain recruiting
team earlier this week, and they mentioned that about
40-50% of the folks that we place into Bain end up at offices outside of Boston, New York, New England, which is much higher than a
lot of other business schools in New England. They did name them, but I'm not going to because we're supposed to be nice here. But generally speaking, there
is a strong track record of SOM students being placed
all around the country and also all around the globe with these firms.
- All over the globe, yeah. Did any of you recruit for
more than just consulting? Did you have a parallel path at all? What did that look like? - Yeah absolutely. I had a parallel path just because I think it's good to have, keep your options and have a backup plan. So I think the consulting
recruiting process lends itself actually to a
lot of recruiting processes, especially in general
management, corporate strategy, internal consulting. So I pursued that as well,
especially given my background at American Express. I met, attended company
presentations for Chase, CitiBank, Pepsi, all those
companies, met with people, and was just lucky that
I didn't have to really go down that route. - I was recruiting to tech
simultaneously with consulting, very, very similar story, went to coffee chats
and firm presentations with all the big names, Facebook,
Google, Amazon, et cetera. One thing I'll mention
that's nice about consulting is it intends to recruit
a little bit earlier than most other industries. Aside from banking, we're the earliest industry that recruits, so unless you're trying
to recruit into both consulting and banking, it's somewhat easier from a
time management standpoint, simply because you can do
more of the consulting work up front and then meet more the other
firms in the later months. - Yeah, my parallel path
was healthcare tech, and a lot of that started later, much after consulting wrapped up. So it was kinda nice
to kind of have an idea of when I would need to start for that, but I didn't really have
to make much headway because it worked out. - What's the most important
or challenging thing you have learned during the
consulting recruiting process? - So I think for me, the
most challenging thing was recovering smoothly
from making mistakes. I think a lot of the students that tend to go to business school we're sort of used to being smart people, as non-humble as that makes me sound. And so, we're generally used to having a rough sense of what we're doing and oftentimes being right in the way that we approach problems. But when we try new things, it doesn't always work out smoothly, and things that I
thought were really easy, like doing math, if I have
to do them in a job interview with hard numbers and talk through every step of what I'm doing, all of a sudden, I'm
not that great at that. And just learning how to be
graceful and recover smoothly was certainly challenging. - What did you do to help work on that? - Lots of practice. Many people that I know
ask me math questions and make me talk through it
with them, just out of the blue, so I'd be walking down the
hall and someone would be like, Nick, what's 28 times 37? And I'd be like, oh, well,
eight times seven is 56, blah blah blah, to get
to the right answer. - I can kind of relate to that. For me, the biggest thing I
learned was being adaptable. And a lot of, in consulting,
in the actual job, as well as in the interview process, it's just how coachable are you and do you maintain your composure when things don't necessarily go the way that you're expecting them to. And that's hard to practice, but I think it's just a matter of keeping in mind to just be yourself and bring that to the interviews because a lot of it is about fit and whether that person can work with you. - Yeah, I would actually
just mostly second exactly what you guys said. - Great. So New Haven is famous for its pizza. So everybody has their favorites. I'd love to hear yours. - Pretty big on Da Legna's. - Ooh, good choice. I think I prefer Modern over
Da Legna but just barely. They're both excellent. - I like Da Legna's. I'm biased because I'm vegan, and Da Legna's is the only
place that has vegan pizza. - They are, it's good there, I've had it. - It's so good. - Well, thank you everybody
for your time today, really appreciated. If there's any light, last sort of words that you'd like to
share with the audience, words of wisdom or what you knew when you were in their
seat, maybe now's the time, you can run through them. - Yeah, so I can start. I think a piece of
advice that I wish I had back when I was applying
to business schools that's helpful not only in that process but also in applying for jobs is to really make sure
that you let who you are and your unique personality show through, which can manifest in
the actual application. It can also manifest
in the types of answers that you're gonna give in the interviews. I think generally
speaking, business schools, consulting firms, et
cetera, tend to get a lot of highly qualified applicants. And having your story resonate
and be unique and memorable is valuable for success. - Yeah, I think for me it was a lot about getting to know the school a little bit through the students, so I would, I guess my piece of advice would be to try to do some research, attend, I know SOM does Boston happy
hours and things like that, so just interact with some students, get a feel for what it's like to go here, and I think that's helpful to gather some data points in terms of whether this is a right fit for you. - Yeah, I would echo what Shruthi said. I definitely think you can
get a sense of a school just by interacting with the students, and I think the biggest thing
that I started doing later in the recruiting process was
looking through the website, figuring out what students
might be useful for me to chat with and sending
them emails just to say like, hey Nick, I realized you
work in Consulting Club, I'm interested in consulting. Do you have 20 minutes to talk about that? You can tell a lot about a school by how people reply to those emails. I got a lot of folks
within an hour saying like, yeah, let's chat. I'm happy to meet over the
phone, on campus, whatever. So that was like the biggest thing for me. - Yeah, I think all of that helps with identifying any tips or exploration, exercises in terms of
what kind of consulting, what firms are interesting for you, and your overall exploration
and understanding if they have the same values as you, so as you spoke to the
business and society, so understanding what that
means for the various firms, it's gonna predicate a lot
on the research that you do and the networking that you do with alumni and current students who
are engaged in those firms. So we thank you all so
much for joining us today and we hope to hear from you again soon. Thank you.
