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The Best Little Book On Dominating Your MBA Interviews

1. Why Are You Interested In Being A Consultant?

You can guarantee this question will be asked. You have 2 ways to handle this kind of question. First, you can give them a few reasons — 3 reasons why you want to work for McKinsey, or 4 reasons why Deloitte is your first-choice firm. Second, you can tell a story. Stories are the best — they are believable, personal and very memorable. The story might sound like this: No matter which option you choose here, make sure you address the question with enthusiasm — be excited about what the firm has to offer.

What do you think makes a good management consultant? If you do not have business or economics background, take heed!

Satya Nadella

Do you understand what skills are required for success and do you honestly feel prepared to take those on? Firms want to be assured you have a clear understanding of why you are entering into this industry and what you plan to accomplish during your time as a consultant. Structure your response and make sure you include skills like analytical capabilities, hard work, and great communication skills. Are you aware of what you are good at and what areas needs improving? The interviewer really wants to make sure you understand what a few of your strengths are and how to best apply them to all types of situations.

When studying at Harvard, he practically created his own fairy-tale major. He lives in New York City. The bestselling three-book series The School for Good and Evil not only sold more than half a million copies in 20 countries, but also is set to be a major motion picture by Universal Pictures. Soman, I had the pleasure of reading your bio to my college-age daughter. Thank you so much! I can think of no greater punishment than inflicting my bio on a teenager.

4 Key Consulting Fit Interview Questions You Must Prepare For

So, why write about fairy tales? What cultural or societal impact have fairy tales stirred to shape our thinking or acceptance or challenge of gender roles?

My parents figured Disney was an appropriate surrogate parent to my two brothers and me. Until age 8 or so, those movies were all I watched. Everything I learned about storytelling — and about fairy tales in general — I learned from Disney. When I went to college, however, and took a class about the history of fairy tales, I became fascinated by the gap between the original stories and the Disney revisions I had grown up with.

Somewhere in that gap, The School for Good and Evil was born. Take The Little Mermaid for instance. As a result of these terrible decisions, she pays the price of losing her voice, her freedom, her prince, her family, her friends … and ultimately her life, too.

More on HEA

Moreover, she marries Prince Eric without him ever hearing her speak a single word. As if by sacrificing her own voice for her man, she has indeed made a noble and virtuous choice. What kind of lesson is that! But with The School for Good and Evil, I wanted to really get back to the core of the original stories and give young readers a taste of what a real fairy tale is.

Because a real fairy tale is meant to be a Survival Guide to Life: As a result, the characters are naturally and fundamentally unsafe. In the course of a story, a boy or girl might end up with a pot of gold and an Ever After — or you could lose your head or end up pushed into an oven. The reader vicariously tried to survive the gingerbread house, the hook-handed captain, or the apple-carrying crone at the door just like the characters did. In recent years, fairy-tale mash-ups, retellings and revisions have become popular — first, as a response to Disney, and second, because the source material is just so good.

In my experience, product management jobs are in such high demand and are in such low supply that hiring managers can be as picky as they want to be. This means that they typically want someone with prior product management experience and someone who has a CS undergrad. For a while I was following the traditional Johnson MBA resume format but getting rejected right out of the gate and never getting any interviews.

I started getting far more interviews. Everyone will be applying to Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and etc. So these firms can pick from the best. However, as Steve Dalton says, there are more than just those companies. There are so many companies that you might love and be a great fit for, so keep looking. I had an interview with a Linkedin recruiter and at the end we somehow were speaking about how many spots were available for the role I was interviewing for.

As a previous consultant, I received a lot of interviews for sales positions at tech companies in the fall without trying.

Clayton Christensen: "Where does Growth come from?" - Talks at Google

However, getting PM interviews was on the other side of that spectrum because I was pivoting. There are several reasons for this: This just means you need to work doubly hard to convince a company to take a chance on you. One is to go work at the company you love in a role you performed prior to school and then make a lateral shift within the company after you join full time. Cover letters are a great way to show how much you care and what value you can add to the company. In terms of showing how much you care, you can mention: Keep your cover letters short, concise and to the point.

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People who work in tech like that sort of thing. This reduces your PM case prep time, and your time to network with tech companies in general.


  • 4 Key Consulting Fit Interview Questions You Must Prepare For.
  • Interview: Soman Chainani, author of School for Good and Evil series | Happy Ever After.
  • Room 306: The National Story of the Lorraine Motel;
  • Das Wochenende (detebe) (German Edition).
  • 13 Successful People on the Books That Changed Their Lives | Money.
  • Inequalities for the Numerical Radius of Linear Operators in Hilbert Spaces (SpringerBriefs in Mathematics).

But more importantly, it shifts other priorities, for example, all of a sudden you have to get As in all of your classes because you are recruiting for consulting where grades matter a lot , which leaves even less time for PM prep and networking. Also the consulting case prep can help you better understand how to structure your thinking such that your answers are very comprehensive and communicated in an effective manner.