The email below is from a Junior at Stanford University who is seeking my advice on how to best position himself to get an summer internship offer from a top Management Consulting firm. He emailed me at the end of the summer, but I didn’t have a chance to respond to him until a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty sure that I got my advice to him in time for it to be useful for the upcoming summer internship recruiting cycle though.
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JK wrote:
Marquis,
My name is JK and I am heading into my junior year at Stanford University. I am extremely interested in an internship next summer at one of the “big 3” (McKinsey, Bain, BCG), and was curious what advice you could provide me with. I have purchased Case in Point, and have read your blog and, managementconsulted.com a lot thus far, but still feel like I have a lot to know about the industry.
My main question is pertaining to the most important steps I can take in order to secure an internship next summer in New York City with one of these companies. Are there a few main points you can help me focus on?
Thank you so much for your time.
Best,
JK, Stanford ’13
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My response:
Hey JK,
I hope this message finds you doing well. I always enjoy receiving emails from Stanford folks because I have so much love for the school. I’m sorry that it took me so long to send you a response. The past couple of months have bee crazy busy for me and I don’t really have a chance to address my Inbox as much as I should. I hope this message is getting to you in time to be helpful.
By now, the Consulting firms may have already started coming on campus to hold info sessions and begin recruiting candidates for the summer, but, since it’s only early November, I don’t think they will be very far into the process yet. This still gives you a couple of months to position yourself well to be invited to interview. Once you get that interview invite, it’ll be all about you knocking those joints out of the park.
- Learn as much as you can about your target firms – This should go without saying, but I’m mentioning it because you would be shocked by the number of kids I used to meet who hadn’t even visited the McKinsey website before attending info sessions. You should read everything that you can on each of your target firms’ websites and then do Google searches to find any other relevant articles on work that they’re doing and any important news on them. By the time you hit an info session, you should know everything that there is to know about them from publicly available sources as a baseline set of knowledge. Then, when you are actually at the info sessions, you can ask more value-added questions about things that you wouldn’t be able to find through other means. This is how you make the best use of the info
sessions and, in the process, have a chance to make great impressions with the company representative who are there.
- Develop your “story” about why you’re interested in Management Consulting and why you’d be a good candidate – I assume that you’ve thought a lot about this, so I’ll just advise you to be as crisp and specific in explaining why you’re interested in Consulting as possible. Saying something like “Consulting sounds like a cool career”, “I am excited about traveling”, and “I’ve been told that it’s a good move out of undergrad” are not sufficient. I’d recommend
thinking about your short-to-mid-term career plans and then linking your story to those goals. For example, when I was developing my story while at the GSB, I anchored on to the idea that Consulting was the perfect learning lab for business because one is able to see a variety of hard problems across a range of industries and/or organizational
contexts. I saw it as a way to continue my education on business past my 2 years of MBA studies. When it comes to explaining why you’d be a good candidate, I’d recommend pointing to specific traits that you currently posess that would be key success factors for being a great Consultant. For example, if you’ve got killer Excel analytics skills,
are a natural-born leader, and have a knack with working/connecting with people at different age and experience levels, then you’d definitely want to highlight those areas.
- Develop your story about why the NYC office would be right for you and consider other cities that might work for you – You may know this already, but it is TOUGH to get an internship in the NYC office of any firm. Not because there aren’t slots in NYC, but moreso because everybody and their mom wants to work in NYC. If you are dead set on working in NYC for the summer, you’ll need to have a compelling story about why working in NYC makes sense for you. Maybe it’s because you grew up near there or maybe it’s because you want to work on Financial Services industry projects or maybe it’s due to your interest in settling down in the NYC Metro area after school. Whatever it is, you have to make that story ring true and come across as more than a “I want to live in NYC because it’s hella cool” sort of story. Also, I’d
recommend brainstorming about other office locations that might make sense for you just in case NYC is a non-starter for you in the recruiting process. For example, if you grew up in the South, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Miami could be options for you. If you grew up in the Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Cleveland could work. Just ask yourself whether you’d be willing to consider other cities in order to get into one of the Big 3 and then figure out what those other candidate cities would be.
- Study up as much as you can on the industry – It sounds like you’ve already started on this road, but I would encourage you to kick this into high gear. In addition to researching the Big 3 as suggested above in #1, you should also research other Consulting firms to get a feel for the full landscape of services available across each of them
and the differences in their areas of expertise. Also, you should check out general information resources, like Vault.com and ConsultingMagazine.com, that will give you an idea of the happenings in the industry and what some of the emerging issues might be. Once you know what’s going on across the Consulting industry and with different firms, you can look back at your target firms and look at them through a new lens to consider how those emerging issues might
affect their businesses and how they might be acting in response.
- Start practicing for the interview process – You’ve already got “Case in Point”, so you’re already far ahead of many of your peers who will be competing for summer spots at the firms. If you have’t started reading it already, start NOW and find people to do practice interview with. Because there are so few summer internship slots, you will have
to be 100% on point with your case interview performance and your problem solving abilities have to jump out during those interviews. I remember that Stanford’s undergrad career services office did a pretty good job of helping kids prep for these interviews, so I’d recommend contacting them to see what resources are available. It might not be a
bad idea to reach out to the Consulting Club at the GSB to see if any of the MBA students would be willing to practice case interviews with you. Because they’ve been diving into higher-level business courses, they might be able to give you some great feedback on a “business concepts” level that some of your undergrad classmates might not know. By the time you get an interview invite, you want to be a KILLER at case interviews to improve your chances at being one of the chosen few who gets an offer.
If you focus on the areas described above, you should be in pretty good shape for maximizing your chances at scoring a summer internship offer from 1 or more of your target firms.
Take care and good luck with your summer internship search. Go Cardinal!
Marquis
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