How to get better - want to get into consulting

Before coming to B school for undergrad I felt I was pretty good at giving interviews and just public speaking in general (wrong). I wasn't able to get on a single club. Everything is so competitive here it's like they started investing the second they came out of the womb. As someone who studied science in high school, I'm def not ahead of the pack. So far I'm leaning towards the consulting direction. I don't know where to start, there's so much I'm behind on. I have zero industry knowledge. Where do I start to get more knowledge about the finance world?

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First a distinction, learning about finance and about consulting are very different endeavours. You can absolutely do both at once, but there are many differences.

If you want to learn more about consulting, honestly Google is your friend (and I'm not being funny). There are tons of very good resources online for free (e.g., Management Consulted, Crafting Cases, PrepLounge) as well as on YouTube (hundreds, if not thousands, of very good informational videos). You'll see a lot of the same info being repeated, usualy shows you that this bit is accurate / common across the industry.

As far as what you need to learn about consulting, there aren't 50 things to know, really just a handful:

  1. The work: type of projects, lifestyle, WLB, hours worked, comp., etc.
  2. How to get better at it: learn basic business (e.g., marketing, organisational design) / economics / finance concepts + learn to think in a structured way + learn to do case interviews
  3. Building business acumen (related to 2, a little): read a ton of business news from quality sources (FT, WSJ, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, the Economist to an extent) and discuss the topics you see with friends / classmates. Dissect the decisions made, the why, the impact on the firm concerned, etc.

And that's basically it. Also familiarise yourself with some skills that make for a good consultant (and generally help in any job): top down communication and structured problem solving.

That last one you have to practice live in case interviews, preferably, and you can get the basics from any YouTube vid on the subject with >100k views.

 

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