| Topic Name: |
Career Advice |
| Message Name: |
Critical thinking |
| Date Posted: |
03/29/2002 |
| In Reply To: |
I am about to enter college here in Sept, during the fall semester. I have decided to major in something business related, but I am trying to find a certain area to focus in right now, so I can start making connections and getting related experience. My plan is to maintain a high GPA, get some decent work exp, study for GMAT early, and try and make it into a decent top tier B-school.
I am trying to get a feel for all the different areas. I did a little bit of reading and research, and find Management/Strategy Consulting quite attractive. I've read through a number of posts on the Consulting boards, quite a few seems to indicate the consulting industry isn't doing to hot, and the trent will continue. I know that I wont be getting out of school for quite a while, so I am trying to imagine how things will be 5, 6 years from now. I enjoy critical thinking and problems solving, and am very interested in economics and economic theory. How analytical is consulting, banking, and the different areas? What areas emphasis thinking/critical thinking as opposed to number crunching and hardcore math?
I am just trying to get a general idea of what all is out there and what would be right for me. I-Banking, VC, Consulting, what are some general overviews on the different areas and industries? Im just starting out here, and don't know where to find this information.
Any help, comments, advice would be greatly appreciated. |
| Message: |
I agree with Miguel: enjoy your time in college and use it as a time to broaden your perspective not narrowing it by being so focused. However, let me try to be a bit more useful by answering your question.
The best way for you to get balanced understanding of banking, consulting and VC is to read the industry overviews that Wet Feet or the Vault publishes. A short missive via a bulletin board cannot give this subject justice. I've found very few postings that are more helpful than hurtful.
I can only give you a perspective on strategy consulting, and not banking (since I am not a banker). Let me be more pointed and answer your question regarding critical thinking skills.
Outside the lifestyle issue, strategy consulting can be a rewarding career if you like to solve problems. On one hand, strategy consulting is very simple: you are given a problem and your job is to come up with an answer. The part that makes it intellectually stimulating is that the question is most often ill-defined and there are many answers. The strategy consulting is fun because you have to figure out the right question and then arrive at the answer best-suited for your client. You try to create order out of chaos.
You often work with ill-defined problems that allow you a great deal of creativity to frame the issues. Sounds a bit funny if you haven't done this before but half the battle is trying to figure out the right question ask.
After you frame the question, you decompose the problem into mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) modules. You do this in order to make your problem solving less complex. You then go at it and try to solve these problems. More often than not, you are required to crunch numbers to get to an answer. These numbers give you the data to form hypotheses. You synthesize results and, hopefully, you will come to those neat moments when you arrive at an insight that no one saw before. Economic understanding and highly logical thinking is required is necessary for a consultant.
You are then required to go from the 1,000 foot view of the world, and then to think big and see the 30,000 feet view, the CEO perspective, by putting all the data together and marrying it with your business judgment (business judgment takes time to acquire, often by learning from your managers and just going through enough cases until you begin to form your own experiences) to come up with "the strategy."
Putting together the big answer to the big question can be an intellectually satifying, if not physically exhuasting process.
This is just one aspect of consulting, I have not even touched other areas like managing client relationships, giving presentations, putting toegether "decks," etc. I hope this long missive has helped.
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