Advice Please - Senior at an ivy HYP and received an offer
Hey everyone- I'm a senior at an ivy (HYP) and have received an offer from a small economic/litigation consulting firm (think a tiny version of LECG) where I did a summer internship. The downside is that I didn't particularly like the work there, and the exit ops seemed geared heavily towards law school. I'm more interested in going to bschool after a few years. I interviewed with MBB (where I'd ideally like to be), got to final rounds with two of the three, but neither worked out. Ditto with some of the second-tier strategy firms. Consulting just may be worse this year than banking; I heard a lot of MBB offices are cutting back drastically on first-year hiring, and smaller competitors are toast. I'm thinking of doing something interesting and/or different for a year or two like TFA or a research fellowship at a grad school and then trying to go for a lateral back to MBB when the market isn't so shitty. I'm also looking for other boutique consulting shops that might have openings in this kind of environment and still provide decent exit ops/would place to a top bschool. Any thoughts?
I ended up choosing an offer with a non-MBB consultancy firm that was started by some ex McKinsey partners. I chose it over two boutique (regional) IB offers because they have numerous industry connections in the space they advise in.
Ultimately I chose the firm because their analysts have gone onto top b-schools, which to me reflects:
You get an experience worth discussing in your applications.
The partners come from the schools you'd want to apply to.
I think you should look into boutique consulting firms. Many of them are started by the same people who got burnt out/wanted to start their own practice. In that sense, they bring much of the structure from where they worked. So if your concern is exit ops, etc. the best thing to do is talk with those that used to work in your position. I ended up cold-contacting many of them through linkedin and talked about their experiences there.
Good luck!
I'd be hesitant to do TFA, hoping to get a MBB consulting job afterward. While TFA hypes up the "exit ops" - what I've heard from multiple MBB consultants who have done TFA is that TFA career services don't compare to HYP career services, and that all of the post-TFA resumes tend to look very similar.
I don't have any great ideas for you on how to deal with this economic nastiness, and I don't want to seem negative towards TFA (I'm doing it next year)... At least you have an offer!
You can always work at the boutique litigation shop for a little while and try to apply to b-school directly OR try to get a job at LECG or one of the other major lit shops after a year or two, since they tend to have good b-school placement.
It may not be ideal for you, though if nothing pans out with other boutique consulting firms it's not a bad position to be in.
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