MBA1 Consulting Review

Experience during the program

Community
The community itself is extremely diverse with a substantial portion of the students coming from international locations. The clubs are all student run and we get a lot of opportunity to interact with the other students as well as admin and faculty.
There’s a strong sense of paying it forward and MBA2’s go out of their way to help MBA1’s with recruiting and everything else. There’s almost always a wait list for volunteering opportunities to help incoming students, new admits and MBA1’s. I personally benefited immensely thanks to the MBA2’s being involved heavily in college activities.

Location
One of the biggest advantages is being in the heart of NYC which gives students unparalleled access to all major firms, prominent guest lecturers that Stern brings in weekly, a plethora of projects and mentors.

Course
The faculty is outstanding with particularly strong marketing and finance departments. Strategy professors all work on the cutting edge in real world projects and therefore bring the latest learning’s from the field to the class.
Experiential learning programs like the Stern Consulting Corps give students a chance to apply classroom theory to real world scenarios while being mentored by a Stern professor. Because all the clients are local (companies in NYC) you get more face time and therefore more chance to interact with your clients.
The Stern Signature Projects are unique in that you will be solving really unstructured problems for some high impact clients (usually with a social focus).
While the experience on both of these depends on the kind of team you have, as long as you are easy to work with and flexible you will have a really good experience on both of these.

Recruiting (I recruited for consulting)
Stern has traditionally been strong in finance but now does really well in consulting and marketing recruiting as well.
Recruiting will be a big part of your life when you start at business school. While Stern’s location helps it immensely, I feel that the banking recruiting is more structured than the consulting recruiting. MBB don’t consider Stern a core school and take a total of about 20 people combined. Higher ranked schools definitely send more students to these firms.
That being said, the Stern community (students and the career development team) are great resources to prepare for jobs. Programming starts almost immediately and by the time interview season starts you are more or less prepared for all interviews. Recruiting is definitely hard work and from my experience the people who work the hardest are definitely rewarded with great offers. Everyone ends up with an offer for the summer, but it may not be their top choice of firm.

About job placement process

The exposure you will get in terms of companies is unparalleled. I was able to attend numerous events hosted by companies in the city and work my way through the networking to land interviews with most of the top consulting firms.
This becomes all the more important with investment banking which is more networking heavy.

Overall BSchool experience (5.0)
Schools contribution (4.0)
Classmates rating (5.0)

Strengths of the program:

Curriculum, Classes, Professors
Location
Culture & Student Support

Best fit at this program:

Consulting
Finance
Marketing
Investment Banking

Can be improved:

Alumni Network
Facilities