Workplan for PE studying

I basically thought of PE prep through the following sections:

• Deal walkthroughs
• Qualitative (why PE, tell me about yourself, strengths / weaknesses, etc.)
• Technical (accounting, valuation, etc.)
• LBO prep (paper, 1 hour, 3 hour)

I used the WSO prep pack and then a number of online resources (Street of Walls, 10xEBITDA, etc.).

I recruited supppeeerrrr late (reached out to headhunters in May for same summer start) and I didn't have a super laid out day by day study plan or anything, but knew I would have at least 2-3 weeks before actual interviews began and basically said every day, I'm going to study at least 1 hour no matter what - if a night ends at 2am, I'll do an hour of studying at 3am before going home and each weekend I forced myself to do at least 10 hours total (avg 5 hours a day). But I was also a 3rd year then and wasn't somebody recruiting only 6 months in, so this approach probably doesn't work for everyone.

1st step was going through 5 of what I thought were my best deals and doing full writeups on them - summary, my role / responsibilities, business overview, transaction overview, financial overview, transaction outcome, whether I thought it was a good outcome or not from the buyer's perspective, etc. Unlike qualitative or technical questions where everyone should have some sort of baseline level / BS-ability, IMO knowing your deals on a very detailed level is absolutely key, and I was surprised by 1) how quickly you forget things and 2) how much people cared about deal walkthroughs, including asking about like the working capital needs of a business.

Then I created flash cards for each of the key parts of the deals, going down to the nitty gritty such as "Company A - revenue" then on the other side I'd have something like "historically $80-90M per year, growing at 5% CAGR reaching $x in 20XX."

After I felt I got my deals down, I started doing multiple reps of LBOs - 1st paper LBOs, then 1 hour LBOs, then 3 hour LBOs. For each of those, 1st pass trying my best to answer as well as possible but referring to answers when I got stuck / confused, 2nd pass going through w/ no help, 3rd pass w/ a time constraint as if it were "live" - on the last one, make sure you aren't using any pre-installed macros since you likely won't have those on whatever computer you are using on site.

Throughout all the above, I worked on flash cards for all the qualitative / technical questions as well, which is pretty self explanatory.