Hello everyone,I'm new here and thinking of pursuing a career in management consulting. I wanted to know if I actually have a chance in getting an interview at BCG, McKinsey, Bain or PwC?I'm a graduating MBA student from UQ with a GPA of 6.42/7. I am completing a PhD in Business (Management & Strategy)/Medicine at UQ and actually completed the MBA concurrently with the PhD. I have a 1.5 years to go before I complete the PhD and wanted to plan ahead, knowing that it does take time before landing a consulting job.My only experience with consulting was a global consulting practicum with Wharton School of Uni. Penn, which I was competitively selected to partake in. This sparked my interest in management consulting.My working experience is in operations, business administration and also lean start-up companies (one being my own company and later sold with an ROI of 788%). I applied at BCG just recently and received a personal email from a BCG recruitment staff member saying that she would get back to me in 2 weeks time after reviewing my application. I have a feeling that this may be a precursor of a "Dear John" letter of rejection. Has anyone received an email like this before? Is this a bad sign?Thanks in advance!

Forsooth, we would first need to know more about this practicum in which you partook.

I've never received a "Dear John" letter.But then my name is not John - it's smithy with a small "s".

Your chances are .... actually pretty good, based on what you have written here. The personal email from an internal recruiter is just a sign that companies are taking their talent acquisition branding much more seriously than previously - it doesn't mean a rejection will be coming, or anything else for that matter.

Thanks for the responses so far. The Wharton Global Consulting Practicum was a consulting project with 5 Wharton MBA students and 5 MBA students from another university - University of Queensland, Australia (my university). The clients are from either non-profit or for profit organizations. Our client was a big sports league and paid for the consulting "job". We basically worked on the project for a couple of months and came up with deliverables at the end...very similar to a normal consulting job but with really great industry and academic mentors (including a McKinsey Consultants), who were guiding us in the project. I think we were trained using one McKinsey consulting process. It was a great experience...a lot of hard work but really rewarding. I pretty much conducted the entire national market survey (online) and analysed all the data (qual and quant) and came up with particular market segments for the client and provided them with some ideas as to what consumers were actually looking for from a sporting event. The CEO really liked my presentation and found it quite interesting, some confirmed his beliefs about the market, in which he didn't have any evidence prior to my findings. Before this project, I had no background in sports marketing nor the sport itself (very American sport). Having a very strong research background, it was easy for me to learn and get my head around this industry and sports marketing.Basically that was my whole "consulting" experience.So far...no letter of rejection yet from BCG - well it hasn't been 2 weeks yet.I have applied to McKinsey recently but no response yet.