Hello everyone, I'm a long-time lurker and rising undergrad Junior at a semi-target who's received an internship offer for Summer 2018 from Strategy&. The only catch is that the offer expires on October 1st. I'm still going to apply to MBB, but in the case that they reject me or that they can't give me a decision before 10/1, I'll probably accept the S& offer because I'm pretty risk-averse.
If I'm to believe the consensus surrounding S& on WSO (which I've taken with an ocean's worth of salt), then apparently the firm's lost most of its Booz prestige in recent years, dropped from #4 to like #6 behind OW and Monitor Deloitte, and is vomiting out talent. Would taking this internship really adversely affect me? My tentative goal is to make MBB full-time, if not for an internship, and then move into PE. How hard is it to get to MBB/top BB from an S& internship? What are the exit options like at S&, should I go there FT?
Yes, working at S& will completely ruin your future...
Hi, I'm currently an intern at S& so I can answer some of your questions.
1) Project flow in the NY office is very good for FS and Healthcare. So good that they've had to draw consultants from other verticals (what we call industries) to staff them. I can not comment on the other verticals however as I have had no exposure to them. We've beaten McK, OW, BCG, Deloitte on some pretty big projects in the above industries recently so it's still a pretty strong practice. A
2) s for being fully integrated into PwC like Diamond, that won't happen. They've spent way too much money keeping the brand separate and building it up. Also, for example when they acquired Diamond, they literally just called the merged entity PwC-Diamond. And if I remember correctly it was absorbed within a year or so. S& has been around for 3-4 years already.
3) All your work will be Strategy, it's called Strategy& after all. So no operations work.
4) S& and PwC Advisory are still very separate, and the integration from what I can see is very slight (for better or for worse). I personally have not seen or heard about cross-work with PwC advisory except that they've had PwC partners on a case or 2, but this is the point I'm least certain about so take my word with a very small grain of salt for this one.
And for what it's worth, all the MBA interns I've seen have been from M7+Darden, and as for undergrad, there is a very large Columbia, Harvard and Princeton representation in the NY office. I don't know if that gave any insight into luster/reputation etc. but just trying to spread information. I will say that Deloitte has seemed to have overtaken it recently in the prestige game, however I myself am still unsure about how it stacks up to Oliver Wyman. Maybe others can give their input on that.
Feel free to pm me if you want, I'm willing to answer almost anything.
Dude, that's a good offer and you should be pretty psyched to take it if you don't get MBB. Still a big name with tons of deals, and plenty of exit opportunities. For references, I know a variety of recent grads working at MBB who worked at far less well known and far less prestigious places for their junior internship. You're probably right in terms of pure prestige that Monitor Deloitte and OW have probably overtaken S&, but these things are pretty fluid and S& is still a very good place with good talent and good work opportunities. Actually, the work might be better than a lot of MBB offices because there isn't any operations or implementations stuff. Ops stuff is fucking miserable.
Also, if you're really focusing on PE then you should do banking dude. With the exception of Bain which is a feeder to PE because they do so much diligence, very few MBB kids end up going the PE route. They move to industry or go to B school, but only the very top tier of well-connected undergrads end up in PE through consulting.
If you are trying to leverage your S& offer into MBB going down the road, the S& experience might be the most valuable part. Especially Bain and McKinsey really care about on the ground experiences and story-based interviewing, so if you kill it at S&, you'll have a solid story for why you're cut out for consulting. Get your GPA up though, you're gonna be competing against a lot of 3.8+ if you end up doing FT recruiting