OK, I know i’ve been really bootleg…
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I left off in my last post talking about last Tuesday and how I’d had a so-so Bain interview, a terrible BCG interview, and had gotten the bad word that Bain had dinged me that night. I totally expected to get the ding from BCG too, so Wednesday started off as a really low day for me. It all turned around in the middle of that day when BCG’s New York recruiter called me and told me that they wanted to fly me out there for a second round interview…I was SHOCKED!!! But that shock turned into elation and I went into my Monitor interview that afternoon and had the best interview performance that I’ve had to date at these consulting joints. I was vibing with the interviewer, I thought I’d cracked the case, and I felt so comfortable that I just knew I’d be getting the callback. I found out a couple of days later that Monitor was not checking for me and had given me the DING-DING-DING!!!
On Thursday, I had two more first-round interviews with Capital One and McKinsey. The Capital One interview came first and I felt like I bombed that one. There was no fit portion of it…as soon as I sat down, the interviewer startd in on the case and their case was the hardest one I’d seen up to that point and since that point. it was full of complicated math and, every time I solved something, he’d throw in another math curveball at me. At one point, I had to divide 1,111,111.11 by 52 using long division (that’s right…long division). I kept on getting mixed up and stumbling over myself in the math and I felt relieved when the joint ended so I could just go off and expect my ding. To my surprise, the interviewer invited me to take their second round exam later that night (they don’t do a second round interview) and, depending on how I did on that exam, I might be flying back home to VA for a third round interview sometime soon.
On Thursday afternoon, I had my McKinsey interview and I was terrified by this one. I’d been talking to people all day who had done theirs and the consensus was that they bring the ruckus with their interviews. From what people told me, they had the hardest cases, the most unexpected fit questions, and their name alone made some people shook going into it. Given how I’d done on the Capital One interview, I had no idea what to expect. I ended up meeting with two people for an hour each and answered both fit questions and did a case for each of them. I felt like I handled the fit questions well, but I stumbled a couple of times on both cases. I couldn’t tell if I’d stumbled badly enough to ruin my chances, but, given that I’d heard they were the toughest interviewers in the business, I was fully expecting to get the “HELLZ NAW!!!” from them because there were just too many holes in my case game in their interviews. Needless to say, I was floored when i got the call the next day that their Atlanta office wanted to invite me to do a second round with them. Plus, the person who called me was one of my interviewers and he had nothing but good things to say about how I’d handled the case.
Finally, this brings us to today. I had my first round interview with Mercer Management Consulting earlier today and this was another one where I stumbled on the case. the case involved a restaurant chain deciding whether to move into a new line of business and I thought I’d nailed it until the very end when I realized that I hadn’t done anything regarding the size of their market. I’d asked questions about whether they had any potential market data and was told that there was no information available, so I just moved on to other areas. As I was walking out of the interview room, it all of the sudden hit me that I was supposed to make estimates of that data and I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I got another shock about an hour ago when i got a call from my case interviewer and was told that they wanted to bring me in for a second round joint tomorrow morning. I’m going to have to miss my Operations class to do the interview, but it’s a good feeling to know that I might be able to start off next week with a job offer if I can perform well tomorrow.
One thing that this whole interview process has shown me so far is that I’m a terrible judge of well or how poorly I do on these case interviews. I’ve been dissed by the two companies that I thought I’d done well on and been invited to move on by the four companies that I’d bombed. I’m going to have a heart attack before all of this is over.
One last thing, I want to give a shout out to one of my younger sisters, Monica, and her husband Frankie because I just found out that they are about to make me an uncle for the first time
From what she said, she’s about 6 weeks along and the baby should be arriving around the end of September or the start of October…right around the time of my and both of my sisters’ birthdays. Now that would be a hell of a birthday gift for all of us. 
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