The Carlson Consulting Club Experience
Sunday, December 1, 2019
The CCC and Me
As someone aspiring to pursue a career in consulting, one of the first things that stood out to me was the plethora of resources that Carlson offered for consulting careers. The Carlson Consulting Club, a student-led body, is one such resource and was one of my top motivators behind coming to Carlson.
The icing on the cake was when I got selected as a board member for this vibrant club. It was a great chance to not only make use of the resources of the club but also serve as a stakeholder towards guiding it to incremental developments.
A Culture of Continuous Improvement
At Carlson, we have a tradition of carrying forward the best and improving the rest! A few of the structural changes the club made to the consulting case preparation experience this year:
- Encouraging students to maintain a case journal, a repository of cases practiced by students.
- Providing a rubric, very similar to the ones used by interviewers, for grading practice cases to quantitatively identify the areas of improvement.
That’s not all. The latest offering this year has been ‘The Official Carlson Case Book’ and ‘November Blitz.’
November “Blitz”
The newest creation of the club, one which garnered significant attention, November Blitz comprises weekly behavioral and case interview preparation sessions run by the club. It is a power-packed one month of preparation schedule targeted towards cracking interviews, which typically happen after school resumes for the spring semester.
I must say that the ‘Blitz’ would equip us to stay warm with casing during our winter breaks. So far, we have had sessions from Land ’o’ Lakes on Behavioral Interviews, the CCC on Problem Solving and Case Math, and Cargill on Case Frameworks and practice cases.
The next session would bring in West Monroe Partners for group case practice.
In addition to the valuable case prep, these sessions help students network with alumni over delicious meals, and get their best advice on building a robust recruitment strategy. There's a lot of cool company swag too. I won a box of Cargill chocolates last Monday! This year, the number of club-facilitated engagements has already exceeded the number from previous years, and the club is receiving great feedback from all the participants.
By Arijit Chanda, Full-Time MBA, Class of 2021