UCLA and consulting

Question

I've always thought of UCLA as a finance school. How is its rep in management/consulting? i've been BCG and bain as top hirers there, what about McK?

I assume it's easy to get a top 3 consulting gig on the west coast with a UCLA MBA, what about coming back east (NYC, Chicago, DC)?

agold · Answer

I wouldn't say its easy. From what I've seen, M/B/B post significant numbers of hires from the M7 and Tuck, and then it drops down quite a bit from there at schools like Haas, UCLA, Fuqua, etc. You can get into management consulting fairly easily out of an Elite school, but to say that MBB is easy to land is not an accurate statement.

Go check out M/B/B's websites - they have pages for every school in their careers section. Check out the sections that say something along the lines of "Fellow classmates on campus who interned at our firm". You'll see quite a discrepency between #s. You'll also see quite a discrepency between the amount of recruiting events held at the M7/Tuck vs. the rest. I think that most Elite schools place well into firms like Deloitte/Accenture Strategy, Booz Allen, Monitor, LEK, etc. etc.

Lastly, it also seems that LA/SF/NYC seem to be the hottest and most requested offices for M/B/B throughout the country. I believe the competition for the spots in those offices is very much national, rather than regional.

kwam · Answer

How perception is! I'm in Finance for 7 years, and I always thought of UCLA as a "Consulting" school. Perhaps because I know many Mckinsey/Bain/BCG/Booz people who went there.

I would look at their statistics though to clarify this and then we get (from BW):
Yahoo - 10
Deloitte Consulting - 9
Google - 7
Citigroup - 7
Merrill Lynch - 6
Lehman Brothers - 5
Bain & Company - 5
Walt Disney Company - 3
Toyota Motor Sales USA - 3
Morgan Stanley - 3
Mattel - 3
Intel Corporation - 3
Clorox Company - 3
Cisco Company Inc. - 3
Chevron Texaco Corp - 3

It's very balanced, and one thing that called my attention is Citi, Merril and Lehman's numbers, but if they are for Investment Banking roles such as M&A, still is something that the big consulting firms also do.

kryzak · Answer

remember, statistics lie.

You also need to keep in mind what percentage of students from that school actually go into MC. For example, some of the M7 schools have more than 30-40% of people going into MC, while schools like Haas only send 17% a year into MC. While that doesn't explain the numbers discrepancy completely, it does affect the results enough that it's hard to say whether it's "easy or hard" to get into M/B/B just based on looking at # of hires alone.

ncp · Answer

I did a fair bit of research on UCLA, mainly relative to Ross. Check if the following post I made on the UCLA app thread helps you. 103-p463189?t=48805#p463189

UCLA and consulting

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