Day in the life of a Bain & Co. Associate Consultant

so can you tell me a little bit about the actual like a day-in-the-life type experience for an entry level undergraduate like an associate consultant thing yes what type of skills are they using what types of roles are they playing on the team and what type of work it actually good yeah obviously there's gonna be some variance but I never sent um absolutely so you know associate consultant is what we call our first entry-level post undergrad position and you were typically paired with someone who's either senior associate consultant so someone who's been there in or in their third year or you're paired with someone who's a post MBA okay and so typically that associate consultant is paired with another person on a work stream and so it's up to the two of them to tackle a piece or a work stream of the overall case okay and so you can imagine if you're an associate consultant your day probably consists of the following there's a piece of it where you're meeting with that consultant so they're checking your work structuring the work for you teaching you maybe how to use pivot tables teaching you how to do vlookup so there's a lot of that or they're giving you feedback on the slides you've put together but typically you're going to spend a lot of time in Excel you may be building models you may be analyzing big sets of IRR data but typically you're the one who gathers all the data from the client gathers all the external data and analyzes it doctor when you say gathers data from the client are they doing the interaction with the client as well this is the tund or is it just kind of like they're the ones that get all the files dumped and they have it collated because typically they're the ones who draft the initial data request and you know maybe email back and forth the client it depends you know how new this person is but yeah they're the ones who make sure we get everything from the client that the data that we're getting is high-quality and that they're really analyzing all of that data that can mean analyzing data and putting in slides so they all spend a lot of time in Excel a lot of time in PowerPoint really taking that data as you know sliding it up into charts often times you know we like within someone's first to second year for them to build a model so some sort of model with some sort of outputs and that the definition of model is very loose but we like to see them do that at one point and what's an example of like a model might be you know we're gonna try to understand the valuation if we spun off a piece of a company so it could be a valuation model I did a model once around adjacency is and what that might have a revenue impact lots of different types of models but that's something that we want we want all a C's to be able to do before they really get promoted to senior associate consumer so but I would say you know call it a 10-hour day a couple hours a day they're meeting with their consultant getting feedback I'm a couple hours a day they're you know in Excel doing analysis and in PowerPoint but then there's a lot of other pieces to the day so you know you'll have a case team meeting once a week you'll have extra tens at Bain so everyone participates extra tens or basically extra curriculars mapping that you participate in and they're extra because they're in addition to your current work people really like being involved in them but you might be on you know the social impact team yeah or you might be heavily involved in recruiting doctor or you might be basically the fun chair where you're you know planning events for the office social yeah exactly so you know there's that type of stuff that probably an hour a day and so you know you're in meetings and you know you're you're doing some fun stuff as well your extra tens but that's right when you're out of undergrad um typically um you won't be thrown right in front of a client on your very first case at Bain it'll be either your second or third case doctor got a little experience I care about exactly exactly okay so it sounds like at the entry level out of undergrad you can expect like a fairly typical day might be you spend some time collecting data working with it in Excel maybe three or four hours maybe another three or four hours taking the output of that work and getting it into you know presentable slides and then there's some meetings here and there and maybe you've got some extracurricular work as well yeah and a meeting with your your senior associate consultant or your consultant yeah yeah there's there's definitely a quantitative component so whether you're building a model you're analyzing client data another typical piece for ACS to work on is a survey so they're writing some sort of survey they might be coding the survey and analyzing the results and putting in a slide so very very common the one thing I would say though is that I don't want to undermine the job to just say it's kind of all called quantitative we expect very much a C's to have a voice in the meetings so you'll have a weekly case team meeting in which the partners then the manager will join and we very much expect that the ACC's present their own analysis and then are able to answer questions and contribute to the overall brainstorming so we've had some unsuccessful ACS at being you know where they don't speak up in meetings and they don't have a voice for themselves so as much as yes they do do a lot of the data work we try as much as possible to make sure that they have a voice in the meetings right okay mix that's cool you

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Keywords: Bain, Bain & co, Bain associate consultant, consulting career, management consulting, consulting skills, bcg, mckinsey, consulting interviews, consulting prep

Id: 77COHvKMtaQ

Length: 5min 57sec (357 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2018