McK vs A&M Offer Decision

can't give u any first hand info but heard u could get 300k tc ur first year at A&M. plenty of threads on here talking about rx co comp

McKinsey has a ton of travel, but is often Mon-Thurs, where Fridays are more chill with minimal weekend work. A&M RX is closer to typical banker hours, also the engagements themselves are likely more stressful. 

PE firms mostly just want smart people who have enough technical skills to be trainable. MBB is known to hire some of the smartest people out of undergrad/MBA programs, so it's a natural filtering mechanism. Now, I do think (not that I have MBB/strategy experience) that it'll be harder to pass their technicals coming from MBB without extensive study. That said, if you clear it, you've already been vetted for an important factor, rightly or wrongly, by working at MBB (i.e. are you smart and can work long hours on high-stakes projects under tight deadlines). Since these firms get so many applicants, it's time efficient for them to use these firms to do some of the identification for them.

Prospect in IB - Restr

Yea but everyone at McK tries to exit since the upside really isn’t there if you plan to stay at the firm long term right? As opposed to A&M where there is upside. Will that hurt my chances of exiting if i go McK, since I’ll be in a bigger pool? 

A large amount does end up exiting McK, but I think you're overestimating how many want to go to PE/PC in the first place. Also, the more people that leave from a certain firm in the industry also has some benefits (more alumni / established pipeline) which you may not get otherwise. Regardless, I think you're in a good spot with either firm, but at least in my opinion McK is the clear winner

I'd take A&M over PWP lol

Investment Analyst in HF - Event

I’m going to give a few thoughts on this. Apologize if this comes across as being blunt; just how I write. For some background, interned at MBB, started FT career in RX consulting, and moved to distressed investing. 

1. your experiences sound like that from people I know in Rx consulting in europe. If so, that makes sense; the industry is much less built out than in the USA.
2. I agree that MBB has an extremely good brand name
3. I agree on the value of the skills that McK teaches, especially with regards to C-suite stuff. However, there’s a difference between building a polished executive persona (McK) versus mastering hard operational/financial mechanics (Rx Co in general). I learned a lot during my internship in mgmt consulting, but was very cognizant of the fact that there was a lot of situations where the output was slides over substance. In Rx, you really can't solve a multi-million dollar liquidity shortfall with a pretty 2x2 matrix or a polished PowerPoint deck. You need hard numbers and math not hypothesis testing, and you cant make generalizations. If you present a $ value, you better be willing to bet your career/reputation that an independent reconciliation is going to get to that exact same value. Confident and clear communications mean nothing without the analytical horsepower behind it, and this may be a hot take but I find RX professionals to provide more realistic and actionable communications as opposed to the strat/management consultants.
4. The next point is time. Generalist management / strat consulting projects are often intellectual exercises for healthy companies that have the luxury of time. You don’t have any of that in a distressed situation.
5. The mindset is different. McK etc have this mindset of "every page be turned 10 times" to achieve aesthetic perfection, but the idea that my RX firm pushed to us and I pushed to my juniors was that speed and execution trump beauty when a company is running out of cash. A good output now is worth more than a great output later. Btw, a polished, heavily reviewed deck doesn't always mean it's right, it often just means someone got very good at packaging an idea, regardless of whether it actually holds up to reality.
6. What you call “chaos town” is just how the real world is…it’s not organized nor is it clean. When you get parachuted into distressed environments for a living, you have to be decentralized and reactive, and to that end, juniors are usually more valued for their raw analytical horsepower than their slide-deck storytelling. It’s the same situation in PE or IB. You get rewarded more early on for technical execution as opposed to soft-skill storytelling.Also note that in RX you’re interacting with people from the entire organizational hierachy, not just the top levels. Communication styles that work for the C-suite won’t work for the lower levels. I'd also argue that executing the tasks is how you end up solving the problem. If you try to stare down the monolithic monster of a failing company all at once, you’ll just get depressed; you have to break it down into pieces, and once you execute enough of those tasks right, the problem solves itself. It's very different from how you approach issues in mgmt/strat consulting.
7. I’d say it’s simple, but not easy to learn the 13wcf etc, and it’s easy, but not simple to learn the McK etc thinking process

I fully agree with you but also would highlight that it depends on the situation. A lot of RX cases in Europe are indeed what you are describing .. some smaller OEM supplier shortly before insolvency/bankruptcy. Nobody cares about anything else other than saving the biz and most toolkit you need is being technically cracked to make sense of the financials.

Yet though, my current experience has been with larger RX mandates (>2bn Sales) which typically still have some financial runway and more time. For those I would say, my McK toolkit helps a lot.

Senior stakeholders at my current mandate are all ex C-suite from larger F500 type of companies. 

What I observed from my RX colleauges is that they don’t really know how you play that game. I.e., how you manage cadences, communicate results that you don’t loose them along the way, etc.

I acknowledge that you did an internship at MBB, but it isn’t really a lot of insight on the broader skillset if you judge pages/content from that n=1 situation. The toolkit that especially McKinsey teaches (BCG and Bain less) is swim or sink from day one. As an intern you are shielded from that. So the learning is less about knowing that a lot of pages you build are nicely dressed up fluff. The learning is  more that you are 6 months into your job and get told “hey, this is your workstream on forecasting and valuing this rare gene therapy drug; I don’t really have more context, just read the background material. In 3H we speak with Partner X so prepare a full driver tree and tomorrow you need to present this in front of SVP Y”.

Mind you this was PRE AI. And you did all of this while having some insanely frightening and pushy partners breathing down your neck.

I felt lowkey anxious the majority of the time at the firm … but, this is the toolkit. The toolkit is not the nice page it is this mental mode of being responsible for every little thing on your workstream and getting a boot in the a** if something goes wrong. Its about always thinking in advance and being proactive. Never coming with problems to partners but you need to be able to bring solutions.

I am not saying RX internally trained people are bad .. not at all, they are insanely cracked,

I am just saying for a career starting choice for someone who thinks about different industries and optionality, MBB provides an immensely helpful platform.

// let me just add something because this topic is so close to me lol

that being said, RX itself is incredibly more interesting and rewarding than anything you do at McKinsey. Even the strategy work that most students dream about is incredibly painful. It is essentially building a glorified piece of research, with too little time and way too little people. So you will be grinded to the bone for 3-4 weeks building 150 pages of content and then hop to the next thing (often unrelated).

Much much worse though are those larger PMO/transformation type of programs. They are essentially the new cash cow in town and are often times outcome based (eg, fees based on % of savings). I always call them Big 4 on steroids. It is not purely PMO type of Big 4 work but very close to that with much less people and much higher expectations so you will still clock in 9-Midnight working on a procurement stream of a larger transformation. A lot of people will also do something w Org or IT operating models, etc., thats far removed from anything interesting.

RX is essentially a mix of finance and strategy, so essentially you need to judge: what do we want to do with all of these subsidiaries? Do we sell them? Close them? How is the market, how are the competitors? And then you move to a decision where everything is linked to a three statement model at the end.

I went to RX because of that because the market is insanely hot and the work is interesting. I decided against PE because the market is bad and I would work considerably more.

I can only speak for RX in Europe but the options are crazy. The firm in is basically flooded with mandates but does not have the people.