What’s up, y’all. I know it’s been ages since I posted anything up here, but it’s not because i haven’t had anything to say. I’ve actually had a lot to write about, but I’m still waiting to hear from the folks up-top at McKinsey about whether I’m allowed to continue this blog and, if so, what sorts of things I’m restricted from describing here. It’s been tough because it’s been a reflex for the past 3 years to instantly start writing as soon as something interesting goes down. For the past few weeks, I’ve just had to sit on my hands and think through what I would have written and that just feels foreign to me. Because I don’t want to jeapordize my status at McK, I’m still going to be a little guarded with what I say in this entry, but I figure that I owe it to my long-time readers to at least put something up here in the form of an update. Plus, I’m in the process of trying to copy bar charts from a huge spreadsheet into PowerPoint and for each chart, there’s a 3-5 minute delay while Excel recalculates every single equation, so I’ve got nothing but time.

If you’re currently a second year MBA student, you should know that right now is the thick of the full-time job recruiting season and your campus is probably buzzing with people prepping for interviews, running to company info sessions, and pretty much freaking out and stressing at any given time. Well, the same is true at Stanford GSB and, from what i hear, second-year kids on campus are buggin’ out, particular when it comes to squaring up for spots at the Consulting and Banking firms. One tactic that worked well for me during full-time recruiting and that a lot of “my first-years” are using is to be very strategic with the firms one chooses to apply to. During internship recruiting, it’s enticing to take a shotgun approach to choosing firms and apply to everything under the sun. For a select group of people, this works out and the story ends happily ever after. For most of us, we end up getting overwhelmed going to a million company presentations, don’t spend enough time prepping for the interviews, and end up falling flat…long-time readers of this blog know that’s what happened to me. Basically, the shotgun approach of trying to hit a wide range of companies is not effective. During second year recruiting, I came out of Accenture with a job offer and I knew that my consulting case interview game was tight, so I was much more strategic and aimed at only what i thought were the top four Consulting firms…this is exactly what I’m hearing that others are doing now too. This way, you can spend more time with the firms that you know you want and, more importantly, spend the extra time you have left over doing interview preparation. In others, it’s trading the shotgun approach for a sniper approach where you take the time to aim and have a much better chance of hitting your target. It worked for me and I would HIGHLY recommend it to anyone else approaching an interview process.

Anyways, I mentioned Class of 2007 going through the recruiting process because there’s been a lot of activity going on surrounding the quest to prepare for McKinsey’s first-round on-campus interviews, which take place next week. Whew lawd, folks are NERVOUS right about now. I don’t know if I was this nervous, but I’ve been talking to a bunch of “my first-years” and people want to do well on these interviews so much that it is causing them to spontaneously stress out. I don’t know about any of my other classmates who are currenty with McK, but I’ve been trying to do my part to help out wherever I can. Part of my motivation is my dual role of being both the BCSS recruiting captain and on the Southern Office recruiting team for the GSB, but moreso I want to set an example of how folks should go out of their way to reach back and help classmates below them. I mean, that’s the culture that we have (or in my case, “had”) at Stanford GSB and I am a true believer in it. Further, after doing all of the company interviews over two recruiting cycles, I’ve gotten to be great at going through these cases and have picked up a lot of insights (as some of you may have seen in the slides I put together and posted on here), so I figure that I can provide a lot of insights that’ll help these students out. So far, I think of done mock cases with about 8 or 9 GSB students (some of them multiple times) and I find it to be fun. I still have about 4 or 5 more I’m supposed to “case up” before their first-rounds come, so it’s going to be a busy start to next week…especially when I consider that I’ve also got to focus on bringing the thunder at the client site. Dang, it’s good to know that all the work I put into messing around with these cases has not only put my case game on almost bulletproof-status but can help make others great at them, as well.

Tying my GSB experience back into my McKinsey experience…So far, the business school class that has been the most useful in my job has been my Excel Modeling class…yeah, that’s right, Excel Modeling. When I was going through the class during my first year of B-school, I found it interesting, but figured that it would be much less useful in Consulting than others, such as Strategy and Economics. Now that I’m in the mix, I’m learning that one of the biggest components of any Associate’s job is data analysis and, for that, your Excel game has to be TIGHT. Back at the GSB, I built several models and they were all decent, but they weren’t anything to write home about. On this study, I’ve been working on a model for the past 3+ weeks that I can safely say is “The TRUTH”! I started it from scratch and I’ve got it up to 18 tabs with links between the tabs and to 6 external files and business logic that has the file size up over 1.5MB. If you would have asked me at graduation whether i’d be able to put this thing together without help, I would have responded “heck naw”, but I guess stuff like this becomes second nature when you’ve had good training in it and you pay attention in class. So, again I’ll say it…pay attention in that Excel modeling class. If you’re planning on going into Consulting, Banking, or any career where you’ll need to mess around with data, Excel is going to end up being your version of King Arthur’s Excalibur.