The mbaMission Podcast

EP 52 | How Can Consultants Stand Out in the MBA Application Process?

• mbaMission • Season 2 • Episode 52

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If you look at the class profiles of the top business schools, you will find that more admits come from consulting than from any other field. MBA programs love management consultants, but coming from an overrepresented field means that the competition is fierce. How can consulting applicants stand out in a crowded applicant pool? In our latest episode of the mbaMission podcast we welcome back Liza Weale, founder of Gatehouse Admissions and former Bain & Company consultant, to break down what consultant applicants can do to stand out.

00:00 Applying to business school as a consultant
00:54 How to stand out as a consulting applicant
06:40 Differentiating yourself at your consulting firm
08:10 Recommendations
11:25 How to approach the application essays
18:48 How much work experience do you need?
21:01 Reapplying as a consultant

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harvard Stanford it's just very hard after only two years of experience three years of experience consulting to then get in there are a lot of overworked consultants out there who at the end of the day need their sleep and then there are just some who find that extra gear business acumen being able to see the bigger picture and the the whole reason one of the consulting firms is brought in to solve a problem make sure you think about the the second order of your

If you look at the class profiles from the top business programs the biggest pipeline is consulting business schools love management consultants yet with such a big pipeline of applicants comes incredible competition today we'll discuss how applicants from management consulting can stand out to inform the discussion we're bringing in a former management consultant herself Liza Wheel liza I think you're the perfect guest today because you started when you yourself were a Bane and Company consultant and you actually started doing this stuff by helping associates work through their own admissions process and like like what got you excited about it and what could you say to one consultant versus another yeah that's a great question i loved I loved my time at Bane i know you and I have spoken about it and how much how much of a learning experience it was but it was

when the language had a lot of associates on business school i'd been a communications TA at MIT Sloan another thing we have in common and I offered to read their essays without much of a thought beyond that but then once I started reading the essays I just loved helping people tell their story and and really express who they were um and what stories had shaped them and this this question of you know how did you know how do you approach different consultants all on the same team or different associate consultants all on the same team kind of it's all just like each of them were so different once you got beyond the oh we're all working on this case together and and I think that is you know that's the that's the bottom line or the you know the moral of the story when it comes to if you're applying from management consulting it is the most populated pipeline for any school Um and it's also the the sort of sweet spot for these schools but the the trick if there's any trick it's really digging into your your own personal stories the things that have shaped you and when you're at your best and even maybe when you're at your worst too yeah in fact one of our previous podcasts we were talking about the Harvard Business School application and it gives you really plenty of real estate as as do other applications to really maybe share a failure and again sometimes as a consultant at first blush you don't think oh how can I distinguish myself but at the end of the day again human process i love to say that a lot in the human condition includes some failures so I don't want to get too in the weeds right here but but Jeremy how do you think about helping consultants particularly when it does take a little bit of effort to actually distinguish one from another i mean this is a trope that I that I come back to all the time which is hopefully people are planning well in advance and so it's tough to show up and say "Hey I've got three years at PWC i'm applying now i have to take my GMAT and GRE what should I do in the next six months like that's it's just it's going to be really hard for you to top school there are enough consultants out there who have engaged and planned well in advance so some of the things you can do is obviously take your test early tests are good for 5 years gre or GMAT doesn't matter you can be active in your work environment not just not just doing the work you've been given but we find that those who get into real top schools generally speaking like a a a gap between Harvard and Stanford and others really those who are creating opportunities not just receiving opportunities and like that is that sometimes that's just luck like some sometimes that sometimes you got to you you see an opportunity that maybe like you couldn't see from a different different different vantage point it doesn't need to be like I just brought in Ford Motorco as a company for for this uh for this firm it's more like you know I saw an opportunity to do some niche training i saw an opportunity to start this affinity club i I saw an opportunity to be particularly helpful to my to my uh my you know my my my MD whatever it is so um you know I I think it's listening it's being active and managing your career and then this is the hard part for a lot of people because consultants are still like the cliche is true they're still on the plane they're still coming and going but trying to find a way to be active outside of your outside of your work and like the flip side of that is there are now tons of online opportunities to volunteer to engage you know you can volunteer with the Smithsonian online you can volunteer you know as a as a tutor as a mentor you can volunteer as a as a business coach for someone in a different country there there's so many different ways like it's it's infinite um but just listen like hey on a relative basis if you've got I talked to those when we talk about private equity applicants kind of like incremental turns the dial I' there are a lot of overworked consultants out there who at the end of the day need their sleep i would be one of them i I I couldn't I couldn't maintain that lifestyle for a long period of time and then there are just some who find that extra gear and are and if you're looking they're saying like among this crew we kind of need to pick the ones who have who had that extra gear because we need some way to differentiate a little bit i mean I think that's an important point something that is hard for you to do whether it's actually you know raising your your hand or volunteering if it's hard for you to do or it's hard for all consultants to do that is the point of differentiation right right if nobody else has time to volunteer and you actually volunteer and like Jeremy said you have a lot of opportunities now to volunteer online yeah other opportunities it's like that is your point of different what I often say to say to applicants in over represented groups i say like put yourself in the admissions c in the admissions rep seat and say they're evaluating you and they're evaluating me and you know your GPA is maybe a nick better and your GMAT's a little bit better like that's that's not everything but it's it gives you a little bit of advantage it's like you know we both have really strong recommendations have done great things at work but you've shown a little more initiative than I have well now I'm starting to kind of look like you're you're pulling away and then it's like and I'm tired i go to sleep you know and you're out there and you found a way to be a business coach to uh Women's Collective in Bise i don't know where I got that from but you did okay like the they've just they've got to differentiate in some way that those little things are enough to say "Hey you're Jeremy's not our guy you're you're you're our applicant." Right i'd also say that the consulting firms they are there are so many opportunities to get involved i think the consulting firms just really recognize my hypothesis is they recognize that there's a lot of great talent in the firm and so you know at being we call them extra tens it was the different committees you'd get involved in whether it was training um I know when I was there I helped uh I shepherd or spearheaded the move from one office to another there are so many opportunities to get involved within your office that are basically you you have them at your fingertips so that doesn't mean you have to go chase them all down is more if you don't have those on your resume it's going to look a little conspicuous why have you not engaged in some way when that's actually relatively easy to do if you're not even doing the easy lowhanging fruit way to get involved that's going to be a miss on on your application or you're going to be more at risk do you want to learn more about your target business schools check out on track by MBA mission where we have in-depth modules on all the top business schools covering everything from what makes them unique to how to tackle the application essays and short answers and so much more you can also practice for interview and video questions all done on your schedule on demand we appreciate your dedication to our podcast and we want to offer you 30% off any on-track subscription use the code MBAM pod to get 30% off any on-track subscription check it out at ontrack.mmbbammission.com it does filter to a very important piece of your application which is the recommendation again a VP or a case manager whatever it is at one of these top consulting firms is going to be asked to do a lot of recommendations a year and if they're considering you know applicant A or or you know associate A versus associate B and they themselves are trying to think about how can I differentiate between these two people they themselves are going to start thinking okay when I write this recommendation I really have to highlight that this person has taken on our charity day or whatever it might be yeah that's a great that's a great uh framing to share with people when they're thinking about it like is my is my recommener going to be able to differentiate me versus the other associates that are asking for a recommendation great point yep but what about what about the the role of of firm you know like there's you know people leave business school I want to go to MBB and then I mean you know it's hard to quantify but like there is a little bit of a hierarchy among consulting firms right it was fair to say it's it's easier to get in from an MBB compared to say Accenture Price Waterhouse Deote right right but but it also depends on what you've done at those firms god knows Liz and I saw at Bannon company certainly the associates who always stayed behind the desk that the bottom line is they were analysts they were very good at that what I would say a important but not necessarily the ultimate most important piece and then there were certainly associates who I had I had an associate me smartest person I ever worked with associate for me at some point the CEO started calling him meaning that he jumped over the director the VP P me for good reason I actually called the associate you can see how immediately that person is different and that type of I would say true leadership whether it's intellectual leadership if you do that in Accenture versus or whoever deote whoever it is versus sort of again being behind the desk at Mackenzie BCG business schools are really going to love you said differently there's no substitute for for being an impact player and for if for taking that initiative we're talking about so there are definitely going to be definitely um you know students at top schools that that have went that have gone to Accenture absolutely i mean the numbers question yeah the numbers are look at the employment report you're going to see a lot of consultants there and they're not just MBB consultants they're from all over the place and they're not just the big consulting firms sometimes you see the niche players that um or some got like a little bit a niche focus like it's you're you're an operations consultant retail consultant as opposed to associates healthare health you're you know you're in a healthcare niche or there are all sorts of niches where you can kind of say like I've got some expertise where I can add to the right add to the class right and that's the thing is they're building classes business schools are building classes and they do need different voices there so at the end of the day coming from a different firm is certainly a different voice and they certainly want you there and part of it also is a numbers game in the sense of the reason there's so many MBB consultants at these schools is because a ton of MBB consultants end up applying and and again there's always going to be some but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be you i mean I think that that's one of the issues so let's circle back in terms of getting back to Liza okay you see this now every day two consultants they sort of look sort of the same you they are now at that point where they're start writing their essays thinking about the things how does one even approach that well I think and I think it's something that we've all spoken a lot about it's about investing and reflecting and really knowing yourself that's it's going to be my mantra i'll say these things all the time but there's just such a temptation to look at the person next to you and think about oh but I did this I did that but I was placed on I had six projects that person only had one that person's saying the same thing but just saying different things i worked on one project for two years and that person's been on six different ones forget that noise really start digging into those challenge moments it's all about the challenge moments where you were really pushed to the max in whatever way it might be and then it's also thinking about all those those influences your upbringing your choices in college that have really you know made you who you are but again this this this part of the process it's looking inward it's forgetting about everybody else is is critical yeah if you spend your whole time measuring yourself against like the perceived strengths of others with no awareness of what's actually going on in their application like under the hood you're gonna have a really tough application yeah listen I say to my clients all the time if you're comparing yourself to the person you know cubicle over down the street whatever it is you lose you know at the end of the day you're going to lose that yeah like and I'll get I'll get calls from people who like you know hey I applied this cycle without your firm but I was wondering if I could I could talk about my application because the guy beside me got in

the person's in that in that person's application you might know them well but you don't know everything about them you don't know what they wrote you don't know what the recommendation

recommend GMAT as me and we went to the same kind of school we had about the same GPA right it doesn't matter you can't you're you are not you're a human being you you there was no apples to apple comparison for you as a human being yeah yeah no no I think that's absolutely right and and we really again want to emphasize the importance of introspection this idea of really thinking about who you are what you've done why you are now where you are and then as an extension why you want to do what you want to do yeah and I also think and I I'll come back to that we should come back to that idea of what you want to why you want to do what you want to do but I also think sometimes um you know this is a little bit playing into stereotypes but you know there's the assumption that when you're in management consulting you'll come in you'll solve a problem but you'll leave long before implementation um and it's a little bit of sometimes that of beef or even why people want to leave management consulting um but I think what that means for when you are an applicant invest in thinking beyond okay here's what the project did but really see it through where were the results um how was this implemented if you don't know at least understand the bigger picture i I feel like sometimes um consultants when they're applying they're very focused on the tasks that they did like I did this market analysis i'm like well what did the market analysis show oh uh that's a different question that's a harder question but that is actually more getting at your business acumen being able to see the bigger picture and the the whole reason one of the consulting firms is brought in to solve a problem and that's just something that I'm always reminding clients make sure you think about the the second order of your and also like it's not always about the analysis like an applicant that you sent me many years ago I remember just wrote about like how morale was tough on his team and how he was in like a dimly lit room in at the top of some uh some small office tower in Charlotte if I recall like late at night on a Friday and how no one wanted to be there and how it was he he played a role in keeping people's morale up and keeping his own morale up that like that like that it wasn't all glamour and that it wasn't all like I gave the CEO some actionable some an action plan and he just implemented everything worked or something it's like that doesn't happen and he just talked about kind of like other parts of his role that really were formative for him that I I think were I just think it he humanized himself he cuz that's kind we're saying you can't you can't be one of this if you are you know a part of this indistinguishable ocean of applicants you're not going to succeed that's right so he did it through noncore consulting skills which was great for And can I ask was that his idea or your idea and that's a I'm I'm curious because I suspect it was you that helped him see the power of that story and I'm not it it's just it's hard when you're in it that's right to think that was anything yeah he was a wonderfully creative guy um we maintain a friendship to this day uh I'm going to give him the credit i'm Yeah i'm going to say that that because it was the intro generally speaking to finding purpose in a what matters more essay and and so he sort of launched it by talking about kind of what how how he how he felt like like a little bit of how he might have be wasting some of his time and how how the the deliverable didn't matter that much he was finding himself i think he sort of felt like everyone had on wei about being there and he wanted to be environments that were more motivating to him and so he left consulting behind this was part of his part of his life story most clients can't get to that point i hate to put it particularly folks who are really busy introspection works it just takes time it takes something you need someone to really help you with it and again no I don't want to do a commercial here but this I think is a huge value ad on our part which is really start pulling these stories out and I I know Liza you you will listen to people and you yourself I think have used this analogy to putting a a puzzle together or something yes uh so putting a puzzle together yes and it's also you know consultants know what they're being evaluated at that's right when they're at work right they know what they're going to get their review on and they know what matters and what matters is value add to the client so I think it's it is Yes people haven't necessarily invested a lot in introspection but it's also it's a different measuring stick they're not you know business schools aren't assessing the same thing that an associate consultant will be evaluated on at work so it's harder for that person to maybe find the beauty in some of the stories of when they've really been at their best because that is not necessarily what they're re rewarded for at work so going back to your point about really building this puzzle it is it's thinking about all the different components of when someone's at their best or when they're most challenged and starting to dig into those right and I'll also interject here and we talk about it a lot where else in the application could that information come through listen if you're a top bucket consultant your recommener will talk about it you don't have to talk about it you don't have to imply it if you've been on a lot of projects then maybe your resume shows that or if you've been on a really sexy project maybe your resume shows that so what can you show that won't appear in other pieces of your application and that's all thinking about your motivations your values why you getting inside the other thing I always say is we want to get inside your head we want to see why you made the choices that you did it's all the color and the the character that's going to be much harder to see in those more uh sound bitey resume or online application the res or the recommendation can go there but um certainly the applicant has a little bit more opportunity to explore the the the characters u the characteristics that makes one one um in their essays for sure one thing I want to talk about is we find this with private equity applicants another very wellrepresented group where we find that male male private equity applicants generally speaking succeed if they're applying after their second year into their third year so they've done two years of banking and then or consulting sometimes two years of private equity and then they're applying to business school i have found I I think this is fair to say that applicants who are applying with two years of of consulting extremely long odds applicants who are who are finishing a third year of consulting still pretty tough like I find most of them are are moving on to another role um and then applying like you know four or five years into their careers i I can see both of you saying that's right but I think it's important for us to get that out there for applicants who are like "Yeah I can I can I can find a couple small you know tweaks to differentiate myself." Boom i'm in I'm in at Harvard it's just not the case yeah i I feel like Harvard Stanford it's just very hard after only two years of experience three years of experience consulting to then get in it is just very hard so what I frequently tell folks is many consulting firms offer you a fourth year secounded to some of your clients for example that's very interesting probably worth thinking about and it's worth it just for you know experience if I were there I would have I would have easily taken this comment it's just another skill set and I think um you know sometimes when people are coming into business school with one experience an advisory experience no less so they're not necessarily up against that sort of operational day-to-day putting out fires um experience of working you know within industry i think the complement of real operational experience plus the advisory makes you a much stellar applicant and you will be a better leader in the long run as a result even if you want to go back into consulting that's just my personal bias on on the value of such an experience so I think this you know clearly the consulting firms feel that way as well otherwise they wouldn't make this offer exactly exactly so it seems like a a bit of a no-brainer it it happens to benefit one's school application or one's business school application but it's also very very good for one's own professional development no no I think that's absolutely right certainly one dilemma that we see when this really plays itself out is in fact someone applies after second year you know really only sometimes even after their first year in consulting they apply but as we've heard before sure you apply you get rejected but that's not a death sentence by any means i I think we keep on coming to the fact that you know reapplicants are actually looked at you know fairly favorably it's somewhat school dependent but I would say marginally favorably at most at most schools how did the school what's what's your job as as an admissions officer is your job to punish someone for applying in the past or is your job to find you know if you're a warden the best ballpark 900 people out there you're not going to look at someone and say "Well you know this young woman is absolutely amazing and she's grown a lot in the last year and we'd love to have part she's she meets all the standards and be an exciting member of our class she applied last year forget her." You know that's just not it's just not like it's that's not a self-interested process and so I I think look the admissions committees know there are a lot of consultants out there applying and they know they can't accept all of them and applicants it's hard to understand because a rejection feels so personal yes it does they need to keep in mind that like it it's just you might have been if they could have accepted double the class like you might have been at the standard they're looking for but they just have to make some somewhat arbitrary choices so like it's not a repudiation of you and that you can go forward and reapply and as you said you know like I remember Rod Garcia the former director of admissions at MIT Sloan saying to me uh you know like he said a rejection isn't a life sentence right and and we we actually had a consultant a client a couple years ago who applied not like Jack Ma who applied to Harvard Business School 10 times but applied to to MIT three times and got in on his third time it's not common maybe maybe the world is telling you something if you keep going it's not working but like you know reapplying totally fine especially if you're from a Yeah especially if you're young just keep growing like you got to keep growing in your career like you know I often say to applicants who are higher risk like you know really really high risk or really over represented like look I'm not I'm not saying you're not going to get in i'm saying I think there's a risk that you're a significant risk you're not going to get get in so apply like continue to develop your profile as if you're applying next year always always thinking always think about the long game right if you're just thinking about this fall you're going to miss opportunities even for a weight list that's what I always say is like you know when you talk to someone maybe in the spring and they don't have a lot of community involvement and they say "But if I get started now will that look you know disingenuous that doesn't really count for much." And I I say "Well a any action is you know any action if you're interested in it it's good action but also think about the long game you there's a very good chance if you're in consulting you might end up in that further consideration bucket of HBS or a wait list of any of these schools because they know that they can see all the consultants that they want so you need to invest now to make sure to shore up the chances you've got something to say when you give them an update later on and to your question or you know the topic on reapplicants I think Jeremy you touched on this a little bit what is important is to be able to show the delta between who you were when you last applied and who you are now if it's just more of the same if you're going to bat with the exact same approach as you did last year you probably will come up short again but if you have used this time to to to say "All right I didn't quite cross the bar last time what do I have to do to make myself stronger what sort of projects do I need to get on what sort of community engagement do I need to tee up for myself?" It's going to force me some internal growth and then I'm going to be able to say show the schools something new yeah no absolutely and actually it is not that uncommon that consultants get weightlisted or particularly if they apply round one and business schools are waiting to see who's coming in round two so the reality is is people have to be prepared for like you said Liza the long game this is actually a process that you think is a three-month process could be a 12-month process and you have to be ready for that definitely hey Carol maybe that's a great place to to to wrap this up you got to play the long game yeah yeah absolutely you do have to play the long game and on that note Liza thank you very much for joining us today jeremy thank you very much for joining us today for joining us it is our pleasure to have Liza here today we're so lucky that that you uh you came all this way with us in Boston i want to come back all the time this has been so much fun it's so great catching up with all of you we're definitely going to do this again count me in i'm here okay perfect perfect if you want to be one of our success stories sign up for a free consultation with a member of our full-time MBA admissions team since we've worked with tens of thousands of applicants over the past two decades we can give you our honest opinion on your chances and help you put together your very best application that is not a sales call but rather your first session with one of us for free we can give you a profile evaluation answer specific questions about the process review your resume talk about your school choices and so much more sign up at mbamission.com/cconult we look forward to working with you