From weighing 280 pounds and a 2.5 GPA at a Non-Target, to 200 pounds and an Interview with McKinsey

Hi Everyone,

I've been browsing Wallstreet Oasis for the past few years and I want to share my story and more importantly, reiterate to everyone on this forum to dream big. I went to a non-target state school and while suffering from social anxiety and obesity, I was also facing an extremely difficult time academically. I ended up changing my major three times and even faced academic suspension for a semester. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to receive an internship at a local financial institution and finished up my degree part-time in the evening. During that time, I was also promoted from an analyst intern to a full time business operations analyst.

After graduating, I went to a boutique local firm (out to Accenture recruiters - eventually landed a job in their commercial practice doing the same exact work I had been doing at the boutique however for F500 clients. I networked my way onto a F200 client that's incredibly heavy on marketing, social engagement, and advertisements. You've definitely seen their commercials pop up at the movie theaters, super bowl, or at airports. This was a new engagement and pretty soon I was leading a team of 2 resources. This expanded to 12 about 2 months after.

About a year and a half later, I decided I want to push myself even more and decided to aim for Deloitte. This was a company that had recruited at my undergraduate school and typically only hired 3-4 analysts with 3.8+ GPAs a year. After a grueling interview process with a few of their Senior Managers and a difficult case study, I received the call. I had an offer from Deloitte!

Incidentally, the very next day I received an inmail on Linkedin from a McKinsey recruiter for their federal practice. They were looking for a new analyst with experience in analytics and strategy. I messaged her back (hadn't accepted Deloitte's offer yet). The following week, I had a phone call with her and she sent over the SHL test. She had loved my experience at Accenture and wanted to bring me into McKinsey as an analyst. I took the SHL test and had an in-person interview scheduled for 2 weeks alter.

I felt that Deloitte was a much better fit for me and ended up accepting at Deloitte (pulled out of the McKinsey interview process).

The point of my long story is, no matter what your background is or GPA is, there's always a way. Become great at what you do and opportunities will present themselves. If they don't, its up to you to aggressively hunt down those opportunities.

 

GPA is generally looked at during the beginning. However, as time does go by, GPA becomes irrelevant, and then it becomes a matter of competency...along with who you know and what you know. I landed an engineer role for a major tech corporation with an Associates degree (MS preferred), in the events that I am a CS major at a part-time online/onsite campus (go Pirates!). My GPA was never questioned, but my work ethic was. I got this job, in all honesty, through referrals and this was after the director of the location screened 55+ resumes. It's like hitting the lotto, right?

 

Great moves! Glad you were able to find the position before graduating and are working to finish up that degree now. I agree - it kind of does feel like the lotto however too many people tie in academic performance with professional success. There's a correlation yes, however work ethic will push you much far ahead.

Sayonara
 

Yes we are! Met a Venture Capitalist once and asked him how he got there. He had no IB experience, no experience on Wall Street. He said "you have to find your own path. it has to be a unique path. dont follow what others are doing or what they've done. too many people focus on steps and rationalize a plan based on moving from point A -> point B based on what others have done." That stuck out to me and since then, I've stopped worrying about following a traditional path that we see so much on WSO but rather focus on a path that's unique to myself and my strengths.

Sayonara
 

Hi there OP,

I finally found the time in my busy week to read your thread and I wanted to personally congratulate you on your own thread for your success. You see, I graduated college with a low GPA (Deloitte and KPMG and I felt kinda depressed by it. Here they were starting out their lives on a promising path and here I was back at home working as a lowly lab tech.

I spend my time now searching for alternative paths that get me out of the life sciences, a part of me thinks that some employers out there might think "wow he graduated as a pre-med taking those hard sciences! Lets at least let him prove himself!". Either ways, it is always great to hear your success story and I am currently working out a path for myself to where maybe one day, I can share a success story of my own.

Congratulations OP!

Thank you for reaching out to me on my low GPA thread on the off topic forum.

 
Best Response

Postgradwonderer,

No worries I hope you found it helpful. I've had friends in very similar situations as yours (low GPA, degrees in Bio/Chem) and realized Med School wasn't looking too realistic. I did suffer from a lower GPA because I too wanted to impress my parents and study engineering and make them proud. When I switched over to Business, my major GPA was much higher than 2.5, around 3.3. Nonetheless, you have to figure out a path that works for you and figure out a way you can translate your current lab tech experience into an entry level position at a small company.

A good approach would be to look at certain fields where GPA isn't as highly valued when entering, and build your resume and skill set around that particular niche.

Checkout Coursera and Udemy. Take some courses on business foundations and fundamentals. I know Wharton runs a certificate program that lets you take classes in Accounting, Operations Management, Finance, and Marketing. You also get some experience with a Capstone project.

I'm currently doing a program on Coursera through Darden and taking strategy classes so I could learn to communicate better with my peers working within Strategy & Ops.

You could also look to get Coursera's Data Sciences specialization. It would build up a lot of fundamental technical skills that could push you through the door into your first job. Leverage your network with your friends/family and see if you can do a short project at one of their family owned businesses/consulting firms to get some more relevant business experience down on your resume. It's way too early to call it quits because of your GPA. There are always ways to bounce back.

If you're still interested at getting into finance (which I assume you are), I would advise to put that on the backburner for now. You'll still have a shot at doing that down the road when you go back to graduate school. The finance world is huge - and not everyone goes into Private Equity or Investment Banking. Plenty of corporate finance and Asset Management positions out there that you could look at in the future after getting an MBA or CFA.

Either way, what you mentioned about being 30 and 'broke' because you haven't found a good job is not going to happen. You will find a good job - and you wont be broke at 30. I know you'll work to get some technical skills and break into a company before then. Stay motivated, stay positive, and keep investing in yourself.

Sayonara
 

Wow...

So this is how successful people who have made it in life sound like right! Major change up from the whole you'll never make it big in finance give up now message kept hearing at some of the other parts of this site.

Consultant120, I was actually leaning more towards tech for now. My research has shown me that generally speaking, the finance and accounting world are very GPA and stats oriented. I did a ton of soul searching and found that all those hours spent toying with HTML in my teenage years alongside reading about how search engines such as Google work (SEO), it is another field I had interest in.

I started with toying around with Code Academy about 5 months ago, then moved towards working with Ruby, and I am now taking a course on Edx that is relevant to the computer science field. A part of me has thought about doing a bootcamp a year from now, almost 26 soon so I do feel like I have to get going you know.

Eventually, years down the road, if the opportunity presents itself, I will go for finance but if not then I'll still find a way to make the best of what has been given to me. Thank you and though things are good for you now, I hope they get even better!

 

Awesome story! glad you made it work for. In my opinion, having a lower GPA probably gave you a little bit more grit. I work with guys like that all of the time now who have completely turned it around like you have. They tend to feel like they have a lot more to prove...

 

OP, this is really inspiring.

I was a third year pre-med student with two engineering majors at a top 10 undergrad school in the US a few years ago, but things were not working out and I was lost in life about what I wanted to do when I finally realized that I couldn't really become a surgeon because of my nationality. At that point in my life, I lost all motivation and my GPA started to slide to 2.9 and I wasn't even sure if I could find a job at all because it seemed so hard to find a company that would sponsor a H1B Visa for an international kid with a 2.9. My school was in a rural setting and I couldn't find any internships other than positions in laboratories. The more I did research, the harder it was for me to convince myself that I liked it. I had wasted hundreds of hours, sacrificing sleep to repeat molecular biology experiments over and over without success or learning what was wrong. I felt like I was a waste of federal research funding.

Then, two years ago I made a decision that probably changed the course of my life. I transferred into a university that was outside of the US because it had offered me a full scholarship. I had already finished my third year at my college in the US and I would have to take another year, but back then, I would have done anything to raise my GPA.

My new college was in a city, and there were less restrictions for working in this new country, so I decided to do internships in industry to save some money for grad school. It was very difficult for me at first because I had never learned the language prior to transferring, and everything was new for me. Then, in my second year there, I landed an internship with a consulting company entirely by chance. I think I fell in love, because though I had been doing research for 3 years straight at that point, I had never felt like I used the skills I learned in school to do anything productive (no offense to hard working people doing research out there, this was probably specific to me). The head of the office told my friend that he "had never seen a better intern" when he was talking about me and my mentor told me that "maybe this work is my calling". That month, I stopped to appreciate the fragrance of flowers while I was walking home for the first time in a very long time and over the course of the next few months, I became completely independent of Zoloft, the anti-depressant I had been using for years.

During the internship, I learned how to scrape data with python in a week. I learned the Korean alphabet so I could verify details on a Korean government site. I learned how to organize my thoughts with rigorous logic and guide my actions (and this continues to influence the way I make decisions subconsciously and helps me to plan and take control of my life). I was learning faster than I ever had at any point in my life. Perhaps because of all the statistics and quantitative classes I had taken, everything fell into place naturally and I was able to see things very clearly. Consulting work was similar to research for me in the sense that you learn for yourself which questions to ask and how to test your hypothesis, and it was nice that your success did not depend on how much RNAse you shed. Above all, I felt appreciated for what I did for my client and that gave me the sense of career satisfaction that I thought I could never reach if I could not end up as a surgeon. (I know, haha)

After I realized what I wanted to do, I began to take action. My program at school was conducted in English but I decided to learn the local language. I interviewed at many, many, many companies despite not being able to speak the local language fluently. Rather surprisingly, I was lucky enough to get a handful of offers here and there but struggled to find a good fit. It took me a while but now that I have, I feel like I must be the luckiest person in the world. (Idk if my obsession for my job is healthy or not lol)

I apologize for digressing, but heres a shoutout to all you people out there who are struggling: don't give up just yet! I hope you all end up at your dream positions!

 

I'm impressed at your decision to choose Deloitte over McKinsey and how you behaved. Many people, on WSO and elsewhere, think too much about prestige and whatnot instead of finding the place that feels right. What you did took a lot of maturity, and I think that is a really good sign for you, not only career-wise, going forward.

Keep having a good time and rocking it!

 

OP - Thanks for sharing your story, incredibly motivational. Did the McKinsey recruiter reach out to you after you pulled from the interview? And do you have any plans to get into MBB in the future?

“You adapt, evolve, compete, or die.” -Paul Tudor Jones
 

Hi MisterSuit, yes I did reach out to the recruiter to pull out of the interview process. It was more of a timing thing, Deloitte needed an answer (bird in hand), and the McKinsey interview process would have taken another 6-8 weeks. I was anxious to get started. Strange how things turned out at Deloitte, I was able to get onto an S&O Banking project and realign myself to the Financial Services industry group. Learning a lot right now and in my spare time studying for the GMAT. I've been in touch with a few admissions directors for some MSF programs as well, so lets see how it goes :)

Sayonara
 

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