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Only had to work 8hrs today 🙃
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Amazing Weekend 😻
thoughts on the FRM license?
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Coach
Mckinsey senior BA comp?
Only had to work 8hrs today 🙃
Conversation Starter
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Amazing Weekend 😻
thoughts on the FRM license?
Coach
Mckinsey senior BA comp?
Become BFFs with your colleagues, thereby removing the need for a social life outside of work
Fwb
I also view it as a time limited, near-term investment to accelerate my learning and credentials. Almost like a business PHD or something.
What helps is:
1) Protect Friday eve to Sunday aggressively (tougher to do once you become senior)
2) Work with the same people once you find your area in the firm
3) Avoid ‘red flag’ cases: typically new clients, anything with a timeframe <4 weeks, DDs, many strategy cases…speak to people in your firm to calibrate what this means there
4) Accept a minor trade off in performance - again as you get more senior it’s worse - but there is an extra 10% of push required to get the very highest performance grade. The extra hour of digging for insights, prepping on the weekend, finessing slides vs good enough so there is limited iteration - you can get the grade below top without doing all of the above when you are more junior. And still be on a good enough trajectory for promotion.
5) Always keep perspective - cases can get very intense, but regularly reminding yourself that it is not a life/death issue, that you are smart and will get through the crunch periods as a team are helpful for mental well-being.
6) Don’t define yourself by your career. Keep up hobbies, friendships, family bonds. Don’t wear on your sleeve that you are a top tier consultant. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce. But some day, everyone has to leave the firms - even senior partners.
It’s just my experience and don’t get me wrong, I love a good strategy case but once you have done strategy for a number of years, the process starts to become really repetitive, painful from a wlb perspective and diminishing returns in terms of new skills vs transformation/ execution where you actually impact the P&L (often diverging materially from what you thought was possible in the strat phase)
Honestly I have not found a way to cope. My social life and mental health have suffered
:( sorry to hear! Is it really that bad??
It's not non-existent... sure, it's worse than my old job, but I have a spouse, hobbies, and great friends I see regularly, plus many fun vacations every year
Wish I could meet you two but I'm based in Texas!
Associate Partner here rated distinctive multiple times. I have had good WLB. Sure, plenty of crunchy weeks, especially on strategy pieces, but I learned to set boundaries, leverage tools, work with great people (above and below), prioritize, and manage expectations.
No. It sounds like McKinsey thinks about productivity tools differently from EY and BCG.
Mentor
I put up with it for 3 years to accelerate my career, then left as soon as I got a good exit opportunity with Wlb
Damn this is awesome, would love to hear more @bcg3
1) Value those free weekends and being able to turn the phone off when sleeping (didn’t have that at previous job in healthcare)
2) solve studies for people, work with people you like and build a friend group in the office - works for me as I want to spend time with my friends so I sort of enjoy that. And as my colleagues are friends for me, spending time with them means working as a side effect
3) but most importantly - I do think Consulting is only enjoyable if you are a certain type of person that happens to enjoy that kind of work. Same as working in a hospital is not for everyone (wasn’t for me AT ALL) or any other work!
What kind of job did you work at in the hospital? Just curious! I’m trying to decide between pre med and MBB myself!
Coach
I trashed everything in my life that wastes time. I got rid of my TV for example. I moved near the office/airport to eliminate a long commute. I pay for services to take care of everything for me around the house.
This allows me to actively invest every free second I get into friends, family, activities.
That said, I can easily see this burning most people out. I think there are some strategies to follow that make things easier, but at the end of the day you need to decide what’s sustainable.
I get you! Makes total sense
Spend a few hours on the weekends so your weekdays aren’t as f*cked. Basically try to spread out the workload as much as possible. At least that’s what works for me, for others they prefer to stack everything Monday through Thursday and strictly do not work the weekends.
I guess for banking if you don’t do any work on the weekends, you probably won’t have time to sleep or eat on the weekdays 😂
Ehhh look at other offers
You need to adjust your mindset - coming in with the idea that “it sucks but it’s worth it” isn’t right and I think you’re not synthesizing the feedback provided here correctly.
As many others have said, it is NOT a forgone conclusion that you don’t have a life outside of work. Like others, I have a great life outside work - I spend time with my family, meet up with friends, travel often, and never work weekends.
It’s a demanding job but you control your life.
Thanks for pointing that out! The way you’ve put it makes it sound better and I’m looking forward to it!
It's not forever, and your life may be better as a result in the future. Set a target exit date even as you're going in, so you can focus on the exit date and make the present more bearable
I wouldn't say it's non existent. Plenty of good weeks but also bad weeks. I would agree that overall it's not super sustainable in the long term...
Thanks everyone! What I get is that it sucks, but you can make it work. I’m an adrenaline Junkie so maybe I’ll be just fine!
I don’t think it sucks at all. There are parts that are hard, but the speed, impact, discovery and people side of it are all very energizing, at least to me.
Doing a corp strat role where you run the same strat cycle every 12 months, have less access and fewer resources sounds terrible to me.
It’s all about what you like.
Put up with it for a couple of years, then get a good exit. Or get used to being super efficient day in day out.
Subject Expert
Depends on your expectations. You’ll get weekends completely to yourself, but it is fair to say that you can’t really make random plans on weekday nights.
What you should be able to do though is protect weekday special occasions planned in advance (on my team, we try to give each person on the team one of these nights a week). Stuff like going to a friends birthday dinner, seeing a show with your partner, etc.
My life is pretty chill. 8-9pm everyday, Manageble
I'd like to "relocate"