How quant is consulting?
This may be an incredibly stupid question, and I apologize if it is, but how quant/math-based is consulting compared to something like IB or PE? Thank you.
Nov 28, 2015
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Is that a "highly quant" answer?
NA
It varies a lot by project. During my tenure, I've gone a full month without touching Excel, and I've also built out a pretty detailed customer lifecycle model that probably goes just one step farther in terms of analytical rigor than anything you would do in banking/PE.
At the end of the day, consulting and banking/PE are probably at similar overall levels.
How much quant classes to take for consulting? (Originally Posted: 05/23/2013)
Hi there, I'm a rising sophomore at a top 3 school, and this question concerns my course selection for next semester. I'm a social-sciency person. I'm okay with math but not great nor interested in it. I know that for consulting (or life in general) the more quantitative my coursework is, the better, but I really don't feel like forcing myself to do difficult quant courses just for the sake of it. I would say that I'm considering both law school and consulting as career choices, but definitely not finance. I've taken AP Calc AB in high school, would that be enough or should I go on to take 2nd and 3rd semester calc and linear algebra? I'm taking statistics, micro and macro next year. Also is it necessary to take intro programming and/or engineering courses?
TL;DR: I'm not interested in math so I don't want to take too many quant courses just so that my resume looks good. I want to know what's the minimum amount of/most essential quant classes I should take, so that 1) I'm not at a disadvantage in recruiting process 2) I have a good grasp of the practical math skills that consultants actually use.
Thanks so much in advance guys!
That being said, whenever I see that a "social-sciency" applicant is crushing the quant courses - gold!
On one hand, if you are are sufficiently good at what you do, you can into consulting with any background. On the other hand, people who go out of their way to avoid quanty classes raise some red flags: Will they be happy in consulting, what are they afraid of, etc.? As far as I'm concerning, a near 800 math SAT, an A in one quanty class or quanty summer experience and they've addressed the issue. There is probably a wide range of opinions on this one.
Economics Consulting can be more "quant" than IB/PE will ever be. Examples of work would be benchmarking mortgage backed securities performance against the entire universe of comparable MBS. That's some computationally intensive work done on SAS.
I personally spent most of my time writing SAS code.
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