Hello all. I’d like to start this entry off by hoping that all is well for you during the holidays. I’ll bet that most of you are relaxing and enjoying the much-needed 3-day weekend and I’m right along with you on that one. I’m back in VA at my mom’s house enjoying the quiet and scenery…and the fact that I don’t have to worry about hopping on a plane tomorrow morning.

As 2006 comes to a close, I’m happy to report that I reached the end of my first McKinsey study on Friday and it was a heck of a ride. It’s amazing how quickly one can ramp up on a topic, dig up a ton of relevant data, perform analyses, and finally deliver value to a client. Over my 4 months on the study, I went from feeling overwhelmed at the start to feeling totally confident in my ability to do the job at the end and now I am ready to tackle whatever is coming next. After getting this first one out of the way, I can now say that Consulting is the type of work I should have been doing all along. I find it much more interesting than plugging away at code and it’s great to know that I’ll likely have a challenge facing me everytime I go into the office (as opposed to looking at the same old code over and over and over).

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog and the possible implications of what I’m writing about my job and it’s started to worry me. I’ve tried to sanitize the entries about my study as much as possible, but I often find that it’s difficult to write anything of value without giving away specifics, like client location, details about my workstream, and anecdotes about what I see on a daily basis, that I could get in trouble for mentioning. Even when I think I’ve cleaned up things as much as possible, I find out that I’m still teetering a little close to putting too much business out in the street (thanks to my GF who often points these instances out). All of my long-time readers know how hard I worked to get this position at McKinsey and, as such, I hope you’d understand that I don’t want to do anything to jeapordize my standing with the Firm. So, it probably makes sense for me to stop writing about my experiences as a first-year consultant to make sure I don’t slip up and end up getting the boot before I reach the end of that first year.

Now it looks like I’ve got a bit of a dilemma. Since I’m not going to write about my job, that doesn’t give me much to write about. To work around this issue, I’ve decided to make this more of a question-and-answer blog, which allows me to keep using my insights to help people but shouldn’t get me in trouble by writing things about my job that I shouldn’t write. I’ve set up a Gmail account for this purpose and, if you have any questions about B-school and its application process or Consulting and preparing for interviews, you can email me at marquisweblog-AT-Gmail-DOT-COM (replace the capitalized words with “@” and “.com”). I’ll check that account periodically to see if there are questions that I can answer and post my responses as new entries on here. Let’s see if this works and, if it doesn’t, then I’ll try to figure something else out.

Again, I wish you all happy a holiday season. At times like this, many people think about getting gifts, but I hope that some of you will think about the real reason for the season and find some way to give back to others in need. Whether it’s giving of your time, financial resources, or talents, I’m sure that there’s someone out there who would benefit from any gifts you can share. Take care and I’ll catch y’all in 2007