Princeton Senior with questions about my experiences at McKinsey

The email below came in from a reader who is currently in her senior year at Princeton, my alma mater (GO TIGERS!!! B-)). She was fortunate enough to make it to the closed list for interviews for Analyst positions with McKinsey and Bain. Her interviews are coming up next week and she had a series of questions for me about my experiences as a Management Consultant at McKinsey. It seems that she thought I’d been a Business Analyst there, but, despite her mistake, she asked some pretty good questions.

I didn’t answer all of her queries as fully as she may have expected, but I think I did a good job of covering most of the bases. Once upon a time, I would have given her lengthy responses to every one of her questions, but, if you check out what she was asking, you’ll be able to figure out why I didn’t answer each of the questions. I guess I’m actually learning to filter myself a little in my old age. 🙂

—–
JC wrote:

Hi Marquis,

I stumbled across your blog as I was doing some industry research on consulting. I have two upcoming interviews (both first round) for Bain and McKinsey. I’m a first-timer (in fact, I’m a Classics major, so this is way out of my league!) and I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions about your experience with McKinsey.

Why did you choose consulting over finance?
What was the most important lesson you learned as a result of your time at McKinsey?
What were elements of the company culture you would have changed?
What was your favorite case you worked on as a BA, and why? Least favorite case?

How many cases total did you work on throughout the interview process? How many rounds were there?

Hope you get this email soon! (Interviews are next week!!)

Best,

JC

—–
My response:

JC,

Thanks for thinking of me as a resource for your question. It’s always good to see an email from a fellow Tiger, especially one looking at Management Consulting. Also, congratulations on making the closed lists for 2 great companies. Judging from the fact that you were able to score interviews with McKinsey and Bain, you must be one hell of a Classics major. You might think that you’re out of your league, but these firms are great judges of talent and they must have seen something great in you.

I should tell you upfront that I usually respond to questions in the order that I receive them to be fair to everyone who contacts me. Plus, I respond to emails when I have time to get to them, so I don’t really do rush-jobs to meet a sender’s timing constraints (see the Contact page on my site for more info on that). But, since you’re a fellow Princetonian and I’ve got some free time tonight, I’ll knock out a quick reply for you.

Before diving in, I should tell you that I wasn’t a BA at McK, so my experience won’t necessarily be representative of what you’d see there if you join. I spent 2+ years with The Firm after I finished business school. Prior to B-school, I spent 5 years as a Software Engineer, which is a big part of why I chose Consulting over Banking. With no pre-MBA business background, I went with Consulting because I saw it as the perfect learning lab for business and knew that I’d gain experiences in a range of industries and functional areas.

For your question about the biggest lessons that I learned at McK, I’d divide that into hard skill and soft skill lessons. My most important hard skill lesson was a huge improvement in my ability to analyze data in Excel. When I started at McK, I was decent at Excel, but was far from a star. By the time I left, my analytics were a major strength in my business toolkit. The most important soft skill was an understanding of the importance of having a perspective and being willing/able to share it. As long as you are silent in a problem solving situation, no one ever has a reason to believe that you’re keeping up with the discussion or have anything interesting to contribute.

My favorite study was a 5-month long engagement that started as a performance diagnostic and rolled into a organizational transformation effort. The work on the study was really interesting, my McK team and client teams were incredibly cool, and the long-term impact that came from our work was likely to be significant. As for my least favorite study, I’ll have to keep that one to myself 🙂

When I interviewed, the process had 2 rounds. The first round was on campus and consisted of 2 interviews. The second round was in the office location and consisted of 4 interviews. When you asked about the number of cases that I “worked on”, I think this is what you meant. If you were asking about the number of cases that I did while prepping for the interviews, that would be well over 100 cases (accounting for the total number of cases that I did during the first and second year recruiting cycles in business school).

I hope this response is helpful. Take care and good luck with your first-round interviews for McKinsey and Bain.

Marquis