The following field report is from a recently hire Bain intern who wanted to pass along some advice to others still in the recruiting process. He secured an internship from a non-target school and had an interesting perspective on what it takes to be successful.
Field Report:
I have been waiting for this moment for the past 5 months: a reason to finally write to you. Just to provide context, I applied to Bain, BCG, Accenture, and Deloitte Consulting for a summer internship, got to final rounds with the first three, and received offers from Bain and Accenture. I will be accepting Bain’s offer and starting in May!
As an avid follower of your teachings in LOMS and principles on case interviews in general, let me share what I think are the 3 biggest reasons for getting an MBB offer.
- It’s habit, not knowledge
- Networking
- Hearing live examples in LOMS
In the past you’ve talked quite a bit about the latter two, so I’ll spend the majority of my time on point 1).
I strongly believe that it’s not about what you know going into the interview. It’s what has become habit, and therefore will naturally come to you even under a high stress situation. The analogy I gave to a friend when eating lunch one day was: “If there was a war outside right now, you would still be able to eat that burger, because you don’t consciously think about how to eat that burger. It’s a habit of picking it up, aiming it at your mouth, biting into it, chewing, and swallowing. On the other hand, for an infant still learning to eat correctly, if there was a war outside, he or she would probably fail very hard trying to concentrate both on eating the burger thinking about how mother has taught him to eat it and on the war outside.”
Sure, it’s not the best or most realistic analogy, but my friend got it. And that’s exactly what case interviews are like. Once you get used to asking the why’s and how’s, looking for the trends and competitor figures, segmenting averages, synthesizing, using textual equations, among other techniques taught in LOMS, you don’t think about them anymore, and they come naturally to you in a case interview.
Precisely, the feedback I received was: very polished, structured, and comprehensive. As a closing note, I gave 50 live cases, received 50 live cases, and listened to LOMS 5 times over a period of 3 months to prepare.
I cannot thank you enough Victor, and I plan on promoting your program to the rest of my program and school (which happens to be currently a “non-target” school).