Coming to law school, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do. I knew I was interested in business, and I certainly had no strong desire to actually practice law. But, I believed that a legal education would be invaluable to me throughout my career. I came to law school to develop analytical and communication skills rather than to gain any specific content knowledge. However, to gain more direct business knowledge, I felt it was crucial for me to also pursue my MBA as well, so the joint JD/MBA program turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.
When I arrived at law school, I had heard all the horror stories about the first year of law school. To my surprise, it really didn't feel that way. It was certainly challenging and required some long hours, but I found studying the law a lot more interesting than I anticipated. I spent my first summer beginning my MBA, but when it came time to decide how to spend my second summer, I had come to the conclusion that maybe I wanted to practice law after all. I thought corporate law would be interesting work and give me great business experience I could use if I wanted to leave the legal profession. I ended up working for one of the large Atlanta firms that summer.
I learned quickly, however, that studying law and practicing law are very different. I also found that I wasn't getting the exposure to business that I thought I would, so after a summer doing legal work, I knew it wasn't for me. I found myself with nine months left of school and still no clear idea of what I was going to do.
I started by talking with my career services counselors, doing research and reading about what else was out there. Since most of the on-campus interviews, including job fairs, were legal related, it became clear that I was going to have to network outside the legal profession to find the job I was looking for. Several career paths seemed applicable, but I felt that management consulting would provide me with many of the things I liked about law firms (challenging work, great experience with sophisticated clients, and an emphasis on personal development), but it would give me the direct business experience I was looking for and be a lot more interesting to me in general.
The process of pursuing a management consulting job was more challenging than I ever thought it would be. I spent an incredible amount of time networking trying to get my resume in front of people, starting with Georgia State alumni and branching out from there. Throughout the fall semester of my last year I slowly made progress, beginning to get my resume in front of people. By the end of the fall, I had several offers from the big 4 accounting firms, an interview with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as well as interest from a number of other consulting firms or small companies.
The interview process with BCG was unlike anything I had experienced before, even though I thought I had a lot of experience in interviewing by that point. The biggest difference was the case interview format. While the interview begins with the typical "get to know you" type interview questions I had experienced with law firms, the majority of the interview consisted of solving an actual business problem that the firm had solved for a client. You are given very little information initially, and have to walk the interviewer through how you would approach the problem. Then, if you ask the right questions, you are given more information and data to solve the problem. Though I had practiced for a couple of months prior to the interviews, it was impossible to re-create the pressure of being in the interview room and being asked to solve a problem on the spot.
Luckily, however, I must have demonstrated some of the skills they were looking for. After two case interviews in Atlanta and three more in New York, I had an offer out of BCG's New York office. Looking back, I think law school played a crucial role in my performance in the interviews. The pressure was very similar to that of a first year exam, where you are given a wide open question and are under pressure to solve it. Further, the analytical and communication skills I developed in the previous two and a half years of graduate school had me well prepared for the interviews, and I'm confident I will also be well prepared for the challenges that lie ahead as I start work at BCG.
