How to land an undergrad consulting internship. Man, if we knew then what we
knew now we would have pursued consulting undergrad internships like
there was nothing else in the world. Consulting undergrad internships are
literally the Holy Grail of your work life. They're an opportunity to get a
full-time offer, they're an opportunity to lock in your future, to get trained, to
get skills, to work on super interesting projects, to develop mentors and
ultimately, to find a little bit of yourself in the process and
undergraduate consulting internships are pretty fantastic for that reason. But
they're not that easy to get, in fact, undergrad consulting internships, the
firms only hire about a quarter of their total class size in the internship
process so they're let's say four times as difficult to get as a full time offer,
and because of that you need to understand what you're gonna have to
have in place in order to crush it for the undergrad consulting internships.
I'm Jenny Rae Le Roux, the Managing Director of Management Consulted. I'm a former
Bain consultant, and over at managementconsulted.com we have a lot of amazing
information about how to get an internship at places like Bain and
McKinsey and Deloitte and our focus today is on giving you six tips that you should
really focus on in order to make sure that you'll be set for consulting
internships. Number one, focus on your academics. So your focus for the process
of getting into a consulting internship has to be number one academics. You will
completely disqualify yourself for the internship, there is absolutely no
interest if you have under a 3.5 GPA. So if you don't have a 3.5 GPA you can
actually basically forego the entire internship process and work on getting
another great brand name on your resume in your junior year. So when you're
thinking about a consulting undergrad internship, the number one rule applies,
which is get into the classroom, get into the books, get into library, and make sure
you keep a top GPA because only those with the top GPA will even be considered.
It's just one of the filters that the firms use and they are manic about it in
the undergrad internship process. Number two, you want to get involved with
organizations on campus, but a lot of people hear that and they're like "yeah I'll
get involved in 40, 10, 12" and none of those are helpful. What they're looking
for are three substantial involvements i.e. leadership roles in three organizations
on campus. They can be organizations that are Greek if there's one of them, but
then on top of that there at least need to be two other ones that are non
Greek and the Greek work on your resume needs to be de-emphasized. So you want to
focus on maybe something academic, maybe something professional, it could be
something that's also musical or dance oriented, but you want to have a couple
of things that are semi-professional if not professional in nature. Number three, you
want to make sure that you utilize your breaks to the best of your ability, and a
lot of people take this to mean that they should sleep in, crush Netflix for
as long as possible, and think about everything that they want to focus on
during their next semester. I'm not talking about vision casting and dream
boarding, none of that stuff. What I'm saying is you need to get into work
places, you need to go shadow somebody for a week, you need to go figure out
what they're gonna do and to do a piece of analytics. Get involved with a
start-up, you need to use your breaks and so starting with your freshman summer at
the very latest, you can even do earlier than that, but the latest your freshman
summer in undergrad. You should be getting into a workplace. Now, let me just,
quick aside here. I had to work my way through college so I couldn't just go
and like sit at someone's feet at JPMorgan and be like "I can take
a somewhere unpaid." I needed that summer to make money, so I'm not necessarily
talking about using a hundred percent of your time over the summer, I'm saying
your freshman summer on your resume you need to have something professional and
it can be free or paid, but it's got to be professional and waiting tables
doesn't count, and working in a soccer camp doesn't count, so you really need
to focus on utilizing those breaks to the best of your ability.
Sophomore summer is absolutely critical. Basically, you can almost never get into
a consulting internship in your junior year if you didn't do something
professional ideally, even with a brand name, in your sophomore summer. Next, you
want to learn the value of externships. Externships are one-week opportunities
where you go and you work with an organization and you figure out how they work.
I did one at NBC and when I did it I was cutting newspaper clippings and
researching online articles in order to prep somebody for a Sunday morning talk
show. Fine, that was legitimate work experience for a brand name organization,
it was a week and I didn't get paid. So the more you can do that, those
externships, you've got winter break, you've got spring break, you've got fall break,
and you've got all of your summer, you can stack some externships up. That helps
add some credibility and some brand experience to your resume and you can
source those yourself or you can go through your school. You can, in addition,
go through professors that have connections and they're often willing to
lend a really smart student to one of their colleagues in one of those ways.
Number five, you want to make sure that you explore different dimensions of your
background. One of the things that we find really sets people apart if they
tick the boxes on all the other things, right. So they have great academics, good
involvement on campus, good work experience and summer internships and
externships. Once they've done all of those things,
the last remaining thing is just that you're awesome. And what do I mean by
that? You know, I had a friend in college who jumped onto the top of a train. It
was really stupid, but it led him on this grand adventure where he ended up like
80 miles away from our campus without a phone or money or anything and he had to
find his way back. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that people actually really want
to talk about in the interview. They want you to go start a company, they want you
to pitch somebody, they want you to get on network TV. They're interested in
hearing your radical stories. There's something about it that demonstrates
initiative and passion and engagement in your life so don't forgo those opportunities,
but make sure that the other things are anchored in place first.
And finally, our sixth tip, a bonus tip if you will, is don't do anything stupid.
No topless photos, no "I was wasted last night dude," don't talk about drug use
online. Anything that is published online is completely there for posterity, so be
very careful about the online portrayal that you have about managing your online
presence and unless you want to be like radical and incendiary, you probably want
to keep everything a little bit under wraps. To get an undergrad consulting
internship you'll need help. We offer resume editing, consulting on
your networking strategy, and finally, interview preparation. So please come
check it out, managementconsulted.com, or find us on social.