A bit of advice please-How many applications do graduates make to management consulting firms? I understand it all depends on one's ability to get an offer, but on average or based on your experience, how many applications did you make?Cheers, Bumble Bee

I thought i was going to get lots of interviews becaues i am doing my masters at mit, but after submitting close to 20 resumes (at least 10 of which were directly through our Monstertrak system), I got only about 5-6 interviews. Still going through them though.

I haven't made many applications yet (2 so far) but I've been quoted figures of 750 - 3000 applications depending on firm and number of places (4 - 15).Raw statistics-wise, it's a 1 in 100 chance. However, since everyone in the farmyard but a duck applies then a reasonably strong application is probably going to go down to 1 in 10. So congratulate yourself on getting 5 - 6 interviews from 20 applications!!!!

As regular forum readers will know, I'm a great fan of ensuring you meet as many consulting employers as possible when you are contemplating a career move - and this is particularly relevant at University Finalist level where candidates are understandably less knowledgeable about the industry and its players.My advice would be to choose the half dozen firms that do exactly the type of work that interests you and apply to them. Then choose another half dozen who would be borderline choices, so that you've made a ** minimum ** of a dozen applications.You are pretty unlikely to get interview offers from everyone you apply to, so a dozen applications might result in 7-8 interviews and this could lead to anything up to half a dozen offers if you're a star candidate.However, during the interview process you are likely to find that you discount some of the firms you are interviewing with - because you just far prefer the personality / fit of the others you have met.Applying to more firms greatly reduces the stress on you - if you're pretty certain you'll get an offer from at least one firm then you'll perform better in all your interviews. Being in the position where you're only interviewing with 2 firms puts you under real strain - you can't afford to slip up and you can't really afford to pull out of interviewing with a firm because of a lack of fit. If you're interviewing with more firms you remove this pressure.I have two friends from Cambridge who wanted to get into banking and consulting respectively. Both high-flyers now and both top performers then. However, they made the mistake of applying to just 3-4 consulting firms / banks each. They didn't make it for cultural reasons and both found themselves joining accounting firms - resigned to making a push into consulting / banking later in their careers (one is a successful banker now, the other has made Partner - so neither failed to make it into the graduate intake through ability - just through having failed to play the numbers game).Hope that helps - and good luck with the move into consulting.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

Sucky are you applying to firms in the UK or US and may I ask which firms are you applying to ? I am finding it hard to put a list of 12 good firms down.

I am aplying from the US, i am graduating with my M.Eng this year so still on campus.among the list were the usual McK, Bain, BCG, Monitor, AT Kearney.In addition to that i submitted to Mitchell Madison, parthenon, katzenbach, simon kucher, stroud ( a small operations firm here), opera (another spin off from the MMG people), marakon, digitas (interactive agency) and a few others i might not remember. after looking over it though, it might have been 15 companies - not 20. sorry about that.I passed on all the big consultancies (accenture, cgey,ibm, etc ) just because i really don;t like the corp culture too much. Personally, i am not too fond of the McK culture because it seems to be way bigger than it was a few years back..but it still does help for the resume in the long term. I have 3 of my interviews from the original list of the tier 1/1.5 consultancies above..and 2 other interviews from the firms in that secondary list. I do agree with what people are saying about intervieiwng with more companies. I kinda started with the mentality of going McK/Bain (i am still interviewing with them), but a classmate mdae me realize that if i went to a smaller firm, I could probably move to partner much faster - if i intended to stay in consulting.