aaudetat wrote:
rhyme wrote:
kidderek wrote:
lhotseface wrote:
Most undecided people seem to end up in Management Consulting. After a couple of years, they get tired of the hotels, the airports and working in far flung places like Mobil, Alabama. At this point, they pick an industry they fancy or have experience in and join it in a corporate dev./gen. management role. My worst fear is that I will follow the crowd at school ending up as a finance monkey in IB and eventually hate myself two years after graduation.
I want to find out more about rotational programs, any one talked to a current student/alum about this ?
That's the route that I wanted to take, but consulting seems to be the most difficult industry to break in to. The travel and inconsistent schedule can be a drag too.
Consulting is easy to break into. Don't worry about that.
Really? Why does everyone act like it's the world's biggest deal? Or is it just the biggies that are hard to get into? As I've been working on this, consulting has actually piqued my interest, but I've kept that to myself. It seemed like showing up to an interview and saying, "I want to do consulting!" was too much like when I was 8 and wanted to be a movie star.
Yeah, sweetie, sure thing.
Because it's not a hard and fast area. That is, it's not saying "I want to work for an IB" where they will care what specific courses you've taken that address key knowledge areas. Do you know NPV? Can you figure out yield curves? Do you know crap about WACC? etc etc.
It's not like trying to get a job in corporate where your industry experience, or lack thereof matters. Know nothing about the mortgage industry? Hard to make an argument to be a product manager in that area.
Now consulting's different. You dont need any industry knowledge because its any industry. It doesn't matter what. Don't know NPV? Thats ok, it might not come up. It just depends on the projects. We dont have to staff you at Goldman, we can staff you at Pillsbury. Basically a consulting gig boils down to little more than a "can you think, do you mind travel, and will you fit in?"
And cases are easy once you learn how to do them.
That's also the problem with consulting. You spend a couple years in it, and by the end of it, unless you get high enough - say director or above - you've become a jack of all trades and a king of none. You don't know one industry especially well, becuase you've worked in fifteen by then, you dont know any one company very well, because you've worked for twenty of them, and you find yourself in a position where you know a little bit about a lot, but not a lot about a little bit.