Q&A: 2.5 years @ MBB post PhD

1) What field was your PhD in? My PhD is in Biomedicine

2) Why the switch from academia to consulting? Was this an interest that developed later on in grad school?

There were a number of reasons for wanting to transition to consulting, but I suppose you can break it down into 2 question: why not academia and Why consulting

Happy to also answer the first Q if you are interested but I presume that the second is the more relevant here. Once I decided to move from academia, I started looking for positions that would satisfy my curiosity as well as open new doors - I wasn’t precisely sure what I wanted to do, so I needed a job that would broaden my future options. Consulting hit these KPIs rather well. Also, it seemed to me that consulting was much the same as my PhD work in that I would take complex problems and break them down into their component parts and solve them.

The pay and pay trajectory certainly informed my decision as well :-)

4) Do you feel intellectually fulfilled in your current role?

Sometimes. Maybe more now than at the beginning. The amount of dumb work you have to do as a BA/A/AC is prodigious. As an entry level consultant you really don’t have much of any say over the analysis you do and are really not very involved in cracking the case, at least compared to driving your own work as a PhD student. This changes quickly as you move up the ladder, with more responsibility and trust coming your way. I also found it difficult to go from being an expert and leading teams to being a low level analyst, which likely informed my feeling of intellectual fulfillment or lack thereof.

6) If you're hoping to exit, I'm curious what sorts of roles/industries you're hoping to exit to?

I began getting recruiters contacting me ~6months into the job. I have looked at exits to pharma/biotech as well as tech. For tech and smaller startups, a common exit of business development. For larger companies, it’s more likely to exit to the strategy team with the hope of moving to a business line within 2-3 years.

As for what I hope to exit to...I would lean more towards the R&D management side of pharma or tech. Perhaps portfolio management or other roles that require a deep technical understanding. But I am not actively pushing to leave at the moment so haven’t fully defined what I want my next step to be.