Part 4 of my Career in Detail Series and the Current MBA Job Market

The Weekly Sitrep

Happy Saturday Sitreps Team!

We are rapidly approaching the “lets circle back on that next year” phase as work as we head into thanksgiving and December. I finally firmed up my holiday plans with my wife, and am looking forward to some time off at the end of the year.

If you have noticed, I was doing a series on my post MBA career in detail and paused the last iteration of this series a couple months ago. I wanted to experiment with a few other topics and see how subscribers reacted to them before I restarted the series. Part of nurturing and growing a following like mine is that you constantly have to experiment with different posts and themes to see how an audience reacts. These experiments give you valuable insight and data into what your audience wants. 

So with that being said, I am going to split this iteration of the weekly sitrep into two topics. The first is a continuation of my career series and another topic will be an overview of the current MBA job market. These will be shorter articles, but because they are shorter I will be able to pack in more each week on a continuous basis. Let's dive in.

My Post MBA Career in Detail

Part 4: Full time job recruiting at my MBA program and the path to consulting

Check out Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series if you need to catch up.

After not getting a full time offer from the Investment Bank I was interning at, I packed up my stuff and drove with my wife and 3 year old daughter back to Pittsburgh. We took a really nice route through the smokey mountains and it was great to get out of the mega city of Atlanta and decompress. I had put so many expectations on myself around the internship that it was great to not have to worry about it anymore.

During the drive back up, I made the decision to not pursue investment banking anymore. I did not like the people or culture at SunTrust, and it was best to find something that fit me better. 

We had plans to go hang out in France for a few weeks after my internship and before the start of the fall semester at Tepper. Luckily, Delta ran nonstop flights during the summer out of Pittsburgh to Paris so it was pretty easy for us to fly there. We landed in Paris and spent the next month hanging out in France. We went and toured the D-Day landing sites, Mont St. Michel, the French Riviera and even Monaco. I highly recommend it! 

During this time, I was also networking with veterans I knew at consulting companies as that was my #2 choice (remember I had somehow convinced myself that professional services was something I wanted to do ahead of tech). 

After school started back up, full time on campus recruiting started immediately. There were no restrictions like the first year and not as much hand holding. Something I was also surprised about was that many of my returning MBA classmates had similar experiences to me in their internship, and that the fulltime job offer conversion rate was lower than I expected. 

I started case prep for consulting interviews which I knew would be vitally important. Luckily the intense prep I had done for investment banking had a lot of carry over, and so I very easily mastered a lot of the case prep with a solid financial underpinning as to why companies do the things they do.

The corporate presentations and networking events came fast and furious, and I quickly secured invite-only dinners with numerous consulting firms, and was flown out to a couple events in NYC which was fun as well. The interviews came shortly after (which I was well prepared for), and I was able to secure a full time offer with pwc in their M&A group rather quickly. I think before the end of October I had a very competitive full time offer.

I did not stop recruiting however, as I knew this was a one time chance to stack offers and see which one was best. Through some networking I was able to land an interview spot with United Airlines in Chicago and went through a series of interviews, including some simple financial analysis and quickly secured a job offer from United in an FP&A role.