The message below came to me from a soon-to-be MBA1 student at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and, unfortunately, it came in February and I didn’t get a chance to respond to it until July. As I’ve mentioned in past entries, I hate the fact that I can’t respond to people immediately. In this person’s case, that delay means that a lot of the advice that I would have given him doesn’t apply anymore. That said, I do believe that the advice that I offered should be useful for him anyway. His question was about how he could best prepare himself for the summer internship interviews in Management Consulting. At the time, he worked in Audit and only had 2 year of work experience, so he wanted to get on the ball early to prepare for his target firm, BCG.
Despite my late response to this reader’s email, I think my advice would still do him some good….that is, if he ever sees it. It turns out that he’d sent his original email from his work email account and, when I sent my response, it bounced back to me because he’d left his job. I ended up finding him on Facebook and sending the email to him, but I never heard anything back from him. Hopefully, he was able to see what I wrote and can use my guidance as he prepares for his summer internship interviews.
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JN wrote:
Hi Marquis,
I luckily stumbled upon interview you had with Management Consulted more than a year ago. It would be great if you could take the time to give me an honest opinion about my situation- granted you are not a career coach, but I would really appreciate your thoughts.
I moved from Haiti in 2005, then graduated at Babson College to work at PwC [audit] since 2009. This year I will be enrolling at Fuqua [Duke] School of Management with the hopes to make it to the Boston Consulting Group.
At this conjuncture, what do you think I can do to position myself better in order to get a Summer internship at BCG? Also, will 2 years of experience- compared to the 4 of my peers- will position me, and what should I focus on? Finally, should I retake the GMAT, I had 680.
Other points that you may find useful in answering my questions, I started an ESL program in Boston. I will do a 3 months rotation in advisory at PwC, focusing on sustainability.
Thanks!
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My response:
JN,
I hope this message finds you doing well and ready to get started with your first year at Fuqua. I’m SO SORRY for taking so long to get back to you. As you can imagine, I get a lot of emails and, given my schedule, it can often take me a while to get back to people. I’m just now getting to my messages that came in early in the year and didn’t realize that yours was so time-sensitive. If I’d gotten back to you in February 2011 when you first wrote to me, I would have had a bunch of things that you could have gotten a start on in the late Winter and Spring, but, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do so. Sorry again for the delay.
Since you haven’t started your first year yet, I still have some advice for you that could be helpful as you prepare to make a run at BCG for your summer internship.
- If you haven’t done so already, start learning how to do consulting case interviews NOW. Many of your peers won’t start the case interview prep process until later in the Fall, but, if you start learning now, you’ll be a pretty advanced case interviewer by the time those other kids are just learning the basics. There are several good case interview prep books out there and I’m a huge fan of “Case in point” by Mark Consentino (that’s the book I used to get my own case game tight). Buy a case book ASAP and spend the next few weeks reading it cover to cover…you won’t regret it.
- Begin your research on BCG to learn about what makes it distinctive as a firm, which of its offices are attractive destinations for you, and what its corporate culture is like. This early research will allow you to get the low-hanging fruit sort of things knocked out now and will allow you to ask more value-added questions during information sessions that the company will hold on your campus.
- If you can, try to get reeled into some of the groups of MBA2 students who will be practicing for their full-time consulting interviews. When it comes to the interview process, practice makes perfect and getting an early start on those practices will be a huge bonus for you. Plus, the MBA2s will have gone through a year of B-school and a summer internship, which should give them a stronger business acumen than your MBA1 peers and allow them to give you more concrete and actionable feedback.
- As soon as you start at Fuqua, go to the Career Services and ask if they can connect you with recent Fuqua alums who either currently work at BCG or are BCG alums. These early conversations can be a great way for you to gain insights about what it’s like to work there and could be a starting point for differentiating yourself among the other candidates for the BCG summer internship.
- Start researching other Consulting firms that might be good summer internship opportunities for you. BCG is a really hard firm to get into and, if you don’t get the internship, you’ll want to find a different internship that will prepare you well for getting a full-time gig there. That’s the strategy I took when McK dinged me for summer internship second rounds back in the day. I ended up doing a summer in Accenture’s Strategy Practice and then flipped it to get the full-time McK offer afterward.
Your GMAT question is an interesting one. 680 isn’t a bad score, but it isn’t one that necessarily jumps off the resume page. If I’d gotten back to you when you first emailed me, I would have advised you to consider retaking it and aiming for something above 700 to make your profile “pop”. You would have had several months to study at a slow pace and you could have knocked the test out earlier in the summer. Now that you’re right about to start at Fuqua, I would recommend sticking with your 680 and getting yourself mentally prepared to perform well academically in your first semester of classes. Scoring a high GPA in your first semester would be a great way to differentiate yourself as an applicant.
I hope you find the above pieces of advice useful as you frame out your strategy to getting that BCG internship. Take care and good luck with the upcoming start of your first year. The 2 years in business school will be some of the best times of your life and I hope you take advantage of all that Fuqua has to offer during your time there.
Marquis
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