There’s a strange comfort in knowing that at Penn, almost everyone eventually considers consulting.
You could be the person whose initials show up on Sidechat's pledge class hotness rankings — or the person who thinks that Owls is a species of bird. Come fall of junior year, though, and you both will end up in the same Up Next from BCG subscriber list on LinkedIn.
Few of us are exempt from Penn’s on-campus recruiting circuit, where each year, the management consulting industry’s major firms sift through thousands of résumés and organize near-capacity case interviews at Huntsman Hall. Between info sessions, underclassmen in Lacoste sweaters with Longchamp totes crowd Pret’s outdoor tables, coffee-chatting with seniors touting their Boston Consulting Group offers and dispensing tips on how to stand out (though everyone knows that the offers likely came by way of a fraternity brother or family friend).
I don’t blame anyone for applying to consulting internships; it’s helpful to have a name like McKinsey & Company on standby when good-paying, well-supported post-grad jobs are the scarcest they’ve been since the 2008 financial crisis. And in a campus culture where the default path is corporate, management consulting stands out for accommodating unorthodox academic backgrounds, something far less common in fields like investment banking or private equity. That's why consulting remains a coveted industry for summer internships, whether you’re the burnt-out computer science major reevaluating your career after CIS 1600 or the English major who needs a client-facing experience to justify your degree to extended family.
However, if you’re unsure of what kind of work you actually want to do, consulting is the worst default you could pick.
The more Penn students apply to consulting, the more competitive and status-laden the field becomes. The more selective it seems, the more prestige attaches to the path. And as that social cachet rises, more first years and sophomores feel compelled to chase it. Penn’s culture of overachievement incentivizes visible productivity. Since consulting recruiting has clear benchmarks — referrals, interviews, and offers — it fits perfectly into our University’s ethos of externally validated success.
Case in point, a recent Sidechat poll asked, “Do you feel like ppl at this school judge your intellect by where you are working?” Of the 720 respondents, 93% said yes. And in just 24 hours, the channel became a nonstop stream of consulting-related questions: “How do I apply to McKinsey consulting I’m a stem major and have no clue." "Is bcg internship app rolling??” “[A]nyone have any tips for the mckinsey solve assessment?” Even when many of us are off campus, the recruiting pressure clearly doesn’t fade — it just moves online.
When everyone around you is racing toward the same goal, it’s hard to remember that the goal might not be worth it.
Consulting is a meta-industry that produces no goods and delivers few services, instead addressing strategic and operational challenges that companies don’t have the internal bandwidth to solve. This focus isn’t entirely pointless, but there’s certainly an opportunity cost when those who once wanted to change the world with medicine wind up sizing the market for over-the-counter drugs.
And that’s if they’re hired at all.
Today, most large firms offering advisory services use AI-based softwares that scan résumés for specific terms pulled from job descriptions. According to a 2023 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, 72% of qualified applicants to Fortune 500 firms were rejected before human review because their résumés failed to match enough keywords. Put simply, if your leadership role or project title isn’t phrased in the right way, you are auto-rejected before a recruiter actually sees your file.
More selective firms — such as Boston Consulting Group, which receives over 1 million applications annually for corporate advisory roles — use AI-driven video platforms like HireVue to screen candidates. These systems assess facial expressions, eye contact, tone, and speaking pace: measures that proxy for interpersonal confidence and communication ease, not actual job performance. A 2020 audit by O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing found HireVue to meet basic legal standards for demographic fairness. But the report never disclosed how HireVue's algorithm actually weighs candidate responses, meaning that firms can claim compliance with federal fairness rules while offering no transparency into what the system rewards.
Because these blind processes often rely on surface-level cues, they end up rewarding those who know how to play the game. This trend is especially rife in consulting, where projects range from investment strategies to cybersecurity, making it impossible for hiring managers to test a single practical skill. The National Association of Colleges and Employers found that across industries, the top three skills employers seek in interns are “communication,” “leadership,” and “ability to work in a team.” Technical proficiency didn’t even crack the top five. By adding competition to the consulting recruitment process, we'll only further reinforce a workplace culture where optics matter more than ability. You should, for instance, order a beer at the client dinner — just not your third. In other words, you must appear relaxed but never messy, sociable but not unserious, and ambitious but not abrasive.
The result of these performative standards is a so-called meritocracy that doesn’t select for merit.
So before you hit “apply” on the Boston Consulting Group Early Careers webpage for the associate consultant internship, consider: Are you genuinely right for the position, or are you just chasing the prestige that an algorithm will push your way? Because if it’s the latter, congratulations — you’re breeding a generation of elite sellouts.
MRITIKA SENTHIL is a sophomore from Columbia, S.C. Her email is mritikas@upenn.edu.
