Students With No Experience or Knowledge Compete to Be Consultants Providing Companies Their Experience and Knowledge

A record number of inexperienced, unknowledgeable students are participating in on-campus recruitment for top consulting firms, positions that would pay them for their experience and knowledge.

Michael Burke (E ’19) completed a second round interview with Boston Consulting Group. “I’m interested in consulting because you get to use your expertise to help companies solve their problems,” Burke said. “It’s cool because I am not an expert in anything and I’ve never solved a single problem, but they’ll still pay me to do that.”

Burke is most interested in working in the insurance division at BCG. “I want to help insurance companies streamline their businesses,” he added. “’Even though I’ve never even bought my own insurance and I’ll be on my parents' health plan for another five years, I know I can help them improve.”

This summer, Burke was an intern at McKinsey & Company. “I worked on a project with a gym chain,” he said. “It was cool to help these people who had built a gym business from the ground up and know the industry extremely well, because I have absolutely no knowledge or experience in that at all and I still got to tell them what to do.”

Since he was young, Burke has wanted to be a consultant. “I’ve known I was going to be a management consultant since I was six,” he said. “I used to pretend to travel back and forth to Orlando every week, living out of my suitcase in a Marriott.”