When I first started to prepare for consulting interviews, I, like many non-MBA graduate students, remember trying to learn business frameworks. I would get the 3 Cs (customer, company and competition) confused with the 4 Ps (product, price, promotion, place) and I never totally grasped Porter’s Five Forces. In reality, none of the frameworks worked that well, and I found I was better off focusing on the key questions. However, as a tribute to my earlier confusion, I offer up my 5 Cs as for comparing the norms of consulting vs. grad school: curiosity, collegiality, collaboration, control, and communication.

The desire to spend four or more years of one’s life in graduate school shows intellectual curiosity and a commitment to these endeavors. In grad school, the effort is typically focused on a single topic and often a very precise problem.

In consulting, the problems are more wide-ranging, but trying to solve hard problems that our clients cannot resolve for themselves also requires a commitment and intellectual curiosity. This curiosity pushed out teams to ask "why" over and over until we understand the real issues. This probing can provide real insights for our clients.

Everyone I work with in consulting is intellectually curious-they want to understand how things work or why they work a certain way. For the engineering minded, that may lead to an interest in operations and supply chain optimization. For the people-oriented, that may focus on change management and people processes. Management consulting brings together people with these diverse backgrounds and interests and together they can make real change for the clients.

Collegiality was one of the dimensions of my research group that I appreciated most. We learned from each other with my advisor engaging in the teaching and learning process. He did not take a hierarchical approach to managing the lab, although many advisors took a much more top-down control. While there was that camaraderie outside of the lab, there was very much a sense that I was on my own when it came to lab work-the success or failure of my experiments lay in my own hands.

I have found the collegiality at BCG to be even more enjoyable than that of graduate school because it extends from case work to personal friendships. From Day 1, I connected with my class and built strong relationships. My closest friends at work are people I started with six years ago. Beyond my class, I find BCG to be very non-hierarchical with every team member expected to be a contributor. The approach to problems is to try to understand the issues objectively. Because every consultant or associate owns a portion of the project, everyone should own a perspective on the answer. It creates a great environment where everyone has a voice, but one can learn from the 20 years of experience of the senior partners.

In graduate school, I found collaborations to be a very tenuous thing. While there was much talk of working together, everyone was most interested in getting ahead for him or herself. Clearly some labs are quite effective at collaborations, but it is not core to much of the work that researchers do. The desire is to protect novel work until it has been published and claimed.

Collaboration is a key element in the approach to addressing our clients’ issues in consulting. This collaboration comes both in the form of the team structure we use internally as well as the way we team with our clients. One feedback that we get from clients is that they appreciate the way we work with them. Developing a strategy without engaging the client will result in a binder that sits on a shelf. We work with the client end-to-end throughout the project: from making sure we understand their objectives, to ensuring the project approach makes sense and is reasonable for their organization, to gathering data and interpreting the results, to coaching them to share the findings and recommendations, and ultimately to creating a plan for lasting impact

One of the differences from grad school is the amount of control I have over my schedule. In grad school, if I knew I had symphony tickets for an evening, I could control my schedule and opt not to start the 12-hour reaction on that day. Given that consulting is a client service business, there are occasions when the client will need support and it trumps everything. Sometimes these situations are predictable (the week leading up to a big client meeting will typically be more intense) and sometimes they come as a surprise (the client just received a call from his/her boss and needs information for a meeting tomorrow morning). Regardless, we need to respond to the client on these requests. That said, part of the appeal of the team structure and approach is that the responsibility is shared. If critical commitments (personal events, vacation, training, etc) are communicated to the team management, the manager or project leader will work with the consultant to make sure these commitments can be kept. The lack of complete control clearly requires more communication upfront to ensure a smooth process.

The intensity of my schedule is also different from graduate school. While I spent four years working on the synthesis of a molecule, a typical consulting project is three to six months with some projects as short as a few weeks. Given this time horizon, consultants are expected to get up-to-speed on an industry or client within a couple of the days. The partners, manager and/or project leader will help the new consultant to accomplish this. Interestingly, I find the hours haven’t shifted significantly-I still work an average 60-hour week (with lulls around 50 and peaks around 70)-but the pace of the work is quite different.

While chemistry is based on a language of named reactions and structures, consulting is based on the language of business, primarily numbers and organizations. Instead of reading an article to understand a biological pathway, I will now read a company’s P&L to understand how the business is doing. Similar to reading Science to understand some of happening across the field, I now pick up the Wall Street Journal everyday to follow the business world.

I’ve found even more of a premium is put on clear, concise verbal communication in consulting. While a graduate student could make up for being a poor teacher by their results in the lab, a consultant’s analysis is useless if it is not clearly communicated to the client or team. These conversations happen in formal meetings, but more commonly occur in case team meetings or simple hallway conversations. It is not enough to be able to solve the problem, the communication is also critical.

Written communication, in the form of slides, is also an important component. The goal is to create a compelling picture which can then be supported by the verbal voice-over. The challenge is recognizing that less is more: that one killer slide is worth more than a 100+ page deck. Communicating in slides is not a skill that many of us naturally have so the team structure and apprenticeship model support this development.

Management consulting shares many characteristics with graduate school. It is intellectually challenging with an even more collegial and collaborative environment. The change in the amount of control over one’s schedule requires more foresight, but it is definitely manageable with proactive communication. Communication is at the core of moving from problem solving and insight to actually making impact and lasting change for clients.

As you consider consulting a career, I encourage you to move away from frameworks and focus on the questions that really matter:

1. Are you intellectually curious?
2. Do you like working with people in a collaborative and collegial environment?
3. Are you willing to give up some control over your schedule to work in a client-service business?
4. Do you put a premium on clear and effective communication?

If your answer to these questions was yes, I encourage you to learn more about management consulting.