What would I do if I had six years to prepare to get into a consulting gig?

What’s good, folk. I hope you’ve all had a nice Labor Day holiday weekend (if you’re in the United States, that is). Over the past couple of days, I’ve found myself returning to the reflective period that I shared with you guys a few months ago and it’s really had the gears in my head turning. Exactly a year ago today, I received a surprising call that caught me totally off-guard and threw my life into disarray. I’ve written about this before, so I don’t go into details here but I can’t help thinking about how much can change over time. At this time last year, I felt completely lost and it seemed that everything around me was spinning out of control. I don’t know if any of you have ever felt this way before, but it SUCKS, especially if you’re the kind of person that’s used to having a handle on everything. It’s scary when I think back to how far gone I was and I honestly didn’t know if I’d ever get my mind back right.

Then, one day, time and circumstances started making things make sense and I started understanding that everything happens for a reason. And, all of the sudden, I went from being totally lost to finally finding bits and pieces of myself. It’s kinda like the lyrics from that old Johnny Nash song “I Can See Clearly Now”…

“I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.”

Kinda wild, right? Gotta love how far a person can come in a short 12 months. I guess the big takeaway is that God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle, especially when He’s trying to teach us a lesson. Hopefully, the road to understanding the next lesson won’t be so rough to get through next time, but it’s good to know that time does help put everything into perspective. OK, enough about me…I know y’all don’t read this blog to read anything about my life nowadays 🙂

The email below is from a reader who aspires to join a MBB consulting firm and has come up with with a six-year plan to make that happen. In his message, he asked me a ton of questions and, by now, y’all should know my standard reaction to those kind of emails. Instead of flipping out over it, I just chose one of his question and gave him the best I could come up with on it. I tried to put together the answer to that question so that it would address a couple of his other questions too, but I might not have done a great at it. Who knows…anyways, let’s get down to business.

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BV wrote:

“Marquis,
I love your blog. You are helping tons of people, and for that you are truly capturing the essence of success in life. So thanks for your help!

On to my questions and background info.
I graduated 4.0 with Honors from the Honors College at University of South Carolina. I was a triple Business Major including International Business (ranked 1st in country at the undergrad level), Marketing, and Management.

I have some work experience(less than 1 year), mostly sales and marketing, but nothing with a pedigree and nothing all that substantial. I am going into the Peace Corps for 2 years to do economic development. I plan to get out and work with a non MBB for 2 years, make it to a target school and then apply to MBB. I have a feeling I will crush GMAT.
Will I even have a shot given my non-pedigree undergrad and pre-MBA work experience?

First, what else can I do to maximize my chance of getting into top 5 MBA program?

Second, what can I do to really beef up my resume, and what can I study given that I have at least 6 years before I apply to MBB? I have case and interview prep materials, GMAT prep, Vault and Wetfeet Guides, Mckinsey series books, and some things on PowerPoint and Excel. I read Consultingmag and periodically browse blogs and forums like this. I also am networking, and have managed to get in front of 3 Mckinsey employees, one an engagement manager, one from Accenture, and one from Bain.

I want to develop technical skills in the most important areas as well as soft skills. I want to know how and where to do impeccable research and data analysis. I need some specific topics to study, and some specific ways to study industries and functions. I’d like to find out specific analyses that are performed during the research and data analysis phases of the engagement. How they teach you to manage the project workflow, structure the hypothesis generation and gather, analyze and interpret the right data, and put it into charts and PowerPoints as well as reports. I need a pdf way to study modeling in excel, plus anything else in excel or that would help me be a good consultant. It would be great to get my hands on something that resembles the materials given during initial training for MBB analyst/consultant positions, as well as see something like the PowerPoints and reports created by the teams. This would let me see where the bar is, and specifically what I need to get really good at and study. Do you know if anything like that exist out there somewhere? What are the business topics I need to become really familiar with?

Basically, if you knew you had 6 years to prepare to get into an MBB and then excel once there, what would you do? Also some specific recommendations for extracurricular involvement post undergrad, which demonstrates the level of leadership they are looking for would be helpful.

Is there anything I’m forgetting to ask or that isn’t on my mind that should be?
I am aware I asked many questions and gave lengthy background info, but I feel a lot of it is necessary for you to provide a relevant and helpful response. Thanks for any advice and recommendations you may have.”
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My response:

BV,

I hope this message finds you doing well and enjoying the last few days of summer. I know it’s been a while since you first emailed me, but my Inbox stays packed with emails and, in your case, there are other reasons that it took me a while to get to your message. Before I dive into my response to your email, I’ve got to call out one of the sentences from the end of your email: “I am aware I asked many questions and gave lengthy background info, but I feel a lot of it is necessary for you to provide a relevant and helpful response.” I’m not sure how many of my past blog entries you’ve read, but I’ve got to let you know that your email hit a pet peeve of mine that I’ve mentioned MANY times on my blog…I don’t like to receive long emails with lots of questions because they take a long time for me to read, process, and respond to and leave me wondering if the reader put any thought at all into how long it would take for me to get through all of those questions. When I saw that sentence at the end of your email, I was left thinking “hmmmmm…” and chose to address emails that I could get through faster before yours. I was just scanning my Inbox and realized how long yours had been there, so I figure that now is as good a time as any to get to it.

That said, I don’t intend to answer all of the questions you posed in your message because it would take me a long time to do so and that’s not fair to all of the other people who’ve emailed me requesting help. Instead, I’m going to answer one of your questions and see if I might be able to touch some of your other questions in that response. Of the many questions you posed in your email, the following one seems the most interesting to me:

“Basically, if you knew you had 6 years to prepare to get into an MBB and then excel once there, what would you do?”

I’ve been asked this question in bits and pieces over the years, but I’ve never had someone put it all together as cleanly as you did in your email. So, if I had six years to prepare for the path you’ve planned, I would do the following:

– Take the GMAT immediately: The GMAT exam is the biggest hurdle for most people who apply to business school and I always advise that people get it out of the way as early as possible. I took the GMAT two years before I applied to business school as a part of applying for my first grad program and found the MBA application process to be a lot less stressful with that test out of the way. You seem to be sure that you’ll crush the GMAT, so you might as well get it out of the way now so you won’t have to worry about it later.

– Start learning how to tackle consulting case interviews as soon as possible: As you can imagine, the case interview process is a beast to get through and is the big differentiator between those who get the offers and those who don’t. Some people take naturally to the sort of structured problem solving required to do well on cases, but I’d guess that the majority of candidates have to work hard to adopt that manner of thinking. A key to success is for the case process to seem second nature and the best way to make this happen is to practice-practice-practice, which is what I would do immediately if I were you. With a two-year runway, you could be a case interviewing master by the time you approach the MBA summer internship cycle during your first year of B-school. If you go back to my November 2006 archives, you’ll see an entry with a link to a case prep guide that I wrote a few years ago. That guide has some tips that could serve as a decent starting point for you.

– Seek out leadership opportunities at work (even if they’re outside of core job responsibilities): Business schools are looking for applicants to exhibit leadership potential and one’s workplace is a great place to do this. Depending on one’s pre-MBA job, these opportunities could be easy to come by, but it isn’t as easy for most folks, including myself. In these cases, I would look for places where I could move the needle on some initiative about which I was passionate and take it upon myself to drive that initiative forward. Not only will this provide experiences to describe on a resume and in applications essays, but it will also provide recommendation writers with interesting stories to share with the admissions committees. In fact, this is exactly what I did back in the day and I found that it made the difference in making my profile jump off the page…I likely wouldn’t have done as well on my apps if I hadn’t been able to create opportunities to shine outside of my standard software development duties. You’ve got two years to do this and, in that time, I bet you could have major impact in the process.

– Ramp up participation in extracurricular/outside-of-work activities: You seem to already understand the importance of extracurriculars, so I don’t need to go into depth on that. Having never worked for a B-school admissions office, I don’t know if there’s a particular type of extracurricular activity that business schools seek, but I always recommend to my readers that they pursue activities that interest them most. That way, they’ll be more passionate about them and will have more of a desire to lead them. Whatever activities you choose, you should do more than simply be a member…if I were you, I’d get involved in committees, drive initiatives, and pursue leadership roles as a way to show that I was playing a notable role. I’ve written a lot of entries about this topic, so I’ll leave it to you to find those entries and get more details about extracurriculars.

– Develop an MBA story and build experiences around it: When I was approaching the business school application process, I spent significant time upfront figuring out what my application positioning (or “MBA story”) would be. This way, I knew that I’d be painting a consistent picture of myself as a candidate across all of my applications, conversations, and interviews. I found this as a great way to maintain my focus while putting together my applications. Once you’ve determined what your MBA story will be, use it has a guideline for the professional, leadership, and extracurricular experiences that you acquire over the next couple of years. Basically, this one step would be a way to pull together the four steps described above into what should ultimately make you into a strong business school applicant. Over the years, I’ve written several blog entries about how to build one’s MBA story, so I’ll let you find those entries to my advice to other readers on this topic.

So, that’s what I’ve got on your question…dang, this email ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would. I’m sure you still have other questions because of the ones I left unanswered from your email, but I’ve covered many of those topics in past blog entries and you’ll probably find a lot of the advice that you need in my archives.

Anyways, I’m still in awe of the fact that you’ve got your six-year plan laid out already and feel that you’re on the right track. At this point in my life, I basically think ahead in six-month increments because the crazy economy of the past year or so have convinced me that external factors can do a lot to derail a longer-term plan. Anyways, I hope my words above provided you with the kind of ideas you were seeking to weave into your six-year plan. Take care and good luck with reaching all of the goals that you’ve set for yourself.

Marquis

P.S. Next time you reach out to someone for advice on something, you REALLY need to be mindful of the number of questions you ask and the amount of time and thought it might take to address them…seriously. I’m pretty much used to this sort of thing by now after all of these years of blogging, so I didn’t trip too much after reading your email. But, I have a feeling that many other people might not have as decent of a reaction as I did and could write you off completely for it.