MarquisParker.com // Business Strategist, Speaker, Advisor, and Coach

The email below came in from a reader who is currently in medical school and is considering joining McKinsey & Company after graduation. His question is about job security as a Consultant and whether he’d be making a risky move by passing up a surefire career in medicine to learn about business in Management Consulting.

Unfortunately, it took me a while to respond to this reader’s email, so I might have sent it to him too late to be helpful in his thinking around the decision. I hope that isn’t the case though.

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DN wrote:

Hi,

I am a

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Recently, I was contacted by the founder of a pre-launch start-up called Flevy, which will be a marketplace for selling formats for business documents. Basically, these formats will be templates that folks can use as a starting point to create their own deliverables without having the reinvent the wheel. In my view, this is a fantastic idea and, as someone who has had to create my fair share of docs from scratch, this will be a major time-saver for professionals.

At this point, Flevy is trying to populate its marketplace with content and they reached out to me to … Read the rest

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As my long-time readers know, I’m all about passing along opportunities for free help with products and services related to the MBA application process. In this entry, I’ve got a really good one for you guys.

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The email below is from an Analyst in Accenture’s Management Consulting group, who I met through a program where I serve as a coach to consultants in the first couple of years in their careers. During a recent in-person seminar for participants in this program, she approached me with questions about Stanford GSB, her first-choice school. We chatted for a bit at that session and she followed up with the email below.

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MM wrote:

Hi Marquis,

Thanks for the great conversation in St. Charles. How have you been?

I’ve been doing well. MLT is kicking-off. I just had a

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Hey, everyone. I’m posting a quick entry to share an article that was recently sent to me by Tim Handorf from the team at BestOnlineColleges.com. Tim thought that it would be tailor-made for the folks who frequent my blog because of many of you are in the middle of your formative career-development year. After reading it, I totally agree with him.

The interesting thing about the books in this list is that it isn’t all about career development. Instead, they take the idea of “personal development” and make it all encompassing. The books that they’ve chosen cover topics like … Read the rest

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The email below came in from one of my readers, who is also a friend of one of my friends from Stanford GSB. He is an African-American applicant targeting next year’s application cycle and is wondering whether I had any advice for him about fellowships that might help him cover some of his educational costs.

This is post is shorter than most of my email responses, but I thought it was worth posting because there are likely several folks out there with a similar question.

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LC wrote:

Hello Marquis,

I had a quick question for you if you don’t

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The email below came to me from a college junior who has scored a unique opportunity for a summer internship at McKinsey that is unlike any other that I’ve ever heard of. He found out about me through the interview I did for ManagementConsulted.com a couple of years ago and asked for my advice on how to maintain a work-life balance during his internship. In my interview, I mentioned that as one of the toughest parts about making the transition into the Consulting industry.

I have a feeling that he’ll be surprised by my response because it wasn’t as touchy-feely … Read the rest

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The email that I’ve posted below is from a college Freshman who attended a keynote presentation that I have a few months ago. I talked about many things in that speech, including the ideas of goal setting and self confidence. When I saw this email, I couldn’t help but smile because I could see that my words really sank in for this kid and encouraged him to write in search of some personal advice.

I responded to this student’s email in 2 parts because I had answered a question similar to his first point in this post. So, in … Read the rest

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Hey, everyone. I’m using this post to make a quick shout-out on behalf of my man Kenji Crossland. My long-time readers might remember that name from a video interview that I did of him in my “Conversations” series last year.

Since that interview, Kenji moved into a new role working with Vittana, a non-profit with a website that helps its users make microloans to support the education of students in developing countries. Tomorrow (March 8, 2012) Vittana doing a big push to help fund 100 women’s educations and they already have a lot of influential bloggers and twitterati on … Read the rest

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The email below is from one of my visitors who was seeking advice on how to transition to a Big 3 Consulting firm (i.e., McKinsey, Bain, and BCG) in an Analyst role as an experienced hire. Consulting firms usually hire Analyst-level talent directly after school, so the move that this reader is targeting can be a tricky one. I know a few people who have done this, so I definitely have a few ideas on the topic.

His question is similar to ones that I’ve received a few times before, so, luckily, I was able to refer him to a … Read the rest

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The email below was written by a student from the Indiana University group that I mentioned a few entries ago. I met him during a student trip to Chicago held in mid-January. He and I chatted a bit about his desire to move into IT after his college graduation and, since I used to work in the industry, he thought I’d be able to give him some good advice. Please read below for his questions and my answers to those questions and a key question that he didn’t ask but that I thought would be important.

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AK wrote:

Marquis,

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Recently, I’ve received several emails asking me to provide an overview of the Management Consulting industry and, in those cases, I’ve referred people to my archived blog entries, where Consulting is discussed at length. Given the interest in this topic, I thought it would make sense to present a single big “Here’s what Consulting is all about” perspective. Normally, this perspective would take a long time to create, but, fortunately, I’m able to leverage something that I created back in 2009, which may be a little old but is still largely relevant to the current state of the industry.

A … Read the rest

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The email below comes from a Freshman student at Indiana University who I met during MLK Weekend. She’s part of a program for the top students in IU’s undergrad business school and I spent some time hanging out with them on the Saturday of the weekend and organized a panel discussion with some of my Aon colleagues for them on the Monday morning. After returning to Bloomington, this student contacted me for advice on some issues that are top-of-mind for a lot of college students.

The student asked me 2 separate questions, but, as I was responding, I realized that … Read the rest

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Long-time visitors to this site are probably used to seeing folks ask me questions about how to get into McK (or one of its peer firms). In this case, the author of the email below was seeking advice on how he could position himself to get into McK’s Philippines office. He believed that his situation was complicated by the fact that he comes from an academic institution that doesn’t have a top brand in his country, which, according to him, can have great impact on one’s chances at the top firms. Because I don’t know the policies in his office… Read the rest

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Happy new year, everyone! Hopefully, you all had a great holiday season and a safe entry into 2012. Now that I’ve had a couple of days to recover from the holidays, I figured that I should get back to posting truth and wisdom

The message below is from a reader who currently works as an intelligence analyst for the government and wants to make a transition into Management Consulting. He’s wondering whether he has a shot of making this move without having to go off to business school. As my long-time readers know, I’m a huge fan of the … Read the rest

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