Does My background and Experience suit Consulting?

I am currently in an Evening MBA program, with an expected finish date of April 2011, at a good business school ranked any where from 5 to 12 depending on the survey you read. GMAT - 690

Undergrad: Electrical Engineering
GPA: 3.8

Work experience: 7 years

(2002 - 2003 ): Worked as a sales Engineer for a computer service major for 1 year. Worked with various clients from IBM to Accenture.

(2003 - till now) Has worked for two utility majors as a contractor on various projects. Worked on designing algorithms for energy trading division for one of the utility companies. Lead teams in developing applications for the Energy trading division for one of them. Good at optimizing portfolios and modeling data using various math models.

Worked on various corporate finance tools like SAP finance. I am highly interested in Developing algorithms and working with numbers but currently i work as team leader. Also worked in the supplier management side for one of the companies.

i have gradually moved from being a pure mathy guy to leader ship duties.

I am interested in getting into MBB consulting and i am interested in working in Asia , India or China. Does my aim seem realistic?

I know my MBA Score is low, should i write it again? My grad GPA is low and i dont plan to put it in the resume.

What other steps should i take to improve my chance for getting into a good consulting company or should i just look at another field. With my expertise in Algorithms and mathy background which field would be better

 

I assume by "mba score" you mean GMAT? I guess there would be no way of knowing that you took it after/during b-school, though that would be highly unusual. Maybe worth a shot, but your GPA is going to be a problem. Typically b-school GPA isn't important....except for IB and management consulting. So you might be out of luck there. From your goals though ("I am highly interested in Developing algorithms and working with numbers ") it sounds like you might have more interest in IT consulting. Maybe look at SAP consulting.

 
Best Response

As someone who recently graduated from a similarly ranked bschool (closer to 12 than 5 though) with an MBB full time offer in hand let me offer my advice:

  1. Retake your GMAT. Because I was a summer intern at my firm, I was involved with my firms recruiting team at my school. When screening candidates for the pre-select interview list we were instructed to do the following: 1) auto-reject any applicant with a sub-700 GMAT score unless they had a personal connection in the firm advocating on their behalf, 2) reject any applicant with a sub-730 GMAT unless there was some other evidence of outstanding academic accomplishment on the resume or a connection to the firm.

  2. Get your bschool GPA up. You will be asked for your GPA on the online applicatoin. Any applicant with less than a 3.7 was an auto-ding for a first round interview. The general concensus among the recruiting team was that bschool is easy, there is no reason you should have a low GPA. If you leave it off the applicatoin, and your school does not have grade non-disclosure, it will be assumed that your GPA is below 3.7. Even if your school has grade non-disclosure for 1st round interviews you will still have to disclose your GPA before your second round interview. Unless you absolutely killed the 1st round anything under a 3.5 will ding you at the second round.

  3. Apply only to offices in countries where you are a citizen. The firm may say that this doesn't matter, but don't believe a word of it. It cost the firm anywhere from $8000 - $20,000 to get work authorization for someone to work in a country where they don't have citizenship and when push comes to shove with two equally qualified candidates the one who already has thier citizen ship is going to win.

  4. If you are Indian or Chinese and applying for a position in a US office, make sure your English is perfect and that you come off as out-going and friendly. This goes double if your background is in IT. No recruiter will purposely discriminate against you, but each year they get literally thousands of applications from Indian and Chinese IT guys and you really have to break that mold to stand out.

  5. You might also want to consider switching to the fulltime program so that you can do a consulting internship. It will be very, very hard to land a fulltime MBB offer without an MBB summer internship.

Also note that the rules outlined above are bent much more readily at a top 5 school (think H/S/W/MIT/Kellog/Booth/Col/Tuck) then at a top 12 school (think Haas/Ross/NYU/Duke), and become quite strict by the time you are in the top 15 range (think Cornell/UCLA/Yale/CMU).

Good luck to you.

 
Reset:
As someone who recently graduated from a similarly ranked bschool (closer to 12 than 5 though) with an MBB full time offer in hand let me offer my advice:
  1. Retake your GMAT. Because I was a summer intern at my firm, I was involved with my firms recruiting team at my school. When screening candidates for the pre-select interview list we were instructed to do the following: 1) auto-reject any applicant with a sub-700 GMAT score unless they had a personal connection in the firm advocating on their behalf, 2) reject any applicant with a sub-730 GMAT unless there was some other evidence of outstanding academic accomplishment on the resume or a connection to the firm.

  2. Get your bschool GPA up. You will be asked for your GPA on the online applicatoin. Any applicant with less than a 3.7 was an auto-ding for a first round interview. The general concensus among the recruiting team was that bschool is easy, there is no reason you should have a low GPA. If you leave it off the applicatoin, and your school does not have grade non-disclosure, it will be assumed that your GPA is below 3.7. Even if your school has grade non-disclosure for 1st round interviews you will still have to disclose your GPA before your second round interview. Unless you absolutely killed the 1st round anything under a 3.5 will ding you at the second round.

  3. Apply only to offices in countries where you are a citizen. The firm may say that this doesn't matter, but don't believe a word of it. It cost the firm anywhere from $8000 - $20,000 to get work authorization for someone to work in a country where they don't have citizenship and when push comes to shove with two equally qualified candidates the one who already has thier citizen ship is going to win.

  4. If you are Indian or Chinese and applying for a position in a US office, make sure your English is perfect and that you come off as out-going and friendly. This goes double if your background is in IT. No recruiter will purposely discriminate against you, but each year they get literally thousands of applications from Indian and Chinese IT guys and you really have to break that mold to stand out.

  5. You might also want to consider switching to the fulltime program so that you can do a consulting internship. It will be very, very hard to land a fulltime MBB offer without an MBB summer internship.

Also note that the rules outlined above are bent much more readily at a top 5 school (think H/S/W/MIT/Kellog/Booth/Col/Tuck) then at a top 12 school (think Haas/Ross/NYU/Duke), and become quite strict by the time you are in the top 15 range (think Cornell/UCLA/Yale/CMU).

Good luck to you.

one of the mroe helpful posts i've seen here in the last year. can he get a couple more bananas?
"... then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it."
 

Thank you reset for the real great advice. I am planning to take GMAT again.

Would it help me in getting into the MBB or at least next tier consulting firms if i apply for the India or China Office. When using the On campus recruitment i don't know if they will let me apply for Asian offices. generally at what stage of OCR would one get a chance to choose the office?

Thank you

 

Its all about how you position your experience. I think the fact that you are doing an Evening MBA might hurt you with some of the firms - which prefer to hire full time MBA students.

I would advise against retaking the GMAT - marginal value to getting a score above 700, especially given your experience and engineering degree.

What you need to probably do is to choose an office where you would be competitive (Asia - if you have citizenship there....). Most firms make you choose the office at the start of the application, and you can obviously say you are flexible. Equally important is reaching out to the office or if you know anyone in the Asian offices.

All the Asian offices get a lot of applications from people who have a fleeting interest in the region - so they really want to make sure you are genuinely interested (i.e. long term ties, past experience etc)

like what one of the previous posters said - it takes a lot of resources for a firm to sponsor you, and they would gladly do it for the superstars for the popular offices like NYC, Bay Area, London etc

For someone on the fence (i.e. in terms of profile) like yourself - you got to play to your strengths.

It is not impossible - I have seen people with a profile like yours get into MBB. They positioned themselves well, and had great communication skills, good analytics and differentiated themselves through their personality (Read: airport test and general attitude).

All the best!

PS: I had a profile similar to yours in some ways and landed a top consulting offer. So it can happen.

 

Guys as i have said earlier i have a low GPA and i am not going to put it on my resume. In fact i am trying to improve it to some extent.

I have a low GPA as i had to drop out of a semester half way through as i was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor and that really messed up my MBA for nearly 3 semesters and i still have some lingering issues with health.

Can i tell that to a recruiter if my low GPA comes up for discussion or should i explain it any other manner.

I fear that the recruiter may doubt my future ability to perform or function properly. Should i tell it to the recruiters explaining my low GPA.

 

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"... then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it."

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