How to start with case interview prep if you are a beginner and joining a B-school in 4 months?

Hi Prasoon,
there are 4 aspects of the application process you have to focus on:

• CV and cover letter: prepare impactful documents that highlight your achievements, skills, and motivation.
• Test: you should understand if your office assesses candidates with PST, SHL or Imbellus, since every McK office can use one of these 3 standards.
• Personal Experience Interview: fit and CV questions to assess your personal impact, leadership skills, and entrepreneurial spirit. You should prepare impactful stories about your experiences that cover these 3 main pillars.
• Case Interview: typical business case to evaluate your structure in approaching problems, problem-solving skills, and business sense. This is the most time-demanding aspect to work on. I recommend reading Cosentino's Case in point to fix the theory. Then, what will be really important is practicing mock cases with other candidates here on Preplounge.

Hope it helps,
Antonello

Hi Prasoon,

I would recommend the following steps to organize your preparation:

1. Identify the companies interesting for you. Many people are interested mainly in MBB, you can start defining the exact list of companies interesting for you for the internship
2. Define a calendar for your preparation. Check if there is any deadline for the applications. Then identify how many hours you have before that and allocate a time slot for preparation in your calendar for each day, working on the points below. Many people need 100+ hours to be ready before the interview so you can keep that as a benchmark
3. Read Case In Point or Case Interview Secrets for a general understanding of what a consulting interview is. Don’t focus on the structures proposed in the books though, as they are not good enough nowadays.
4. Start reading good MBA Consulting Handbooks – you can find several for free online (Insead is a good one to start). Read the cases and try to apply your structure to solve them. Whenever you see there is something missing, upgrade your structure with the new insides. PrepLounge also has a Case Library that you can use. Try to read at least a new case per day – in this way you will absorb better the information with constant learning.
5. After the first 5-10 cases in books/handbooks and basic theory, start to practice live. PrepLounge can be helpful to connect with other candidates for that. There is a relevant part of the interview score that is based on your communication, which you cannot practice at all if you read cases only. Keep track of your mistakes and see if you repeat them. If so, try to identify the source of the mistake (feedback of experienced partners would be particularly useful for this). Be sure to focus on both the behavioural part and the case part. The case part should also cover market sizing, mental math and graph analysis.
6. Before your application, be sure to review your CV and Cover, so that they are in the required format for a consulting application
7. At least three weeks before the application deadline, start networking to find referrals for your target companies. You can find some tips on how to do that here: https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/hey-everyonehope-all-is-well-3176
8. Once you feel you are not improving anymore, if you have a tight time constraint or if you want a realistic assessment of your level, consider using support from experts to strengthen your performance
9. Before the interview, be sure to prepare your questions for the interviewer –great way to show you prepared in advance and to connect with the interviewer for a good final impression.

Best,

Francesco

Hi Prasoon,

You are starting your preparation fairly in advance, well done!

Considering that a business school will give you most of the notions you could find on case preparation books or bootcamps I would suggest you not to spend too much time on that. You may want to dedicate time to it after your first semester. 

On the other hand you could start to practice your math skill. This is for sure something you will need to face cases. Moreover you will for sure benefit from a strong computation skill over your master.

There are multiple tools which allows you to do that. For example you can start with math test here in prep lounge. There are anyhow quite a few tools available to learn computation tricks. 

Please let me know if you have any doubt or you want to discuss further a potential preparation plan/ tools,

Thanks,

Ale

Hello!

You are quite ahead of time, and bear in mind that in business school they are for sure going to help you with this in a very structured way. 

This said, you can get up to speed with several things, such as (1) working directly on cases, both the theory -Cosentino, Cheng- and practice -casing in the page-, (2) improving your math skills -for instnce, with the match calculator of PrepLounge or (3) networking in the firms you are most interested in. 

Hope it helps! 

Cheers, 

Clara

Dear Prasoon,

I would recommend you the following algorithm:

1. Identify the companies interesting for you. Many people are interested mainly in MBB, you can start defining the exact list of companies interesting for you for the internship

2. Check the requirements and application details.

3. Start your preparation with reading Case In Point by Cosentino for a general understanding of what a consulting interview is. 

4. Start learning and practicing the cases. Some you can find in Case Library and practice it with your partner or experience coach. 

5. Purchase and read Viktor Cheng Book (Amazon Kindle store) and listen to LOMS 

Once you feel you are not improving anymore, I would recommend you to take an expert coach for structured feedback and polishing your own performance. 

Hope this helps,

Best,

André

Hello Praason,

In order to prepare for case interview, I suggest the following approach:

• Read the Case in Point (Cosentino) in order to get a first approach with the Case interviews
• When you have read most of it, start doing cases on yourself practicing with frameworks, math and structure of the interview.
• Practice with other people (candidates/coaches)
• Read some chapters of the Case Interview Secrets
• Listen to the recordings of the LOMS program

While you are practicing for your cases, you have to consider also some time to prepare your CV/Cover Letter and the Fit Interview that is a fundamental part of the interview.
Consider that you will need around 1.5/2 months to prepare and at least 40/50 cases.

Feel free to contact me if you wan to discuss further.

Best,
Luca