Accounting Student Questions

As a preface to my response, I am currently an accounting student, who has not had any management consulting experience. However, it is a field I want to break into so I think I can help clarify some stuff.

1. Management consulting is a very competitive field to break into. Even if you are in a tier 2 firm (McKinsey, Bain, BCG are by and large considered "tier 1"). In general, most companies hire directly from school, either as an intern or full-time.
2. Most every major firm hires undergraduates. They also hire graduate students with MBA's, engineering degrees, PhDs, etc. They basically hire anyone they see fit for the role. But as I said before, the bulk of recruiting is directly out of a university.
3. Accounting does not really give you a leg up in consulting. Not much does (unless you are a doctor, engineer, or some other expert. For example, if the firm is consulting a healthcare case, a doctor would obviously be an asset to the team). That being said, since consulting firms do case interviews, general business knowledge will give you an advantage over an engineering student or a liberal arts student. Beyond that, accounting knowledge won't really make you THAT much different than anyone else. (Again, this is all me repeating information I have gathered over the past year, I have never worked at a consulting firm).
4. Not sure about this question... What exactly do you mean?
5. Management Consulting is a very team-oriented environment. Some of the work will be individual, but almost all of it will be related to the team in some way.
6. This depends on the firm. In short - yes, travel is commonplace. Some firms are more local than others though, and try to cut costs by staffing people locally. But that is not always possible. If you are tier 1, you are almost always traveling. Within Tier 2 it depends. I have talked to people who have gotten to do local work, or some remote work from home. But in general you are still traveling 80%+ the time.

Hopefully this gives you a good starting point for research. My advice is scour the forums and see what other people have asked. Also, I am not sure what school you go to, but a lot of firms have their favorite or 'target' schools. If your school is not one of those, it will be harder to get a job at a firm purely because the logistics are more complex. However, it can be done.

Since you don't want to do audit (who does?), management consulting could be a good option. You should also consider the other services offered by the accounting firms. They have transaction services, and advisory services like risk, compliance, etc. These are all good alternatives, especially if you are at a non-target.

To clarify question 4: I'm essentially wondering what the role of a CPA is at consulting firm.

I'm at Penn State, honestly I have no idea what is and what is not a 'target school'. I know we get recruited from by Bain and IBM, but I don't know if that qualifies us as a target

-edit- Thanks for all the great input by the way