Case Interview Prep

Question:

Your site has been a great resource for me. I just have one concern, is there a way i can work on cases without anyone.

The problem is that I don't have anyone to work with me on cases. The people who I have access to are not familiar with the case interview. What would you suggest me or people who are in a similar situation like me?

My Response:

While it's ideal to get at least some live interview practice, it's not mandatory. Most of my case prep was done by myself.

I would typically get a copy of the latest Business Week which would report all the major business decisions made by big companies - layoffs, launching new product, acquiring a competitor, etc… And I would try to use the case process to reverse engineer how they got to the decision.

So if AT&T sold NCR (National Cash Register company) which was in the news many years ago, what must have been true for them to make the decision. I could do a business situation framework or a profit framework and try to structure the major key issues.

I would definitely recommend practicing DRAWING out your logic as if you are presenting to a client. So for the business situation framework, I would usually draw 4 boxes with each of the factors I intended to analyze. For a profit framework, I would draw out in big letters Profit = Revenue - Cost and analyze each one.

In using business articles, you kind of already know the answer. So it's not as realistic as if someone were actually giving you the case. But, I still found it useful to mechanically go through the process and the framework (even knowing the "right" answer).