This site does not focus on consulting, and I am not familiar with the details of the management consulting recruiting process at the MBA level, so I don’t know that I can offer helpful advice here. My recommendation would be to contact a few management consulting-focused career sites and see what they say about your situation – most should at least reply to an email or message without asking for payment. And then you can go from there, depending on what they say.

I believe that consulting firms are somewhat more open to candidates with different amounts of experience/backgrounds, but I also think that you’ll have to follow the usual “summer internship to full-time offer” strategy in most cases, at least at the large firms (MBB). So… perhaps think about smaller consulting firms with slower timelines / more of an opportunity for off-cycle hires? This is just a guess because I’m trying to be helpful – I would recommend contacting consulting-focused sites to get a real answer.

I’m currently a second semester MBA student at a non-target school. I entered the MBA program straight out of undergrad with my only experience being a corporate business internship in 2022. As some one who is trying to break into Consulting, could you give an honest outlook or framework as to how and when to break into Consulting?

Thanks,
Jonathan

The general advice here would be to do a Master’s in Finance degree (or maybe something broader than that for consulting) and start doing internships ASAP so you can become competitive at the Master’s level. You can get into IB or MC from a humanities or liberal arts degree, but you still need to know the technical side, get internships, etc. They’re not going to waive those requirements just because of your major. So: it depends on where you currently are in university and your previous internships/work experience and your plans for the Master’s degree, but that’s the general outline.

Where do you want to work after graduation? If London / EMEA, LSE is best. If you want to stay in the U.S., Duke is the best for consulting and they’re about the same for IB from what I can tell. If you’re not sure, then, Duke is the safer option.

I’m wondering if you can help me think about it and make a decision based on the facts I’ve presented above. I want to opt for early recruiting and I think having a focus would help my preparation.

The M&A Analyst offer is better if you want to stay in finance/deal roles, while Strategy Consulting is better if you want to do operational roles (sales, biz dev, marketing, product, strategy, etc.) at normal companies. There’s no correct answer, but one option is clearly better if you’re thinking of IB/PE/related fields, and the other is better if you want broader exit opportunities outside finance.

Great article. Thanks for sharing!

I currently have an offer to work as an M&A Analyst at a listed company (basically Corp Dev), as well as an offer to work as a Strategy Consultant at the Big 4.

What would you say are the main points to consider in deciding between these two roles?

Adam

Because most people, completely coincidentally, “decide” they want to get into PE or HFs at some point (I’m sure it has nothing to do with the money), and in those cases, IB is a much better pathway into them. If you really never want to do one of those and want a purely operational job, then consulting might be better.