Switching from Banking to Consulting

Coming from someone who interned at a MM and secured a FT position with a tier 2 strategy boutique - this is pretty good advice! The only thing I will add is that I was actually asked about my return offer very frequently. This might be because I went to a non-target, so the consultants wanted to make sure I could handle the workload of a high stress job.

Personally, I started practicing cases right after my internship finished (I took 3 days off or something). I still managed to get 40 or so under my belt before recruiting began, but the earlier you start the better. Overall the transition is pretty seamless as long as you have a good answer to "why consulting not banking?" which you will be asked every interview. I always said that I liked learning about business strategy but didn't want to be pigeon holed into one industry/function this early on, and consulting can provide exposure to many more different types of strategy problems. MS GCM will be totally fine for recruiting - I have a friend who did GS/MS/JPM capital markets and (still from a non-target) he was able to get interviews everywhere and landed at a MBB.

Someone recently asked me to elaborate upon my "advice on practicing case interviews," and I figured my subsequent PM might be of general interest:

The case interview preparation process consists of two main parts, 1) studying and 2) live practice. The latter is far more important than the former.

1) Studying: Unlike preparing for investment banking interviews, which mostly just involves silently studying the steps of a DCF in your college dorm (and maybe doing a few mock interviews with your friends), live practice will take up 80%+ of the time you spend preparing for case interviews. That said, you obviously still have to study first, before you can begin live practice. For rising seniors, I recommend doing this before your junior summer internship even begins-- you want to get it out of the way in 2-3 weeks, so you can begin live practice early this summer.

The most popular study materials are Marc Cosentino's "Case in Point" and Victor Cheng's "Case Interview Secrets." David Ohrvall's "Cracking the Case System" probably constitutes a distant third place here. While most people tend to recommend Case in Point, which is basically the default option for consultants today, I personally think that the book kind of sucks. It mainly just gives you a whole bunch of case frameworks to memorize, which is a pretty lousy strategy for actual case interviews. In my experience, Victor Cheng's material was much simpler, and therefore much better. He presents you with three basic frameworks, of which you'll probably only use two: the profits framework, and the business situation framework. (I never bothered reading Ohrvall; apparently some people like him a lot, although like Cosentino, he sometimes overdoes it with the frameworks.)

Victor Cheng also has the "Looking Over My Shoulder" program, a series of case interview audio recordings that you can listen to. This costs like $300 or something to buy, but you can just pirate it online if you're so inclined. Assuming you can get your hands on a copy, this program will actually give you a pretty good idea of what a case interview should sound like, i.e. what kind of questions you'll be asked, what kind of answers you should give, and (most importantly) how you should word those answers.

Do note, however, that the actual content of the interviews in Victor Cheng's recordings is somewhat dated. The first half of his recordings feature "candidate-led" interviews, where the job candidate basically does all of the talking. In my experience, almost no firms actually interview like this anymore. Instead, focus on the second half of Cheng's recordings, which are "interviewer-led." In addition, Cheng somewhat overemphasizes the structured nature of case interviews. Most of my actual interviews were more casual and free-form than Cheng makes them seem; for instance, many of my interviews ended without a conclusion or solid answer to the case, and apparently that was totally fine.

I highly recommend listening through the second half of Cheng's program 2-3 times. You pick up on more nuances every time you listen to it. This'll probably take 15 hours minimum, but it's immensely helpful for developing your "natural sense" of what a good case interview is.

2) Live Practice: Anyways, once you finish reading Case Interview Secrets and listening through the second half of Looking Over My Shoulder a few times, begin live practice as soon as you can. Live practice entails the following: You and a case partner get together (either in person, or over Skype-- I highly recommend Skype instead of the phone, because it always helps to get used to staring at another person while interviewing). You give a case to your partner, and then your partner gives a case to you. Then, each of you gives feedback to the other person. Write down the feedback, because otherwise you will totally forget it. While case interviews usually only last 20-35 minutes, practices tend to have more friction and wasted time, so realistically you'll want to schedule 2 hours for a full practice.

I can't emphasize the importance of live practice enough. Practicing case interviews by yourself just doesn't work very well. When you merely read a case interview in a book, everything seems obvious and easy to solve. It's only once you're actually put under the pressure of doing a case in front of a peer, that you realize how challenging it is to structure a problem on the spot, do mental math quickly and accurately, and articulate yourself clearly to the interviewer, all while simultaneously maintaining some semblance of eye contact!

There are a variety of ways to find a case partner. A lot of people practice with friends/family who are current consultants, or going into recruiting next year. Or if your college has a consulting club, try emailing some people there. In my case, none of my friends/family were doing it, so I literally just posted on my college's class Facebook page and asked if anyone wanted to join me. Of course, the best people to practice with are always current consultants. However, unless you already know a current consultant really well, it's generally not a good idea to ask them to give you a mock interview early in the preparation process, as you probably won't make a great impression. Leave that for later.

One additional note on case partners: not all partners are created equal. Some of the people that I practiced with last year weren't very good at case interviews,, and didn't seem to be improving very quickly either. These people oftentimes just didn't know what a good case interview was supposed to look like. While I don't think that doing case interviews is a matter of natural talent (far from it-- I'd say the skill mainly comes from a willingness to bear through endless repetition), you may want to do live practice with a variety of people in the beginning, just to see who would be more productive in practice than others.

For my practices, I mainly relied upon example cases that I found online, as there are literally hundreds of them out there. Plenty of MBA "case books" are floating online these days, for instance, and Dropbear has helpfully compiled a few of them here: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/business-school-case-books Personally, I found the Wharton and Kellogg cases to be the most helpful.

I did a BB banking internship and successfully recruited for consulting full-time.

When I talked with people in the industry, I sold myself by explaining how I felt the banking experience was valuable, but I wanted to play a much more active role in the client's strategy and operations. I talked about a deal I was staffed on during my internship. The revenue and margins used in the valuation models used a report made by a consulting firm that identified synergies between the client and their recent acquisitions. For me, understanding the industry and the company's position within the industry (which led to the numbers) was much more interesting than just plugging them into our model.

Awesome thank you!! So you don't think it will be held against me?

I know McKinsey really doesn't take undergrad summer analysts, so besides doing microfinance for UNICEF or some other high brow hippie shit, I would think i banking would be the next best thing to interview with them. I don't know about Bain, if they take a lot of analysts from their SA class, which is a bummer cause the people at Bain rock, and have a rad time. I've never meet McKinsey people, but they seem really lame; they get staffed on some amazing consults, but blah. I think you could get in with Bain in the fall.

Yeah, you're in a good position. You'd be in a stronger one if you had landed a consulting summer internship - but a FT gig is easier to land than an internship for M/B/B in general.

Most kids I know that broke into M/B/B FT weren't able to get M/B/B summer internships, so don't sweat it.

Summering in IBD will not put you in a disadvantage for full time. Yes, M/B/B do have summer interns but numbers wise it's very difficult to land one of those gigs. If you had gone through interviews with MBB and did well, they tend to tell you that you did well but that they don't have enough spots, and some times they'll consider you "fast tracked" to full time.

In a down market, the number of summer consultants who accept full time offers is much higher. That said, I estimate MBB fills up to 80% of it's class with new FT hires.

In short, yes you can transition and there are spots open

As a start, take out objectives. You need to flesh out your IB experience, even if this is for consulting. There are no numbers on your resume whatsoever; consultants love saying random things with numbers/graphs/heat maps/etc and numbers make you look analytical. If you have transaction experience you should list that.

I really really don't like the objective/personal profile.

Any reason why you left without a job lined up?

The dates on the education section of your resume overlap; is that intentional?

Can you play up the strategic advisory part of your work more? It just gets mentioned briefly.

Is consulting one of those fields that still does the "objective" at the top? Seems very 1992-ish. That info seems more appropriate for a cover letter.

I would recommend the Arctic Energy group

This a silly question but I'll bite. If you're going to try to switch gears to consulting, can guarantee you the first thing some doucher MBB person is going to ask you is wy switch from XYZ investment bank to consulting.

Given said doucher will likely think himself / herself superior to bankers, you'd best be served to be in a group where you can easily wiggle out of the anything specific. So with that said, I'd probably go with an m&a, lev. fin., or industrials group that's very broad in scope; the more competitive the better.

Healthcare, it's a huge segment of the economy and consulting firms usually have large HC groups. What group interests you is the better question.

Bump - any more thoughts?