<p>I am a recent graduate from UM with a BSE in IOE. I was recently admitted to the inaugural Ross Master in Supply Chain Management Bridge Program which I will be starting in January 2014. At the moment, I am doing a 6 month co-op at Grainger.</p>
<p>Although I will officially be doing fulltime recruiting in Fall 2014, I am interesting in pursuing management consulting and have started preparing for case interviews now as I will be very busy next summer with my Tauber project and preparing for doing the GMAT (plus the earlier the better imo).</p>
<p>Luckily, I managed to get an online pdf version of Case in Point by Marc Cosentino and I have been going over it. I feel like it is useful and provides useful ideas, tips and concepts to think about for the variety of case types but it is not very good at helping me structure my case responses. I have also started watching the videos by Victor Cheng which I think helps more with structuring but I really don't want to pay money for the LOMS program that he offers.</p>
<p>I have also started reading the Economist to get a good grasp of recent business and economic news.</p>
<p>Some people have suggested that I should thoroughly look at case books prepared by the consulting clubs of various universities (I have heard the Wharton Case book and Northwestern case book are really good)</p>
<p>I have not yet started practicing cases with other people but will start doing that soon through Skype or something like that.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any advice or suggestions about how else I can prepare for case interviews?</p>
<p>For anyone who is an actual consultant now, how did you prepare for the case interviews.</p>
<p>Thanks and I would really appreciate anyone's help!!</p>
<p>Ross offers peer coaches who can help you out with case prep -not sure if SCM students are allowed to sign up for the case specialists but most coaches have done cases at one point in their student careers so they can help you out.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t advise starting the process too early - it’s very easy to burn out on cases before interviews even begin.</p>
<p>But what do you mean by getting to ‘burn out’ by doing case interview practices?</p>
<p>I have been told that cases can be completely random in real life interviews and some can be complex in that they can cover multiple different frameworks in a short time so I just want to be really prepared and cover all my bases.</p>
<p>Also, I was lucky enough to get the Vault guide to case interviews and the Wetfeet Ace the Case guide online in a pdf version so I am sure that those will be beneficial too in some way.</p>
<p>I’d suggest just looking over the material a little bit to get a feel for how cases work but not doing any actual practice cases until school starts. Once you get hardcore into case prep mode you’ll be doing 3-4 practice cases a day so it’s easy to burn out if you start too early. Interviewers also don’t want overly rehearsed robotic sounding answers and that’s a risk if you start practicing cases way too early.</p>
<p>Case In Point’s a decent enough book but not all that applicable to how actual cases go nowadays…Ross’s consulting club has casebooks based on actual previous years cases that you can look at (assuming you can join - not sure how it works for SCM students. They also have have casebooks from some other B-schools for reference too). I hear Victor Cheng’s videos are semi-helpful but I only knew one person who ever used it out of the 30-40 people I know who went into consulting post graduation.</p>
<p>At the moment, I am just reviewing Case in Point and getting a feel for the different types of cases there are. I definitely do agree that Case in Point is not entirety representative of reality and some parts of it are ambiguous but it is a good start point I guess.</p>
<p>I have the Wetfeet and Vault Guides to case interviews so I will soon start looking at them too to see how they approach cases and what frameworks and structures they use.
I have heard the Wharton and Kellogg case books are really good so I will download them soon. I have already gotten a copy of the INSEAD case book which I have heard is also top notch. I plan to soon start forming my own customized frameworks which I will try to alter based on the actual case question.</p>
<p>I think it is also useful to try and learn about as many industries as I can, especially those that I am not familiar with such as IT hardware/software, cloud computing, insurance, nonprofit, private equity, investment banking and hedge funds. I am trying to read WSJ and Economist regularly.</p>
<p>You are right that I should probably start doing practice cases later on when I am more comfortable with case interviews.</p>
<p>Does this sound like a good plan or would you or someone else suggest something different?</p>
<p>I think learning different frameworks and trying to develop your own is jumping the gun a bit when you don’t have experience with practice cases yet to see how you act in a pressure situation. I’d suggest holding that off until later in the year.</p>
<p>Keeping up with the news and learning how different industries work seem like a good idea though so I’d say you can keep that up over the summer. If you really want to practice something over the summer try getting some practice at market sizing questions (i.e. How many cabs are there in NYC?). They’re not that common in graduate level interviews but they do come up every once in a while. I think Case in Point had some examples and market sizing questions require some level of industry knowledge so it may be a good way to test that as well.</p>