The email below is from an undergrad who is looking to get a full-time job in Consulting and wants some advice on how to approach it. He emailed me about a month ago and I feel bad for taking so long to get back to him, but I did get to this one in the order that it arrived…this is one of the side effects of doing this blog in my spare time (which there isn’t too much of nowadays). Anyways, I hope this advice arrives in time to be useful to him.
———-
KK wrote:
“Marquis,
I’m ‘KK’ and am a Computer Science undergraduate student at the University at Buffalo. I’m in my senior year now and came across your site when I was doing some research on McKinsey consulting, as your weblog ranked high on my search results. Congratulations on a high viewer rate for your site and also for taking the time to patiently answer individual’s questions and concerns on MBA’s and consulting as a career!
I too found your blogs to be very interesting, useful and fun to read. I enjoyed reading your former mentor’s advice on Corporate Politics and also watching the video of your commencement speech at your former school. You are a very engaging speaker and charming to listen to. I also see that you’re a power networker on LinkedIn with great recommendations from people you have worked with. Congratulations again! I’m sure you’ll become a CEO of a company of your choice. Good luck!
To give you some background of myself, I am very interested in management as a career and also strongly believe in industry experience prior to graduation and so interned at General Electric (GE) as a Program Manager after my freshmen year. As a result of that internship, I quickly learned that I was too young to get into management and that I needed to be more technically focused early in my career in order to have a solid understanding of technical problems encountered in business. The following summer I interned at Microsoft as a Systems Engineer and had the opportunity to play roles of a software developer and program manager. After returning to classes in the Fall after a successful summer with Microsoft, IBM presented me with a very unique opportunity in the field of microelectronics and so I decided to do a Co-op with them as a full-fledged Software Engineer. As the Co-op with IBM came to an end, I then went to Google and interned as a Software Engineer at their headquarters in Mountain View, CA. As most of my experiences have been with large Fortune 50 companies, in order to get the experience of a start-up, my job during the school year has been working with a Technology Incubator as a Business Development Consultant. I’ve been working with this start-up for the past year.
At GE, I was doing Sarbanes-Oxley 404 compliance. At Microsoft, I was working on Windows Live, Microsoft’s online software and services offerings. At IBM, I had the opportunity to work on microprocessors used in gaming consoles, such as the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii and at Google, I worked on Advertisement Spam and Click Fraud prevention.
So now, as I’ve interned at GE, Microsoft, IBM and Google, I’m looking at breaking into consulting for a summer, before I start my MBA. I’ll be graduating in December 2008 and so haven’t applied to B-schools yet. I’m looking for an internship for the summer of 2008 and am targeting McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Accenture and IBM Consulting.
I haven’t been too optimistic about getting into these top firms but am given confidence from a lot of faculty and staff members who reflect on my successes and accomplishments and remind me of how difficult and rigorous it is to achieve them.
All the companies that I’ve interned at do not recruit at my university and I’ve been able to get into these prestigious companies as a result of my hard work, focus and persistence. I’ve had to work twice as hard in order to just get the interview and once I had my interviewing opportunity, I capitalized on it. I feel that once a candidate has an interview, the playing field is level for all the other candidates competing for the same job as it really comes down to impressing the hiring manager/committee.
Applying what I have said to crack McKinsey for the summer; I have tried leveraging my university’s alumni network but the closest I’ve got to McKinsey is an alumnus who works for them in Germany.
I know I’m qualified and am confident but want to be given a fair shot at McKinsey. I’ve been practicing interviewing for consulting companies for a while now, especially case interviewing. In fact, your powerpoint presentation and some blogs on your interviewing experiences has helped quite a bit.
The month of January will be critical as that’s when summer interns will be considered. I need to try and increase my chances of getting an interview to the maximum possible. Any advice and suggestions that you can provide will be appreciated.
Thanks,
KK”
———-
My response:
KK,
Thanks for checking out my blog and for your positive words about it. Also, I apologize for taking this long to get back to you…as you can imagine, I get a lot of people who write to me and it can take me a while to make progress on getting through the emails. But, as I said in my response to the email you sent two days after your original one, I always get to emails eventually. And, because you emailed me so early, there’s still time for me to give you some advice that might prove helpful in your internship search.
The first step I’d recommend is to make sure that your application package is as tight as possible. By now, it sounds like you’ve got some great internships on your resume, but, because those jobs are all technical in nature, you may have to reword those entries to focus on results, rather than tasks (as most technical resumes are). That can be tough to do, but I would recommend leveraging your school’s Career Services office for help in making your resume send off the right message to recruiters for consulting firms. When writing your cover letter, a piece of advice that I often give is to think about the core categories of skills one would need in consulting and then frame a quick description of your background and skills into those categories. I’m pretty sure i wrote an entry about it before, so, if you look through the archives on the site, you’ll probably find that entry.
Once you’ve got your resume and cover letter tightened up, you should research the consulting firms that you’d like to pursue as a summer employer. And, when I say “research”, I mean more than just glancing at the firms’ websites…you should pour through whatever info you can find on the different firms and determine which ones are potential fits for you. This exercise will prove helpful in customizing your cover letter to each firm and strengthening your case in the event that you are invited to interview. Plus, this would help you be more specific about which firms really fit what you want in terms of type of work, company structure, work environment, etc.
During this research stage, I’d recommend finding the recruiting contact email addresses of the firms that interest you so you can contact them to express interest, ask questions, and submit your cover letter and resume (if you’re ready to do so). You might want to send these emails out in the next couple of weeks to increase your chance of getting a response before folks go away for the holidays. This also offers the additional advantage of getting your resume out there before the firms kick-off their on-campus recruiting efforts in January. Also, be sure to mention the fact that you’re going to graduate in December 2008 in your initial outreach to firms because that could affect your eligibility to compete for a summer internship spot…Finding that out early could save you a lot of time in by helping you pare down your list of target firms.
Given your technical background and previous tech industry internships, your best bet might be to pursue an internship at an IT consulting firm this summer and leverage that to gun for a full-time position in a traditional strategy/management consulting role later on. A few firms that would fall into this category would be Accenture (Technology group), Booz Allen’s Government Practice, Diamond Management & Technology, and IBM Global Services. While these firms probably have their own campus recruiting teams, I imagine that a resume like yours would sparkle if you submit it through their online application systems. When applying at these IT consulting firms, try to go for a Business Analyst position, as this would give you exposure to the less “hands-on” side of technology and possibly ease your transition over to more business-focused work. If they try to track you for a Technology-focused position, don’t flat-out refuse it without fully considering how you can leverage it when applying to either MBA programs or traditional strategy consulting firms later on…it’s all about the long-term view when it comes to career issues.
If I were you, I would start applying to your target firms as soon as possible in hopes of getting the attention of recruiting teams before they refocus on their campus summer internship recruiting efforts in January. I’M NOT PROMISING THAT THIS TACTIC WILL WORK, but it can’t hurt you to get your resume into the mix a little early. Each of the firms should have some sort of online application process, so try that first. Also, if there are any alumni from your school at your target firms, try reaching out to them to set up a phone call to get more information. I tried this when doing my off-campus summer MBA internship search and got my resume into the recruiting pipeline with Accenture’s Strategy group through a GSB alum.
That’s about all I can come up with for now, but I’ll try to think a little more about it and see if I can send some more tips later on. Take care and good luck with your summer internship search.
-Marquis
———-
KK wrote:
“Marquis,
I’m ‘KK’ and am a Computer Science undergraduate student at the University at Buffalo. I’m in my senior year now and came across your site when I was doing some research on McKinsey consulting, as your weblog ranked high on my search results. Congratulations on a high viewer rate for your site and also for taking the time to patiently answer individual’s questions and concerns on MBA’s and consulting as a career!
I too found your blogs to be very interesting, useful and fun to read. I enjoyed reading your former mentor’s advice on Corporate Politics and also watching the video of your commencement speech at your former school. You are a very engaging speaker and charming to listen to. I also see that you’re a power networker on LinkedIn with great recommendations from people you have worked with. Congratulations again! I’m sure you’ll become a CEO of a company of your choice. Good luck!
To give you some background of myself, I am very interested in management as a career and also strongly believe in industry experience prior to graduation and so interned at General Electric (GE) as a Program Manager after my freshmen year. As a result of that internship, I quickly learned that I was too young to get into management and that I needed to be more technically focused early in my career in order to have a solid understanding of technical problems encountered in business. The following summer I interned at Microsoft as a Systems Engineer and had the opportunity to play roles of a software developer and program manager. After returning to classes in the Fall after a successful summer with Microsoft, IBM presented me with a very unique opportunity in the field of microelectronics and so I decided to do a Co-op with them as a full-fledged Software Engineer. As the Co-op with IBM came to an end, I then went to Google and interned as a Software Engineer at their headquarters in Mountain View, CA. As most of my experiences have been with large Fortune 50 companies, in order to get the experience of a start-up, my job during the school year has been working with a Technology Incubator as a Business Development Consultant. I’ve been working with this start-up for the past year.
At GE, I was doing Sarbanes-Oxley 404 compliance. At Microsoft, I was working on Windows Live, Microsoft’s online software and services offerings. At IBM, I had the opportunity to work on microprocessors used in gaming consoles, such as the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii and at Google, I worked on Advertisement Spam and Click Fraud prevention.
So now, as I’ve interned at GE, Microsoft, IBM and Google, I’m looking at breaking into consulting for a summer, before I start my MBA. I’ll be graduating in December 2008 and so haven’t applied to B-schools yet. I’m looking for an internship for the summer of 2008 and am targeting McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Accenture and IBM Consulting.
I haven’t been too optimistic about getting into these top firms but am given confidence from a lot of faculty and staff members who reflect on my successes and accomplishments and remind me of how difficult and rigorous it is to achieve them.
All the companies that I’ve interned at do not recruit at my university and I’ve been able to get into these prestigious companies as a result of my hard work, focus and persistence. I’ve had to work twice as hard in order to just get the interview and once I had my interviewing opportunity, I capitalized on it. I feel that once a candidate has an interview, the playing field is level for all the other candidates competing for the same job as it really comes down to impressing the hiring manager/committee.
Applying what I have said to crack McKinsey for the summer; I have tried leveraging my university’s alumni network but the closest I’ve got to McKinsey is an alumnus who works for them in Germany.
I know I’m qualified and am confident but want to be given a fair shot at McKinsey. I’ve been practicing interviewing for consulting companies for a while now, especially case interviewing. In fact, your powerpoint presentation and some blogs on your interviewing experiences has helped quite a bit.
The month of January will be critical as that’s when summer interns will be considered. I need to try and increase my chances of getting an interview to the maximum possible. Any advice and suggestions that you can provide will be appreciated.
Thanks,
KK”
———-
My response:
KK,
Thanks for checking out my blog and for your positive words about it. Also, I apologize for taking this long to get back to you…as you can imagine, I get a lot of people who write to me and it can take me a while to make progress on getting through the emails. But, as I said in my response to the email you sent two days after your original one, I always get to emails eventually. And, because you emailed me so early, there’s still time for me to give you some advice that might prove helpful in your internship search.
The first step I’d recommend is to make sure that your application package is as tight as possible. By now, it sounds like you’ve got some great internships on your resume, but, because those jobs are all technical in nature, you may have to reword those entries to focus on results, rather than tasks (as most technical resumes are). That can be tough to do, but I would recommend leveraging your school’s Career Services office for help in making your resume send off the right message to recruiters for consulting firms. When writing your cover letter, a piece of advice that I often give is to think about the core categories of skills one would need in consulting and then frame a quick description of your background and skills into those categories. I’m pretty sure i wrote an entry about it before, so, if you look through the archives on the site, you’ll probably find that entry.
Once you’ve got your resume and cover letter tightened up, you should research the consulting firms that you’d like to pursue as a summer employer. And, when I say “research”, I mean more than just glancing at the firms’ websites…you should pour through whatever info you can find on the different firms and determine which ones are potential fits for you. This exercise will prove helpful in customizing your cover letter to each firm and strengthening your case in the event that you are invited to interview. Plus, this would help you be more specific about which firms really fit what you want in terms of type of work, company structure, work environment, etc.
During this research stage, I’d recommend finding the recruiting contact email addresses of the firms that interest you so you can contact them to express interest, ask questions, and submit your cover letter and resume (if you’re ready to do so). You might want to send these emails out in the next couple of weeks to increase your chance of getting a response before folks go away for the holidays. This also offers the additional advantage of getting your resume out there before the firms kick-off their on-campus recruiting efforts in January. Also, be sure to mention the fact that you’re going to graduate in December 2008 in your initial outreach to firms because that could affect your eligibility to compete for a summer internship spot…Finding that out early could save you a lot of time in by helping you pare down your list of target firms.
Given your technical background and previous tech industry internships, your best bet might be to pursue an internship at an IT consulting firm this summer and leverage that to gun for a full-time position in a traditional strategy/management consulting role later on. A few firms that would fall into this category would be Accenture (Technology group), Booz Allen’s Government Practice, Diamond Management & Technology, and IBM Global Services. While these firms probably have their own campus recruiting teams, I imagine that a resume like yours would sparkle if you submit it through their online application systems. When applying at these IT consulting firms, try to go for a Business Analyst position, as this would give you exposure to the less “hands-on” side of technology and possibly ease your transition over to more business-focused work. If they try to track you for a Technology-focused position, don’t flat-out refuse it without fully considering how you can leverage it when applying to either MBA programs or traditional strategy consulting firms later on…it’s all about the long-term view when it comes to career issues.
If I were you, I would start applying to your target firms as soon as possible in hopes of getting the attention of recruiting teams before they refocus on their campus summer internship recruiting efforts in January. I’M NOT PROMISING THAT THIS TACTIC WILL WORK, but it can’t hurt you to get your resume into the mix a little early. Each of the firms should have some sort of online application process, so try that first. Also, if there are any alumni from your school at your target firms, try reaching out to them to set up a phone call to get more information. I tried this when doing my off-campus summer MBA internship search and got my resume into the recruiting pipeline with Accenture’s Strategy group through a GSB alum.
That’s about all I can come up with for now, but I’ll try to think a little more about it and see if I can send some more tips later on. Take care and good luck with your summer internship search.
-Marquis
The undergrad ‘KK’ seems to be a pretty smart kid – lots of prestigious internships at such a young age and too at an undergraduate level. His experiences too seem to be pretty diverse and well rounded. This should serve him well with regards to appealing to potential companies he wants to start his career off with. However, despite all this great experience and diversity, can he still make it into a firm like McKinsey? Is it not one of their main requirements, that is a standard for recruiting, that their candidates come from the top 5 business schools? Furthermore, as KK is an undergraduate, he would still need to be from a prestigious school like Princeton or Yale to be considered, from what my thoughts are. What are your thoughts on this Marquis? Do you think he has a chance given his background?