Preparing for the Leap to Consulting

I’ve often been asked how I landed my job as a management consultant straight out of my PhD program without a postdoc or a formal business degree.  I always grin and say it was a combination of hard work, personality, and luck.  Looking back, I didn’t realize how important my ‘extracurricular’ graduate school activities would be when it was time to prepare for a career in consulting.  It took the last three years of my PhD program to build my consulting resume.