He had a couple of questions for me about the Computer Science and Education parts of my academic background and how they’ve influenced my career and current role.
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KM wrote:
Hi there,
I am sure you are busy but thank you for taking the time to read this message. I read about you on “Management Consulted”. My name is Kushaal Malde and I am a curious freshman at UC Berkeley.
After reading your interview I had a couple follow up questions I was hoping you could answer. (here is the link for that interview: http://managementconsulted.com/consulting-interviews/life-as-a-consultant-interview-with-marquis-of-mckinsey-and-marquis-weblog)
1: You pursued a Masters in Education. How would you say it has helped you get to where you are now?
2: Does your background in Computer Science contribute to the work you are doing now or back when you were consulting?
I look forward to hearing back from you!
Sincerely,
KM
UC Berkeley Class of 2017
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My response:
Hi KM,
Thanks for checking out my interview on Management Consulted. I think I did that 5+ years ago and it’s funny how folks are still discovering me through it. Gotta love how the Internet is forever, right? 🙂
It’s always interesting to see folks starting to think about their careers early on in their lives, particularly during Freshman year in college. By starting to chart your path this early, you should be able to position yourself much better when I did at your age. Kudos to you, man.
Here are my responses to your pair of questions:
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- You pursued a Masters in Education. How would you say it has helped you get to where you are now?
Sadly, despite my interest in education, my graduate studies on the topic haven’t really come into play during my career. I did have a project for a large urban public school district when I was at McKinsey, but, other than that, I haven’t leveraged that part of my knowledge base at all since finishing up at Stanford in 2006.Looking back to my decision to pursue the MA in Education, I was more motivated by non-profit aspirations that I have for the future than any desire to work directly in education post-MBA. I won’t bore you with all of the background details, but, one day, I’d like to start a non-profit organization that implements educational programs in rural areas (like where I grew up) and to convince more kids to aspire to go to college after high school. There are far too many kids who grow up in the country and never even consider college as a viable option. I’d like to find an efficient, effective, and scalable way to solve that problem.
Since finishing up at Stanford, I’ve been focused on the corporate game as the platform for my career to (1) build credibility as a top-tier business leader who can be trusted to launch and grow a viable non-profit and (2) build the financial resources that will allow me to take the plunge into the non-profit space sometime later. I’m probably 15+ years away from making that move, but it WILL happen one of these days. Keep an eye on me for that one… 😉
- Does your background in Computer Science contribute to the work you are doing now or back when you were consulting?
I left consulting almost 5 years ago and now work at a global financial services firm in the risk management industry. My current role blends business operations, strategy, and management, so it is somewhat of a departure from my time as a Management Consultant. That said, it’s one of the types of gigs to which one would move after doing a stint in management consulting. The reason that I started the response off in this way is that my past background in Computer Science doesn’t really contribute directly to my current role at all, but it does have an indirect impact due to the way that it eased my transition into consulting back in 2006.When one first becomes a Management Consultant at the Associate or Business Analyst level, much of the work is analytical in nature. Usually, that calls for a lot of data crunching, financial modeling, and other analyses using a program like Microsoft Excel. Prior to business school, I’d never used Excel for anything real and, to be honest, I didn’t even know what it was for other than making basic spreadsheets. That changed when I was introduced to financial modeling during my first year at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
While modeling in Excel was something totally new to me, I quickly realized that it essentially involved breaking a given problem or task into constituent parts that could be modeled using Excel. This is exactly the type of thinking that I had to use as a Software Engineer to break a task into chunks that could be implemented in Java code as a series of data structures and interfaces. One of the key lessons of any Computer Science curriculum is that, as long as you know “how” to code, the actual task of programming in a given language is just syntax. Once I understood what financial modeling actually was, Excel just became another programming language to me and I took to modeling like a fish to water.
Let’s jump ahead a couple of years to when I started at McKinsey…For my first couple of projects, I was assigned to projects where I was tasked with work that was highly analytical in nature and involved Excel modeling that was FAR more advanced and complicated than anything I’d ever done in my B-school modeling class. But, because I was able to view it as just an extension of programming, this new work didn’t terrify me and I just studied up on the Excel syntax that I needed to implement the approach to modeling out the problem that was in my head. And, from there,…BOOM!…I was able to feel confident in being able to knock out any sort of analytical problem that might come my way as a Consultant.
Now, let’s fast forward to today…At my current level, I try not to do too much detailed financial modeling myself and, instead, delegate it to Analyst-level colleagues. This way, my time is freed up for more advanced tasks. That said, because I once was the guy who had to do that analytical cranking myself, I can both understand the modeling enough to know how everything should be set up and coach the Analysts on how to actually implement the approach. #WinForThePeople!
Of course, there are plenty of folks who become successful Consultants without having a Computer Science background, but I’d be lying if I said that mine wasn’t an asset to me as I got started in the strategy game.
If you ever have any other questions about topics like this, I’d recommend that you check out my blog (assuming that you haven’t already). I’ve been maintaining it for 10 years now and, over the years, I’ve had readers send me questions about a range of topics that might be interesting to someone at your stage of life.
I hope that you found the above information to be helpful as you plot out your own collegiate path. Take care and have a nice evening.
Marquis
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