The eve of my first interview felt like a mixture of Christmas Eve and Hallow’s Eve as I swung between feelings of elation and horror movie terror. One moment I was excited to have the opportunity to be a *gasp of delight* consultant, and the next I hoped they would reject me because I don’t even want to be an *ugh* consultant. Why did I do this to myself?
Back in August, I had just finished my summer internship, and, being in Iowa and quarantine, had nothing to do. A persistent feeling in my stomach told me that I should be job hunting *shudders* but after doing some cursory googling, I was at a loss with what to do next to navigate the vast sea that is the job hunting process. I took a “break” from all of the “hard work” I was doing to call a friend. We got on the topic of jobs when she asked me what I’d been up to, though when I said “job hunting,” that was a lie. I was predominantly just worrying about job hunting, not really doing it. My friend was taking a gap year, and one of the reasons was to postpone her own job search.
“Are you recruiting?” she asked. I remembered being a first-year when my upperclassmen friends had joked about recruiting and snakes, and how I hadn’t really understood what they were talking about, but that it seemed like a bad thing. Over the next few years I’d gotten a better sense of what it was, but didn’t have a strong negative feeling about it like some people joked about having. “Well, I don’t know if you’re too late to start,” my friend said, but she suggested I reach out to some of our mutual friends who had successfully gone through the consulting process. I did. And I was told that I was not too late. One of my friends had even started prepping closer to September.
Sitting on that precipice between recruiting and not recruiting, I found my scapegoat. I had just finished listening to the audiobook of Grit by fellow Harvardian and former McKinsey consultant Angela Duckworth. The short of the book is that grit—a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal—is the hallmark of high achievers in every domain. In the book she talks about doing “hard things” in order to build grit, such as learning how to play a new instrument or new sport. One of the reasons I had never really considered recruiting was because it sounded really hard. So I told myself this was a hard thing I could do, and even if I didn’t get a job offer, I would at least get grittier.
And it was also a train slowly picking up speed. If I got on now, I could jump anytime. I’d get a little dusty, but could brush myself off and be fine. But if I waited, the train would be too far out of the station for me to try and get a ride. So I boarded. And suddenly, I had a destination. I was no longer an aimless little life boat. I didn’t know exactly how to get where I was going, but I had somewhere to go.
OCS had a few places to start, and another friend who was also casing sent me a PDF of Case In Point—the casing Bible, in that it’s widely read and a little out of date. But somehow, through my extensive research (by which I mean clicking on every link on the first Google results page of a “consulting prep” search) I came across Crafting Cases. It’s run by two Brazilian ex-consultants, and was the most straightforward, comprehensive guide my mouse could find—and it was free.
I met with my prep friend a couple of times to practice, since everyone on the internet was very adamant about the absolute necessity of “mock interviews.” It was a fairly clunky process as we switched between being serious professionals to laughing over how badly we had messed up estimating how many golf balls were sold each year. Neither of us had any real idea how to give a case since we were both still struggling to crack a case. Well, I was struggling a little more than they were.
They’d recruited junior year for internships, and their parents had bought them a professional prepping service to help them out. I had only used free materials up until then, and I wondered how many other people were buying professional services, and if that created any income inequality in the recruiting process. Not to mention: time. I spent over an hour every morning reading articles about casing and running through cases on my own. I suppose when everyone’s at Harvard we all have the same 24 hours (unless you live in the quad, maybe), but at home, I wondered how many would-be consultants were spending time working jobs or babysitting siblings or even just cooking and cleaning for themselves, as I had been spending much more of my time than I’d estimated.
I pondered these potential injustices, but not a week later, I shelled out $200 of my Harvard reimbursement for the fall to buy a course on structuring cases. The internet reasoned with me that once I became a consultant, I would make my investment back and more. And I don’t regret it. I don’t know how else I would’ve studied. Finding a willing and able case partner is hard. And awkward as hell.
Interviews hit me like a truck riding on an avalanche. I never had two in one day, but every night at dinner for a couple of weeks I was announcing to my roommates, “Okay, tomorrow morning, please be quiet in the kitchen; I have an interview with (insert company name).” There were successes and failures, and eventually all that was left was McKinsey, which I thought was fitting given the woman who’d inspired me to recruit in the first place. When I got off the call of being invited to their second round of interviews, one roommate said I had sounded so excited she’d assumed someone in my family was getting married.
The final interview came (at 7 am for me) and went. The rejection call came around 5 pm. And that was that.
As we drank our Friday night wine later that day, one roommate commented that she’d thought I’d have been sadder. But while I teared up a little bit as the McKinsey consultant went on about what they’d liked and disliked about my performance (he used the phrase “flashes of brilliance”), after, it simply felt over. I had done everything I could. The die were cast. This was my final grade, and I couldn’t argue with my TF for a little more inflation. And, maybe it was imposter syndrome or perhaps a coping mechanism, but I don’t think I’d ever really believed I’d get it.
“Yeah,” my roommate told me, “I couldn’t really see you as a consultant either.”
And I did, as I’d told myself in the beginning, learn. Obviously not well enough, but some—about issue trees and profitability charts and problem solving in general. And I put in a lot of work into my resume and cover letter, which will come in handy later—whenever I work up the will to grab a paddle and head back out to sea, again without a map.
And this isn’t a sad story—some might think it bold of me to assume any of you had sympathy for the poor little Harvard kid who didn’t get their consulting job. The day after my interview, my roommates and I went camping and while stargazing and philosophizing, I came to the conclusion that I still had worth, even if I didn’t have the specific kind McKinsey was looking for. I just hope that one of you can learn something from it. Just this morning I was sitting with one of my other roommates on the beach of unemployment, sipping our sorry-for-ourselves juice, and, when she asked me if she should recruit next year or not, I recounted her the tale of my travels to the mysterious island of recruiting.
Jen Eason ’21 (jeason@college.harvard.edu) writes advice nobody asked for for The Independent.