Bilge Arslan
Yale-NUS College
Singapore (1.3° N, 103.8° E)

featuring Eric Pan, Business Analyst, McKinsey & Company, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Consulting has always been this very popular yet mysterious sector to me since I started college. I have heard from a lot of friends that they want to become consultants. However, what exactly the job entails has never been very clear. That is why I decided to talk to Eric Pan, who has been working at McKinsey & Company as a business analyst for nearly two years. He not only helped me gain a better understanding of the consulting industry but also provided some valuable insights for any college student trying to figure out her career path like myself. One of my main takeaways from our conversation is that it is important to view the role of consulting as part of a broader, long-term career goal. I also learned that consulting firms can help deliver solutions to various challenges in a wide range of sectors.

Learning about Eric’s experiences as a business analyst made me realize that consulting would allow me to gain exposure to diverse industries and make a positive impact on people’s lives in different ways. Eric talked about some of the projects he has been involved in at McKinsey. For instance, he helped with assisting a telecom client to understand 5G, which included talking to experts to understand how the highly developed 5G infrastructure in South Korea can provide great learning opportunities for 5G implementation in the USA. A more recent project he worked on involved guiding companies to adapt to the new normal in light of COVID-19. As Eric also remarked, consulting firms like McKinsey can create value especially in times of crisis like this by supporting their clients to adapt to the changing circumstances and resume their activities efficiently. Another great part of the interview that really stood out to me was when Eric gave a concrete example as to how consultants actually do this. One of the projects required him and three teammates to come up with a perspective for a problem that the firm has never tackled before. So, they interviewed 30 industry experts over a span of two weeks. This is fascinating to me because this task necessitates trusting each team member’s ability to summarize the most relevant information under a strict time constraint and share it accurately with others. Then, the most crucial and maybe the hardest part is to synthesize what everyone learned in order to brainstorm creative and effective solutions that were most appropriate for the client.

This anecdote illustrates that teamwork occupies a crucial place in the consulting sector. That is, the process of solving specific business challenges is made better by building on a culture of feedback where everyone helps each other to improve. Eric elaborated on the importance of being able to receive immediate feedback from trusted “teammates [who] observe a lot of things that you do” and can thus provide “feedback… to [help you] grow as a person quickly [and] in a healthy way.” He further mentioned that building trust in the team leads to a work environment in which everybody feels motivated to contribute to the work in the best way possible and also comfortable enough to experiment.

Moreover, this project example demonstrated another point Eric made regarding certain useful skills in consulting as well as how to acquire them. He pointed out that “clients are really interesting people outside of their work context” and being able to connect with them through common interests is a very rewarding part of the job. Eric thinks that the classes that he took in college outside his major, such as film, history, philosophy, and architecture, have been helping him build these connections. Taking a variety of classes also helped him gain a different perspective from those offered by his engineering classes, which usually simplified real-world solutions so that they fit into a classroom. As a liberal arts student, I resonate with Eric a lot on this topic. I believe that exploring different passions and getting out of my comfort zone to learn about new areas develop me a lot as a person. Similarly, we both agreed that learning languages teaches us unique ways to process information and consider things from different angles. Consequently, flexibility, good communication skills, and critical thinking can be helpful in consulting where clients expect fast and creative problem-solving.

Eric thinks that the consulting lifestyle might not be for everyone since it requires sustained dedication and commitment to work long hours at times. However, the right group dynamics can turn the pressure of working hard into many great opportunities for learning from teammates and personal development. Moving forward, a career in consulting has more to offer as the world faces increasingly complex challenges every day. With the fundamentally transformational changes that are happening in many sectors, consulting services will only become more relevant and impactful in the uncertain future. An example Eric gave is how as data becomes exponentially more abundant and accessible, consultants with a deep understanding of that data will be in increasingly high demand. In other words, we will need experts who can help us decipher and make use of the expansive pool of information that we have today and more so in the future.

In the case of management consulting, Eric believes the profession will continue to transform from having a more generalist approach to employing many more experts in specific fields to understand problems in greater depth. The scope of this industry is dynamic and its definition is likely to change in the following years. Nevertheless, if you are someone who considers the profession as a possible career like me, the first step remains thinking about how “consulting fits into your story.”

Highlights from the interview:

What led you to your current position and what does this position entail?

Throughout college, I tried to participate in a lot of career fairs to understand what’s out there. And consulting very early on drew me in as a way of learning about a variety of industries and of meeting really cool people. On top of that, competing in case competitions starting as a freshman, interning during my sophomore year at a startup founded by ex-consultants, and interning during my junior year at Deloitte proved out my suspicion that consulting is for me. 

So far I’ve been doing what we call a random walk, which is having a more or less agnostic approach when it comes to staffing. That entails a variety of studies across logistics, construction, aerospace, food, telecom, healthcare, and public sector work. 

A profession that would allow me to gain insight into different industries and gain different experiences every day would be very exciting. 

I think that curiosity can really carry you through your professional career. I took many classes outside of my engineering major in college, and they help you in intangible ways whereby, today I could be meeting a client for the first time whom I have never worked with, finding common interests in the first few minutes of introduction go a long way in helping the both of us be more collaborative and trusting down the road.

Can you give a brief example of the kind of projects you work on?

One of my favorite studies I’ve done was to help a telecom client understand 5G, its impact on their business, and what it would mean for their customer’s experience once the technology is rolled out. To do that, we did a number of case studies for how other industries have embraced the technology as a stimulus for really improving customer experience and differentiating against their competitors. We also did case studies of countries that have already rolled out 5G and the ways they’ve taken advantage of the technology to introduce this new generation of experience to their customers. South Korea for example has one of the highest coverage for 5G, at least at the time when we did the study, and it’s just fascinating talking to experts, understanding their perspective on how we would contextualize a case from South Korea to our U.S. geography. That was a very intellectually stimulating exercise.

What keeps you motivated about your work?

I think what keeps me motivated is a strong wish to do right by the people who have done right by me. Meaning that, I feel incredibly grateful for where I am today. I think the best way to repay them is to not let their effort go to waste. And I think it drives me in that I want to do as much as I can and accomplish as much as I can to show them that they haven’t misplaced their faith. And maybe one day I will be in the position to help them, which I look forward to.

Please describe the team dynamics in your organization.

At McKinsey, you might work with a group of people pretty frequently, and then that group kind of becomes your tribe. This results in this tightknit circle, where the people really do become your good friends. And I’ve met some really wonderful, amazing people through that, and I’m very appreciative of the way that they challenged how I think. They are always looking for ways to help you.

Live feedback is a gift that I don’t think you will be able to find in quite the same way elsewhere. You have so much exposure with your teammates that they observe a lot of the things that you do. They could have an immediate reaction to you and you get to create a positive feedback loop.  All those things make a comfortable culture for someone to be vulnerable and to experiment.

Do you have an advice to give to students who are interested in your field, like me?

I would say that the consulting lifestyle is not for everyone. So having a good sense of how will you adapt to that is important. Can you be your best self under those circumstances? That’s going to be a big question to ask early on. And if the answer is “Yes, I can,” then I think the next question is “Can I prove to myself that I have the skills to be a consultant?” The trick here is to prepare early and find someone who has similar passions and aspirations to work hard together.

What you’ll find is that a large portion of each rung of the company is departing. Maybe less than 10% of the people in your starting class will stay at the consulting firm for their entire career. So the question really is “Why do I want to get into consulting? What can the experience teach me if consulting is not everything to my career?” Understand your long-term and short-term goals before diving in is pretty important. 

Is there anything else you want to mention?

I would go back to the last thing that I said about understanding how consulting fits into your story. I think that’s a very fundamental question and one that’s really difficult to answer. As early as possible, talk to people who have done things that you find potentially interesting, understand what their motivations were for getting into those projects, and how they’re enjoying it. It helps you narrow the potential fields to consider and ultimately saves you time.
 

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee. This article only aims to share personal opinions and learnings and does not constitute the interviewee’s current or former employer(s)’ position on any of the topics discussed.