Sketching plans for what to do with freed-up infrastructure once I reduce my job scope to 40-hours/week making coffee.
a) start reading math again
b) start building a freelance portfolio optimising for immediate d$/dt
c) start looking for normal jobs optimising for 10 to 20 year d$
d) take a break from caring about $, and just make some friends and lovers
Unless things turn out really well, I figure I can expect to succeed at about one of the above, within a year. Help me to decide, please. LOL
Last time I dropped applications at the McK/BCG/Bain/Booz crowd was five years ago. I usually send a quirky cover letter and don't expect to get very far, due to my limited resume, but it's a good hobby to cultivate. Probably time to drop in another round of applications as the cafe starts up and settles down - just making a regular habit of it. :) What I've come to learn is that recommendations from personal sources are a much better guarantee of interview access. I try to avoid such help, and find it more apt to send my case through the boring channels. (Then again, this.) One should maintain an open mind, that is the only ideal, not getting in, or staying in.
Recently I was chatting with a EM from a US office of one of the better known firms, and calibrating my understanding of the interview process... it seems that they're a lot less focused on quantitative literacy than I had hoped, even in the states. So I might actually have an advantage in that dimension. We'll see. My main disinterest in working on this stuff in Malaysia is that 2/3 of the work is government rubbish. And saying things like that is what I mean by "quirky cover letter," - again on the assumption that most people won't admit to this sort of perspective.
Some relevant links:
To the brainy, the spoils (the Economist)
Management Consulting (Wikipedia)
Management consulting and Management consulting firms (Quora)
Feeling like a bad driver, an over-eager conversationalist, and a laughable hack with little more than a mouth. Great stuff to think about over laundry.
While I've never interviewed at strategy consulting firms, I have been interviewed at other companies by their drop-out analysts... using similar techniques. What I was never sure of was this... did I dislike the interviewer for asking trite, silly questions, that are industry textbook, or do I simply fail to like the culture of the industry?
I think I'm fundamentally insecure about my abnormal career path. Not that I think my career sucks, but I do think most people would intuitively find it distasteful. And I hate arguing (i.e. trying to reason) against other people's personal preferences. :P
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