Invited to McK's PST. What's next?

PST day: This seems to vary around the world because I've heard of people doing the test in groups of 20+. I, however, was on my own. I was directed to a small room with just a table and chair. They took everything from me (bag, jacket, phone, wallet etc.) and just left a bottle of water, the PST question booklet, answer sheet, a pen and a timer which was preset to 60mins. The PST itself was not significalty harder than the practice versions available on the websites. Though I was filling in my last answer till the very last second. Unless you are some kind of logic/math genius, you will bearly have enough time to finish.

I recommend really practicing under strict test conditions, practicing your strategy and timing as well and have mental check points such as certain times at which you should have completed a certain number of questions. Skip any computation questions that are taking you longer than 30secs to work out the solution steps for and comeback to them at the end. For example I tried to get through everything in 50 mins and used the last ten to answer the one's I had skipped. I also limited skipping to 2 computation questions per case (There are 3 cases in the PST). The math is not difficult because it is mostly addition/subtraction, multiplication, percentages, ratios etc but it is time consuming and you need to find tricks to eliminate incorrect answer options quickly and just focus on checking the remaing ones.Practice practice practice because this test is no joke, I probably studied harder for this than for some of my university courses. IMHO the PST is the most stressful part of the whole process. The cases so far have been challenging but less stressful.

Timeline: I'm not sure if there are any major differences amongst the offices but in my expereince (western european city) they are quite flexible when setting interview dates. It also depends on when you want to start. If you have indicated a very short time period (maybe within the next 3 months) then recruting will probably try to set the interview date as close as possible to your PST. I had time to burn so my first round interview was nearly two months after the PST; I also had exams in between so that also factored into the time frame. Don't be afraid to ask for more time because you really would like to prepare as well as possible so you will need sometime to get to a level you are comfortable with. McKinsey's recruiting staff are some of the best I've interacted with and very understanding.