Break

It’s been a while since my last post, and I figured that since I’m on winter break, I really had no excuse for not writing anything.

Finals ended about a week and a half ago, although I spent the next week in the San Francisco and LA areas visiting companies to explore potential internship opportunities. Now with all that done, I’m visiting back home and looking for ways to keep busy.

It’s weird, given how busy I was during the first three months of the school year. Now I’ve got no readings to do or tests to study for, and I don’t have any recruiting events either, so I’m kind of just sitting around.

The west coast trip was really good by the way. Got a chance to visit a bunch of very interesting companies (some of which may actually hire MBAs this summer). One of the high points had to be hearing from the director of new business development at a major gaming company. A guy with the responsibility of finding and acquiring new video games. Talk about a sweet job.

It was good to see, and a lot of the companies were definitely interesting, but I’m still pretty dead set on consulting as my primary recruiting target.

Given that, I guess I could start prepping for potential interviews.

For those who don’t know, the consulting firms that recruit on campus put their candidates through what is known as a ‘case interview.’

The interview will have its share of normal questions (walk me through your resume, tell me about a time when you were awesome, tell me about a time when you were on a team that wasn’t awesome, etc.), but there’s also this case portion.

Basically, you’re given an open-ended business-related problem and generally allowed to go through it and analyze the situation. Essentially, through the process of laying out your internal thought process and asking the interviewer good questions, a candidate will display whether or not he/she has the capabilities to be a good consultant.

It seems relatively straight-forward. Although I think so many people get worked up about it that they completely forget about the more traditional part of the interview and are left stammering when they ask why you chose to go to business school.

Anyway I have that to work on. Thus far I’ve just read over a couple cases and tried to see what kinds of questions I should be asking and how responses should be structured.

Of course, I can’t do that all day…interviews don’t even start until mid-january, so it’s not like I’ve got a deadline coming up. And this all assumes I get invited to interview with some of these firms, which is certainly not a given.

The way that works, is that each firm has a certain number of interview slots for GSB students when they visit campus. A majority of these slots are ‘invitational’ slots, which means exactly what you think. The firms go through applications and resumes and invite students to interview. A smaller portion of slots are ‘open’ slots, and are available to all non-invited students to bid on. But you only get 1000 points to bid for the entire year, so you need to carefully consider what you’re willing to spend.

I really don’t want to have to bid for interviews, at least with the firms I really want to interview with.

But there are only so many slots, and so many great resumes out there.

We’ll see what happens…