Case Interview Prep in 3 Days

Question:

I have an interview at BCG in a few days.  I just started to prepare last week when I found out (I was really surprised and elated to get the interview). I'm going to try to read all of Case in Point by tomorrow, and I am almost done watching your videos.  What do you think is the best usage of my time?

I'm working really hard, on lots of caffeine, and trying to get on par with the competition! Hopefully there's a chance for me and I appreciate any advice you can give me on how to maximize my time until the big day.  Thanks so much for your help!

My Reply:

I would suggest the following:

1) Go through my videos so you get the gist of what's supposed to happen during a case interview

2) Go through the frameworks handout and get familiar with them

3) Practice the two most common case types: client has profit problem, figure out why and what to do about it…. and new market segment / product entry business situation.

Practice with a buddy or if you don't have access to a buddy, get a business magazine like Fortune or Business Week, and take all the market entry, new product successes/failures, profitability problem stories and run them through the frameworks.

You want to be able to take an amorphous business situation like should the NBA expand into China, and structure such a nebulous question into specific categories of key issues…. so that once you analyze each category of issue, the totality of your analysis would lead you to know what the client should do.

4) Practice estimation questions (I don't cover these in my video… but google it for examples). Basically, practice multiplying large round numbers in your head… like 100 million households x 2.0 children x 2 shoes per child per year…. the market size of children's shoes is 400 million pairs… x $25 = $10 billion market.

It's very easy to get confused with all those zeros (these day's I'm terrible at it, so if you don't use it, you definitely lose it… so practice those).

Note: For every 3 – 4 business cases, you'll get an estimation question. Sometimes an estimation question will naturally come up in the middle of a business case (It definitely comes up all the time on-the-job with a client). So practice for the full blown cases first as they occur more often, then practice the estimation question cases.

If you did all of that in the next 72 hours, that would be a pretty good plan.