Strategy& Experience at the Associate Level - whats's the deal?
Considering offers from Strategy& (Deals) and a consulting-type role at a tech company for out of college.
My understanding is S& has better exit opps, but I've heard some unappealing stuff about work/life-balance and meaningless work. While I have no problem doing long hours if I am growing as a person, what I've heard from others has worried me that the work I'd be doing would teach me much given the large time input (slide-making, data entry, conducting analyses without input or even understanding of project direction).
Has anyone heard similar? Would also appreciate insights on quality of exit opps and if they warrant 65 hour work weeks.
A lot to unpack here and some pretty loaded questions. Let me take a stab at this. Seems like you have heard some pretty aggressive feedback, so I'll give my perspective. For WLB, it's probably going to be worse at S&, especially the deals team, vs. other non strategy consulting gigs. That's just a given. When you're on a deal, 65 hours is pretty normal. If you are looking for a 9-5, then I wouldn't look at S& or frankly, any other similar shop - it's just not going to happen.
But in terms of development, I think it's an amazing experience. Sure, there are moments of "menial" work -you'll find yourself reading pages of a power tool regulation document and think to yourself, what am I doing here (yes that happened to me) But the skill you get is really from 1) the holistic ownership of your work stream and understanding how everything ties together and 2) really drilling down on a hypothesis-driven approach and parsing out the necessary information
Can you coast by and just do what your manager tells you? Sure. You could easily just get on a project, be told to research X, build these slides, etc. But the team really does give you the ability to take your development as far as you want it. That's my two cents at least
Appreciate the response! Any insights on exit opportunities? (where people typically exit to and quality of the firms they exit to)
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