How I Broke Into MBB From A Non-Target School

15 min readNov 22, 2020

I spent most of my formative adolescent years listening to my dad lecture me about business. He’d tell me to bring a composition notebook and a pencil to the dinner table; or he’d pull up the easel board and scramble to find a working Expo marker; worse yet, he’d give up on the easel board and scratch illegible words in a long yellow notepad. Although I refused to admit it then, my dad’s entrepreneurial drive — combined with his genetics — inspired in me a penchant for business very early on.

In high school, I was a part of an organization called DECA, which put on case study competitions at the local, state, and international levels. In each round, I was given a case prompt in a prep room, developed a presentation within 15 minutes, and immediately presented to a panel of judges. It was like the whole room was holding its breath to see if I could pull it all together — and I did it successfully time and again, winning 1st place at state and placing in the top 20 internationally for my event. I remember thinking: “How amazing would it be if I could do this as a career?”

I started my undergrad at a public university in the U.S. with 40,000 students. My university is widely known by name, but it sorely lacks an undergraduate business program and industry connections. During my first year, I found out about consulting through word-of-mouth and discovered it aligned exactly with what I was looking for — a close relation to the case study experience I had enjoyed so much. It was client-facing, impact-oriented, fast-paced, diverse, and altogether way too big of an opportunity to pass up. After much lukewarmth and feeling like I wasn’t good enough to try, I finally gathered my wits about me and started to make things happen for myself. I eventually landed an internship at Bain & Company in one of their U.S. offices.

For more information on management consulting, I recommend this article.

What This Piece Will Cover

1. The hurdles facing non-target applicants

2. My preparation timeline & what I did during that time

3. My recruiting outcomes

4. Casing tips

5. My advice to non-target applicants

Disclaimer: Everything I’ve written here is a reflection of my own personal experience and should not be interpreted otherwise.

The Hurdles Facing Non-Target Applicants

The Big 3 — McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group — are notorious for their Ivy League and top universities preference. For example, according to Poets & Quants, McKinsey’s main target schools include the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, University of Michigan, Stanford University, Duke University, Princeton University, Boston College, Cambridge University, New York University, Cornell University, and University of Notre Dame.[1] The Big 3 are not alone. Following closely behind are firms like Oliver Wyman, Kearney, L.E.K., and Accenture, to name just a few other prestigious consulting firms with an affinity for renowned universities.

Candidates coming from non-target schools face a significantly higher barrier to entry. For context, McKinsey gets around 200,000 applicants, but only 2,000 (1%) get an offer. 60% of candidates are rejected at the resume stage.[2] And out of the Harvard graduating class of 2019, 18% planned to enter the consulting industry (the largest single chunk of industries represented).[3] It is more efficient for consulting firms to recruit at target schools, where a large majority of students are familiar with the consulting industry and where academic ability is already somewhat “proven”. Additionally, Ivy League students tend to be very polished and “safe” to put in front of clients. As an unfortunate byproduct of the target school recruiting system, lone talented wolves from not-brand-name institutions often get their resumes lost in the applicant pool.

Clearly, there is an inherent bias against students coming from non-target schools. Although this is undoubtedly a huge obstacle, I actually believe another is bigger: impostor syndrome. Or an inferiority complex. Or whatever else you want to call it.

As a non-target candidate, it is so easy to compare oneself to an Ivy League counterpart and immediately think there is a difference in capability. I fell prey to this mindset early on. While I certainly wished I had the privilege of attending an Ivy League institution, I firmly believe that simply attending an Ivy League does not equate to an increased ability to perform or an increased level of intellectual stamina. This is especially true in the case of a non-target student who may have been accepted into a target university but couldn’t afford to attend.

Once candidates from a non-target school can see themselves as capable of anything they put their mind to, they’ll be at a much better position to confidently recruit for the job they want.

This confidence is invaluable — not only to the recruiting process, but to landing opportunities and succeeding in life in general. At least, that’s what I’ve discerned.

These obstacles emphasize a need for non-target candidates to be ALL IN. That means no second thoughts about pursuing your dream and a full-on commitment to do anything and everything in your power to make it happen. When you’re competing with the best and brightest in the world, there’s no room for second thoughts.

When I started my preparation process, I soon realized that the case interview prep process was going to take up an enormous chunk of my time, with no guarantee of an offer at the end. I knew that if I didn’t put all of my effort that I would simply be wasting time. Months of valuable time.

I’d rather fail knowing that I put in 110% of my effort, than fail knowing that I only put in 90% of my effort and wondering if that extra 10% would have been enough.

I took this mentality to heart, and it guided the rest of my recruiting efforts.

Needless to say, as an International Business major at a non-target institution, I knew I had a lot to prove.

My Preparation Timeline & What I Did During That Time

My undergraduate university afforded me a lot of opportunities to take leadership and initiative, but it never gave me any resources pertinent to consulting. Everything I used/found was a resource I sought out on my own.

A Note on Buying Materials: The only thing I spent money on was buying the Case in Point book. I never purchased any coaching sessions or other supplemental materials online. I do know people who have and benefitted from them. I’m not suggesting that you do or you don’t — but I was able to land an offer without paying ridiculous amounts of money.

A Note on Resume and Cover Letter: I used Victor Cheng’s page on cover letters to write my cover letter, and I wrote one for each office I applied to. I was fortunate enough to have solid work experience and credentials on my resume, which had undergone numerous rounds of edits. I got feedback primarily from a good friend of mine who got an investment banking internship at Goldman Sachs her junior year. She ended up passing it on to a friend of hers at McKinsey who approved it.

I started learning about cases and familiarizing myself with the consulting landscape around March 2020, but I formally decided to go ALL IN on my preparation in July 2020. I got the offer I wanted in mid-October, and that ended my recruiting process. All in all, I was fortunate enough to have a lot of time during the summer and during the COVID-19 lockdown to zone in on my consulting prep. I probably spent 8–10 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week preparing. In the final month, I was casing every single day of the week.

March-June

To get my feet wet, I bought and read Case in Point, made flashcards on key concepts and frameworks I wanted to remember, and read articles on how to break into consulting.

July-August

I listed out all the firms I wanted to apply to: McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Accenture, Deloitte Government & Public Services, and Kearney, among a few others I never seriously considered.
I chose the office location I wanted to apply to for each firm in order to tailor my networking efforts.
I sent out around 30 cold emails each week to consultants working at the offices I was interested in. Of course, my goal was to get them on the phone, ask questions about their background and about the firm, have a good conversation with them, and keep in touch until it was time for me to submit an application to their firm. At that point, I would send them an email thanking them for their help in the process and hope they put in a good word for me internally. I also connected personally with each of the office recruiters and expressed my interest in submitting an application. One of them volunteered to flag my application when it came in.
I wrote down a list of reasons why I *had* to break into MBB and tacked it onto my “consulting wall”. Call it manifesting. It inspired me every morning when I woke up at 6:30 and sat down to grind. It was also the first thing I put up on my wall, before all the custom frameworks and flashcards got tacked on there.
I read cases every day from MBA casebooks I found online. This website helped kickstart my search for casebooks.
I stumbled across Victor Cheng’s caseinterview.com and his Case Interview Secrets Workshop on YouTube (linked at the bottom). I subscribed to his free newsletter for CIB (case interview beginners, as he calls them) and used his daily emails as a way to put my mind into the “consulting” zone every morning.
I watched mock cases on YouTube while I was jogging, taking a break from school, and eating meals.
After doing a few practice cases with my dad, who absolutely railed me and my inability to think in a structured way, I started to develop my own frameworks. At this point, I was using memorized Case in Point frameworks and it was coming across badly. I had read enough cases to understand what broad case types to expect and what general “buckets” each case covered, which guided my custom frameworks. I tried Victor Cheng’s frameworks for awhile, then kept revising my own frameworks until I found what made the most intuitive sense to me.

September-October

I stumbled across Management Consulted through a networking call with someone from McKinsey, and I signed up for their free newsletter (linked at the bottom). Over the summer, MC was putting on free webinars of live mock cases almost every week. I volunteered to do one and got constructive feedback that helped move my preparation along. Through this experience, I was also able to meet other people around the world who were case prepping, and I gained access to a few reliable case partners who became crucial to my prep process.
I submitted applications. McKinsey’s deadline was early September, Bain’s was mid-September, BCG’s was late September/early October, and Deloitte’s was late October (I submitted 3 weeks early). I know some of these deadlines vary by school, so connect with a recruiter and ask which deadline applies to you.
I cased with many different people over the course of 5 weeks, averaging 3 live cases a day. I think this leg of my preparation process solidified the head-knowledge I had and drove me to improve exponentially. In the first couple of weeks, I was requesting to practice the standard cases — profitability, market entry, M&A, etc. As time went on, I began noticing my weak points — unique cases without a standard applicable framework, cases that were extremely math-heavy, etc. It was also during live practice that I realized that each firm had their own unique way of delivering case interviews and “grading” interview performance (for example, McKinsey is interviewer-led and BCG and Bain are interviewee-led). While I was primarily casing with people I met through MC, some started interviewing and dropped out of a rigorous case prep schedule. I stumbled upon Victor Cheng’s case partner service (linked at the bottom), which gave me another reliable partner to carry me through to the end.
A point I’d like to emphasize on live casing is that the people I cased with had strong access to school resources. They were MBAs at NYU Stern and Columbia and undergrads at Wharton and UCLA. I learned so much from practicing with them —even more than what I learned by reading on my own. After every case, I wrote down my key takeaways and the feedback I received in a notebook. In total, I did about 68 live cases.
I prepared for behavioral questions. McKinsey had the PEI (Personal Experience Interview), and I wanted to be sure I was prepared for the “fit” portions of the Bain, BCG, and Accenture interviews. I was afraid I would get a question I didn’t know how to answer, so I scraped interview questions from sites like Glassdoor, Handshake, and Wall Street Oasis and added them to a huge document. I would recommend (and this is something I did towards the end) coming up with 5 stories that showcase a wide range of your abilities and adapting those stories to fit the questions you get asked. That said, aside from the PEI, the only “fit” questions I got asked were “Why our firm” and “Why this office”.
I began going through the process with McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and Accenture.

Outcomes

McKinsey: I passed the Imbellus Assessment and received a first-round, but for whatever reason I found the interview really challenging and did not perform at the level I would have liked. (I think I didn’t get enough sleep, which was a huge lesson.) Although they rejected me, they invited me to their “Keep in Touch” program and encouraged me to reapply senior year.

BCG: I was invited to take the BCG Pymetrics Test, but was declined from an interview. This was really interesting to me because I thought I had the most optimistic relationship with the BCG recruiter out of all the firms.

Accenture: I was invited to complete the Accenture Digital Assessment, which I had 3 days to finish. 27 days later, I received an invitation to schedule my first interview, which was a 30-minute phone screen. A month later, I got an email from the recruiter, who told me that there were no more openings in the Strategy Development Program I had applied to. She volunteered to change my application to the Consulting Development Program instead, which I declined. I already had an offer at this point.

Deloitte: Although I received a first-round interview invitation for Deloitte, I turned it down and withdrew from their process since I had already accepted my offer at that time.

Kearney: I never found out what their application deadline was, or where to submit an application.

Bain: I received a first-round interview invitation a little over 2 weeks after the application deadline. I got the email on a Monday and had my final round Friday morning. A few hours after my interview, they called me to let me know I had passed on to the final rounds, which were the following Friday. I did the final interviews and got the offer hardly a couple hours after.

All the interviews were case interviews, except for Accenture’s phone screen. Each round had 2 separate 30-minute interviews with different interviewers. I’ve heard that the first interview round focuses on analytical ability through the case, while the second interview round focuses more on fit. However, the format of both rounds at Bain was very similar.

Other Casing Tips

Don’t case the day of your interview. Try to spend the time leading up to the interview relaxing.
Have fun during the case! I got this feedback so much and it was the mindset I carried into my final round. Having fun signals 2 things: 1) You’re built for consulting and will enjoy the job, and 2) You’ve ditched your nerves and can actually think about the problem at hand.
Practice makes perfect, but it is possible to practice too much. While I did more live cases than most people and found each case beneficial, someone told me not to do more than 35 live cases else you start sounding rehearsed. Take this how you will.
Figure out a good way to take notes and stay organized. I averaged 3–4 sheets of paper per interview and had a couple of notebooks I used to take notes and write down feedback.
Always tailor your framework to fit the question being asked, and always remember the exact question being asked.

My Advice to Non-Target Applicants

Forget the naysayers.
I had some people tell me I couldn’t break into MBB, but I was also blessed to have more people tell me I could. Ironically, the people who hinted that MBB was basically impossible were recruiters and others in the workplace. There is something so empowering about someone telling you that they expect great things from you and that you’re bound for success. Surround yourself with people who will tell you that — and then give you the hard criticism you need to become that great person.
Figure out what drives you.
I have a few main values in life that inspire me to work harder each day: my faith, my relationships, and my accountability to myself. I attribute most of my innate desire to achieve to the genes I got from my dad, but what keeps me on my toes and forward-looking are my values: to be a good steward of the opportunities I’ve been given, to seek to make my family and friends proud, and to be someone I admire. These values drive my work ethic and inspire me to make an impact in the world.
Surround yourself with like-minded people.
I have 0 friends that went after MBB, but I have friends that are going to be investment bankers, professional photographers, journalists, marketers, accountants, and salespeople. Most of my close circle share a similar attitude toward life as I do — one focused on working hard and reaping the rewards. Whenever I needed a pick-me-up, my friends knew the right things to say and understood, in their own ways, the struggles I was going through. (To some of my best friends Alicia, Daniel, and Johnny — you 3 know the value of hard work better than anyone. Thanks for sticking with me through this process and listening to my agonizing 7am complaints.)
Stay organized.
I cannot emphasize this enough. Organize your living space, working space, case prep materials, notes, networking contacts, correspondences, applications submitted and outstanding, etc. Nothing is worse than losing something important 2 months after you last saw it.
Give your 110%.
I’d rather fail knowing that I put in 110% of my effort, than fail knowing that I only put in 90% of my effort and wondering if that extra 10% would have been enough.
Be okay with failure.
Although I was ALL IN, I kept telling myself that even if I didn’t break into MBB it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There are more important things in life than work, in my humble opinion. Trust the process and that you’ll end up where you’re meant to be.
Do live practice.
Reading and “practicing” with yourself is not enough! You need to learn from trying and failing, and from observing case partners who are better than you.
Make people like you.
Consulting is a people business. While most people like to categorize the interviews into “case” and “fit ” portions, I like to think of the entire process as a big, fat, fit interview. If your interviewers don’t like you, no matter how well you perform in your case interview you will not get the offer. As soon as I got into the interview room, I cracked a joke and made sure I had a big smile and great energy. That made me less nervous, and it made the interviewer smile and laugh. Don’t underestimate the importance of being personable, genuine, and down to earth.

Closing

Getting a consulting offer as a non-target is difficult, but it isn’t impossible. Do your research, adapt the right mindset, and put in 110% of your effort into preparing for your interviews. You’ll be surprised by the results.