One dream job I would have coming out of UChicago would be a Management Consultant at McKinsey, Bain, or Boston. How does UChicago fare specifically at these companies – concrete numbers are always appreciated?
I’m comparing UChicago to Penn CAS, Brown, and UMich Engineering in state specifically.
Each of your choices will provide good access to top management consultant shops. I’d advise choosing based on where you see yourself happiest for the next 4 years. I don’t have solid numbers to provide but my first year has 2 upperclassmen friends who will be working for Bain and McKinsey this summer. And I know Bain does target UChicago students: https://www.bain.com/careers/meet-us/campus/ac-schools/university-of-chicago/ You may want to reach out to the Career Advancement offices of each school to get the inside scoop.
12% of the Class of '17 went into consulting, and Bain, McKinsey, etc. are full-time recruiting partners.
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/files/documents/class-2017-outcomes.pdf
However, keep in mind that you will be vying for those positions along with many other top candidates at the College. No job is guaranteed.
College confidential is good for many things. Getting insider information on the nuances of management consulting recruiting across different schools is not one them. Either ask on Reddit (where you’ll get more students with first hand experience and not half baked parental guesswork presented as solid fact, but also more sarcastic answers and probably people making fun of you for being careerist or w/e), or use Linkedin data (it’s not a representative sample but it’s reasonable to assume the data is biased in similar ways across different schools) to see how many people end up at different firms you’re interested in, while being mindful of different sample sizes and the fact that you can’t easily differentiate between MBAs and Bachelors. Regardless, whether you end up in management consulting is probably going to depend more on you than Penn, Brown, or Chicago - all of these schools are recruited by consulting firms, so you’ll have your foot in the door no matter what you choose. But networking and impressing the firms enough to hire you? That’s on you.
You’ve been making a lot of threads asking about very disparate things that aren’t really similar at all, besides having high earning potential (econ, CS, data science, now management consulting?) I think you’re asking the wrong kind of questions - seems to me you aren’t even close to settled on what you want to be doing, and you should be trying to figure out which school will best help you figure out what you want to do, not the one that might produce marginally more management consultants because four years down the line you might want to work at BCG.
Those darn half baked parents don’t know a thing. I remember thinking that when I was your age.
@CU123 You misread me. Half-baked modifies “guesswork,” not “parent”
Ahhhh…
Nice catch, Snark. The honor of the parents on this board has been saved. I myself doubt that the offending adjective can be entirely separated from the innocent adjective. But that is a problem of metaphysics as much as of grammar. As long as you leave the alumni alone, I am happy.
I too read it as “half baked” parents. Thank you for the clarification.
But reading it as ‘half baked parents’ is so much funnier lol.
@slashermaster1920: I saw your post on the Brown forum. Each of the colleges will publish stats on post-grad career plans. Here is the link to the Brown Career Center:
From this, I calculated that 104 and 100 of the Brown University class of 2017 went into consulting or financial services. The total # of grads in 2017 was 1572. So approximately 6% of grads from Brown go into consulting or finance.
Directly comparing to the PDF linked above, 33% of UChicago grads go into Finance and 12% go into consulting. I know this is not a direct apples-to-apples comparison, but based on this cursory look, it appears that UChicago has 5x and 2x the percentage of graduates entering finance or consulting compared to Brown.
Now you shouldn’t obviously pin all your hopes on a set of statistics. But I agree with the previous posters, you have 4 wonderful options. Try to find which one of these will suit your learning style and where you can be happy. Everything else will follow.
Can someone tell me why management consulting is so revered these days? Is it just the money? Trying to understand why a 17/18 year old high school student is already focused on getting a job in a specific career which he/she probably has had zero.zero exposure to.
The pay, the work experience, the work environment, exposure to diverse companies & the exit options are some reasons MC is a revered early job. Also, great stepping stone into the top MBA programs. Some MC firms even pay for one’s MBA for returning consultants.
“Can someone tell me why management consulting is so revered these days?”
The prestige of investment banking without the overt capitalism? (Although the reality is that disliking capitalism won’t get you very far in strategy consulting firms that cater to CEOs of public companies). Though in my day travel was one of the attractions.
FYI - Brown is out. It’s down to Penn, UChicago, and UMich engineering in state. You all better impress me at Admitted Students Days.
It’s very interesting work. I have never been so engaged, interested and appreciated as the years I worked in consulting. The ability to drop into a new situation, make changes and result in millions of dollars of profit or save a company from failing was heady stuff. Never boring, never monotonous, total rush. It was the work equivalent of riding a roller coaster. Working in an organization filled with razor sharp colleagues was wonderful as well, and just like the rush top students feel when they get to study in an atmosphere surrounded by other top students - energized. Unlike so many work places where you find disturbing parallels to “The Office” and just hang in to get your paycheck, consulting was filled with fascinating challenges and people.
My son has zero interest in it, but if I hadn’t had kids (couldn’t do the constant travel or 90 hour weeks any more) I’d probably still be working in consulting… until I died of a heart attack. There are trade offs.
MC usually attracts the brain power, which is why they are paid so much. Some of the projects are things that stump regular management (which is why they turn to the consultants . . . ).
Slasher - here is hoping you choose the best fit. The April Visit is more about THAT and not about trying to impress you. Good luck with your choice.
@suzyQ7 There is a wide body of interesting sociological literature on this. I recommend Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho and Pedigree: How Elite Students get Elite Jobs by Lauren Rivera as good places to start exploring the extremely interesting (and also deeply depressing) symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and elite universities.