大声的问一下: 这样差学校能去华尔街么?

Before weighing in with my opinion on this
issue I'll say that I'm a recent Stanford GSB grad who is working at McKinsey,
but I didn't exact get a red carpet rolled out to get my offer at McK. I applied
for summer internships with 11 consulting firms on-campus, got 5-6 second
rounds, and got 0 offers...then, applied/interviewed for a couple of corp
strategy internships after that and got nothing. Finally, I was able to get an
internship with Accenture's strategy group through an off-campus search. I say
all of that to let folks know that going to Stanford...or HBS, Wharton, Sloan,
Kellogg, or any other school...doesn't automatically guarantee you a "home run"
when entering any particular industry. It takes hard work and can be full of ups
and downs, regardless of the school you're coming from.

As someone else
said, your school might give you a small leg-up, but it ultimately comes down to
how you perform as an individual come interview-time. Look at it this way...and
I'll use myself as an example...I was a student at Stanford and I KNEW that I
was going to be able to breeze through the internship interview process, but I
underestimated the fact that, in the on-campus recruiting process, my #1
differentiator (being a Stanford student) would be rendered irrelvant because I
was competing with my own classmates. Then, when I got to the second round, I
was going against the best of the best from Stanford and many other schools, so
my own performance was even more important. Looking back, I was not prepared
well enough and my performance in the interview process reflected that. During
the full-time recruiting process, I put a lot more time into getting prepared
for my interviews and was able to build up my experiences during my summer
internship, so I entered the interview cycle feeling confident in my case
interview abilities. I ended up doing pretty well and now I'm at
McKinsey.

In my humble opinion, while getting into a good school is
important, getting into the RIGHT SCHOOL FOR YOU is much more important.
Earlier, someone posted that a choice of business school shouldn't be made based
on how good of a time you'd have at the weekly happy hour. I'd say that's true
to an extent, but imagine how difficult it would be to learn if you're miserable
all the time. There needs to be a balance between what you learn in school and
how much you enjoy it...otherwise, you're missing out on two of the three
biggest value-adds from business school (with the alumni network being the third
value-add).

So, back to the original question of this thread..."what
B-schools are best if you want to get into the consulting industry?" I won't
give an answer because, knowing this forum, that response would get quoted,
misconstrued, and turned all-around to say that a McK representative said that
one school was better than another. And, we all know that that would be
terrible. Instead of worrying about which school is best for consulting, try
thinking about the core skills one would need to get a consulting job, do some
introspection to figure out how strong you are in those skill areas, and then
pick a school that will help you address your deficiencies in those skills. For
example, if you were to pick analytical/problem solving horsepower, core
business understanding, communication skills, and comfort with teamwork as your
core skills for consulting, you'd use that as your scale to judge where your
primary needs from a particular business school would be. Then, when you've
found the right school for you, do whatever you can to get your foot in the door
at your desired set of consulting firms. It doesn't matter if a firm "doesn't
recruit heavily" at a particular school because I doubt that a firm would flat
out reject a good candidate because he/she went to school X vs. school Y...just
make whatever moves necessary to get a firm to give you a shot and make sure
that you look like a stellar candidate when you do. And, if that doesn't work
for the summer internship, work to get a hell of an experience in a summer
internship and make another run-at for full-time.

A couple of folks have
mentioned that firms like McK have a certain percentage of hires at a certain
set of schools (S/H/W/K/Sloan/etc) and I'm not here to confirm or refute any of
those figures. I'd just like to add that I work with people with MBAs from
several other schools that haven't been mentioned in this thread. So, as long as
you can work your way into the process and are prepared to do well on the
interviews, you've at least got a chance at getting a consulting internship or
full-time position. Don't let anyone (especially on this forum) convince you
that you've got to go to a particular school to have a legitimate shot.