How to practice cases alone

Hi, everyone, I'm doing cases and I haven't found a good case partner. So I am currently practice cases alone. But I find that one big problem of mine is that I don't response to questions in cases quick enough (I attended some campus recruitment event and found that good candidates think and speak really fast, and I'm wondering how they are able to think and narrate so well in such a short time, and how I can do the same). I hope someone here can give me some advices on how to practice cases alone, and still get a good and quick answer to each questions. Thanks.

 
 

Mate, when you don't have a date, you practice alone in your room with no problem - how hard can it be to case alone?

 

You will eventually get to the “quick and on point” answers if you practice long enough. No one gets there instantly. As to how, for each case instead of just building your frameworks try to also say the answers out loud. Try to think what sort of questions you would ask if you are the interviewer and try answering those questions. Once you identified your problem areas, I have heard that Rocketblock is an excellent resource to practice on your own - they have different drills you can do to target your practice. In any constellation, if you are just starting out I recommend you to do practice with other people and then do solo practice once you know your problem areas. If for some reasons you cant practice with someone else, try with what I suggested above. Your learning curve will be slower, but that doesnt mean you wont get there (I studied purely on my own too!)

 

Contrary to common advice that it's "live case or no case" I found solo cases super useful when cramming in the run up to interviews.

Find business school case books (especially leveraging cases that are interviewer led). First read the prompt and draw out a structure, followed by describing it out loud to an imaginary interviewer (then refine with ideas from the one given in the case book). Once complete move onto the next step by looking at the first interviewer prompt, verbally stating your answer (then refining based on answer given in the book and giving it another go). Continue this to answer other prompts, analyse exhibits, draw a conclusions aloud etc. Whilst looking at the 'model answer' after every step, using it to refine yours.

Note that you aren't necessarily aiming for this 'model answer' but reading it might give you some ideas to improve your response.

 
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If you PM me, I'll a run case with you. Just finished the case interview process not that long ago and will be joining an MBB firm as an Summer in June.

As for practicing cases alone, in my experience, you benefit most solely in the case start section where you establish your framework. For the rest of the process, that's entirely dynamic. You need someone to be able to guide you or challenge you to actually get the most out of it. Especially since you said that "people think and speak fast", that's something that definitely comes with practice with others and going through the process.

 

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