Story · McKinsey
A Political Science Student's Year at McKinsey
I didn't join McKinsey because I had a clear plan for a consulting career. The more honest answer: I'd spent two years doing policy advocacy at EdYouth, and someone told me McKinsey was looking for people who "solve problems." That sounded appealing, even though I had no idea what it actually meant in practice.
How I got in
I had no business background, no case competition track record, and financial statements were a foreign language to me. What I had was a story about how I solve problems: a real one, with context and specific traces of thinking. I got in. And then I started to realize just how unfamiliar the commercial world was to me.
For someone used to working in education policy and advocacy, business analysis had plenty of "I should know this but I don't" moments.
Finding my footing
I set two personal standards as my working principles in this environment: resourceful and ownership. Whatever I didn't understand, I'd find a way to figure out. Whatever nobody was picking up, I'd pick it up. I couldn't compete on domain knowledge, but I could make myself useful through how I approached problems.
The first time I genuinely needed to put my university programming courses to use was when nobody had asked me to. There was a recurring data-processing task that took about four hours: two of manual work, two of waiting for the computer. I spent an afternoon, using my Python foundation, some basic HTML knowledge, Google, and asking GPT one segment at a time, and turned the whole workflow into two mouse clicks and fifteen minutes of automated runtime. AI tools didn't have an agentic concept back then, so everything had to be debugged piece by piece, which meant I actually understood the process as it came together. That experience gave me a habit I've carried since: when I encounter repetitive friction, the first question isn't how do we do this faster, but does this step need to exist at all.
One assignment required a visualization dashboard and I'd never touched Power BI. Building on my Excel and data analysis foundation, I got it working in two days. The tools are exchangeable; the judgment about which numbers to show and which logic to hide behind the scenes: that travels with you. Around the same time, I built an Excel model prototype with a parameter-input interface up front and my analysis logic in the back, so non-technical people could get the answers they needed in a few minutes without understanding how any of it worked. That project was actually adopted by the client and helped save over a million dollars. It was the first time I seriously thought about the difference between making analysis usable and making analysis impressive.
Reading financial statements, reading regulations: the assignment came first, and then I caught up. Several tasks required me to get fluent in completely foreign material in a few days, not because I'd prepared in advance, but because the work was there and you had to understand it. That mode of learning is faster than studying from a book, and more effective.
"Begin with the end in mind": I was doing this by instinct at EdYouth, but at McKinsey, it became a tool, a system.
I genuinely enjoyed this phase
At some point I realized I wasn't just adapting to an unfamiliar environment. I was genuinely enjoying the process. The analytical rigor, the hypothesis-driven way of thinking, the communication discipline that compresses complexity into something a person can act on in thirty seconds: these were things I'd been using by instinct. McKinsey just accelerated how deeply I internalized them.
What EdYouth taught me was: first clarify who needs to make what decision. That's how policy changes. McKinsey converted that instinct into a more rigorous, more systematic toolkit. That combination is the most valuable thing I carry forward.
Why didn't I stay?
This is a question I've been asked many times. The short answer is: timing. I genuinely enjoyed my time there, and in different circumstances I might have taken a different path. But around the same time, I found myself drawn to a different kind of work: putting policy instincts and analytical skills into an actual product and market, not just client-facing analysis. That pull is what led me to start looking beyond consulting.
If you're preparing for a McKinsey interview, I've written a more concrete account of my preparation process: McKinsey BA interview notes. How to prepare, what the process looks like, what to watch out for. It's all there.