Is a top school worth it?

tetrishead
Sun, 23 Dec 2007 04:20:35 +0000

Well, you know, that’s the thing. You can’t be sure what you want to do, and consulting is really a field that is so ridiculously diverse that it’s almost a conformation that you don’t know what you want to do. For some reason I had a brain fart and I didn’t see that you mentioned UNC in your original post, and in my head I was wondering why Malishka was mentioning it. Chapel Hill is really solid, and if you’re going to graduate school you’d probably follow the path most people seem to follow (big for undergraduate -> small for graduate, or vice versa, but rarely the same) so you’d end up with a degree from whoever anyway.

Consulting and business in general is really 90% who you know, which might make the UNC location difficult. Then again, that difficulty is offset by the fact that I’d imagine they have a solid alumni network. Small southern LACs (there are southern LACs? are you sure? :p) aren’t going to have that, and they’re also not going to have the location benefit of being in the Northeast for what it is you care about.

The thing with consulting is that… There’s always some opportunity because there’s some field or company that’s always booming or underserved or trying to recover or trying to stay afloat, whereas finance can have hiring freezes industry wide if there’s a downturn in the markets. Yeah, just like finance there’s a big rush out of school and a tremendous amount of competition and horrible work schedules, but unlike finance it’s really easy to get into it years down the road and you actually do tremendously well having specialized in a totally unrelated field (though consulting itself really isn’t a specific anyway field unless you’re doing workplace efficacy stuff like human factors people).

There’s also the fact that you don’t really need to be hired by a consulting firm to work in consulting, unlike finance. While you can freelance in finance in many forms, the opportunities in consulting are greater, and you can actually work for a company that does not do consulting as an internal consultant. That’s generally more an engineering or upper echelons of management thing, but it’s out there.

Again, wait for your aid packages (or wait to even see if you’re admitted) before you make any decisions. I’ll always recommend Chapel Hill over small southern LACs because the only real good southern LAC I can think of is New College or maybe Davidson if you consider NC southern.

The biggest thing for you is that no matter where you go you need to start working alumni immediately, you need to do as many internships as you can (you’re in a nice position that you don’t have to worry about making $ during the summer) and you need to generally work on your rhetorical skills to make sure people remember you. If you really think consulting straight out of college is the thing for you, then you absolutely must learn additional languages. You can go the pragmatic route and learn Mandarin or Russian or Japanese or German, or you can go the ‘passion’ route and learn Italian or French, but if you want to set yourself apart knowing 3 languages will be a bonus for maximizing your chances of being able to do overseas consulting work. Assuming you do all this you’ll probably have a few offers before you even graduate.