Career in Consulting (Internship advice)

yorkshirebanker
Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:47:46 +0000

If your looking at the top prestigious management consulting firms such as Mercer, Bain, BCG, or McKinsey, it’ll be difficult to achieve at a sophomore level because their internship recruitment is geared toward juniors. Not to mention that these firms don’t recruit too heavily from IU.

Perhaps you can look into smaller firms in the midwest that don’t have as rigid of a recruitment process as top firms. Your best bet is to start networking, make cold-calls to these firms. You should convey your sincere interest and pass on your resume.

Another opportunity you have is get to know your professors in the BEPP department. Professors are quite resourceful in developing connections. BEPP isn’t one of the most sought after majors at Kelley. So the number of students in the BEPP classes are far less than accounting, finance, or marketing. Therefore, you have the opportunity to get to know your professors and gain personal attention.

As Wavarian pointed out, there is the consulting workshop, which you apply to in the spring semester of your sophomore year. It is rather difficult to get into the workshop due the rather large population on campus who have a desire of working in consulting.

Though it would help, your sophomore year internship or even your junior year internship don’t necessarily have to be with a consulting firm in order for you to finally end up in consulting. As long as you can connect your experiences back to consulting in a meaningful way you’ll be fine.

If you haven’t taken X220 yet, you should. That way you have full access to the resources provided by the UCSO.

Work on your GPA too.