Consulting Career Expo 2008

I was at a career fair today with some of the biggest names in Management Consulting (McKinsey was absent as they start their annual recruitment cycle in Sept).

1. One company had this to say about my university (on powerpoint):

- Prestigious School
- Strong historical yield
- Track record of top performance by graduates already in the firm
- Academic direction in line with firm's strategy

And listed out our peer competitors:

- Penn, Berkeley, Wash U (St Louis)

2. Another lets slip that in this part of the US, Duke and the *college up the road* are the other core (strategic) schools they target for recruitment.

3. We also learned that applications and resumes from my school *will* be read by at least one alumnus already in the firm.

Advice was given: 'So don't try to (bullshit) us. We know the school, because many of us are alumni.'

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The student consulting club actually shortlists applicants for club membership. 85 applied last year. They accepted 12.

Which is quite different from most campus student organizations (open membership). Elitism starts early. Even before you graduate.

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My friend had this to say about such events.

"It allows both parties to pat each other's backs and do some joint prestige wanking together."

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I-banks are pretty much absent from the campus recruiting scene these two semesters. I think it has a lot to do with the current situation in the financial markets.

Management Consulting Opportunities

I attended the recruitment talk on campus by McKinsey for APDs. My university is one of their core target schools in the US. For this event, the 11 recruiters/consultants present included 3 alumni who are now Associates with The Firm (to try get us PhDs-to-be to think beyond the typical Academia/Industry pathway and join the dark side). Heh.

Now, I have to think about the hordes of my peers who also showed up for the presentation...

It is the key to leadership.

It is the key to the most influential leadership network in the world: our clients, colleagues and alumni.

Will such doors be even there for me to knock on if I had attended other institutions closer to home?

...I met a friend who graduated from a local university and she is currently working for one of the top management consultancy firms. To my surprise, she told me that she used her junior college as her point of reference (which is the top one) instead of the local university she studied in her CV. According to her, her top JC brand name is likely for her to find a job in a multi-national corporation than using the local university. In addition, she told me that all the students from all local universities are usually eliminated from the first round of their interviews as compared to their counterparts from the other countries. - BL

I see a similarity at the JC level, and wrote about it on a previous entry:

...I was born in Singapore and studied in a neighborhood school (government-run schools catering to students with poorer academic abilities and coincidentally (or not), from lower income backgrounds). Students at my middle school came from lower to middle-class backgrounds. After graduating from middle school, my grades helped me matriculate at one of the top high schools in Singapore, where students were largely wealthier. I could have lived a normal life, oblivious to the poverty and social problems around me… but I failed at this.

At high school, most of my schoolmates, having lived in elite social circles all their life, did not even know that poverty existed in Singapore. Whereas students in my high school had resources and opportunities to dream of attending Ivy League universities, teachers in my middle school told us that we should be grateful if we even made it into a university, much less a renowned university. - oikono

I am not sure about McKinsey in Singapore (although their people profile for SEA featured a Singaporean who got her Bachelors and PhD from Oxford), but I know BCG typically makes only 1 offer each year in Singapore. Several years ago, that went to someone from NUS Law.

Hmm, maybe I should also start looking at the other consulting firms...

(On a side note, all these remind me of Monkey Business and Liar's Poker - all for the shitloads of money and power...)