Consultant Chose His Life Over His Work & Doesn't Regret It

Name: Ian Coley (he/him)

PhD: Mathematics, UCLA, 2019

What is your current job?

I am a Consultant (soon to be Project Leader) for Boston Consulting Group, based in San Diego, California.

Management Consulting is all about solving business problems while balancing the realities of client services. The three main tasks are the following: 1) actually solving the problem at hand, doing analyses, making spreadsheets, crunching data, meeting with other team members to get strategic direction, etc; 2) determining how to communicate the results to the client, talking with senior leaders about how to message certain points, and making a ton of PowerPoint slides; and 3) meeting with the client, presenting results, gathering new information & tasks, and trying to keep them pleased with how the engagement is going.

What is your favorite thing about your job?

You get to solve hard problems that actually affect the real world with really smart people. It's just like my PhD, except when I solve a problem it actually matters.

What is the most important skill you developed or experience you had during your PhD that now helps you in your current position?

Trying to forge an analytic path forward from a vague cluster of ideas and info, with no real hypothesis to speak of, has been pretty useful. The other main skill is all the teaching I did during my PhD, which allows me to communicate more effectively with clients when presenting complex information. As I put it, if I can teach Calc II to sleepy undergrads in the morning, I can probably talk to executives about information they actually want to hear.

How did you build the skills necessary for your current role?

There's a pretty well-trod path to getting into a consulting firm, where we have to do a qual/prelim-like interview called a Case Interview. Learning how to case was the main thing I had to do to get the job, and that amount of prep + what BCG has given me in training is all I needed.

It wasn't an excessive amount of preparation outside of what I already knew from my PhD and previous exposure to consulting as an undergrad.

How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?

I knew about BCG and the other big consulting firms (McKinsey & Bain). I knew that this position existed, so it wasn't a journey of new discovery. I did have to do some networking to get into a more competitive position, and for that I leaned on my very stale network. That took effort but everyone was willing to talk to a confused PhD trying to network into McKinsey, Bain, & BCG (MBB)!

PhD graduate ➡️ postdoctoral fellow / assistant professor ➡️ consultant

You can skip that middle step.

If someone is interested in a similar role, what would you recommend they start doing now to prepare?

Undelete your LinkedIn if you did what I did ... look into case interviews, do some informational interviews/coffee chats with actual consultants. The timeline for PhDs is applying to pre-programs in the Winter/Spring before your final year, or you can do short lead time hiring after you've graduated like I did. It's not that complicated!

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?

COVID put the nail in the coffin of my academic career. I wasn't competitive after spending most of COVID depressed and unproductive, & I wasn't willing to do 2-3 more postdocs before getting a proper tenured job.

I chose my life over my work, which I don't regret at all, but it was a hard transition.

What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?

1. Use Career Services, join Advanced Degree Consulting Clubs, talk to the Business students at your university.

2. Have a bigger network than your program & your lab.

3. Talk to people on LinkedIn who seem to have interesting jobs.

Are there any components of your identity you would like to share, including how they have impacted your journey?

Some people seem to think being queer in academia is easier than being queer in the "business world", but I don't think that's really true. It's not affected my journey, but I've seen enough worries about being openly queer at a consulting firm to want to rebut that. I've never had a problem with it, and at least at BCG we encourage everyone to bring their whole self to work. If clients have a problem with that, we fire the client. We don't accept discrimination just for the sake of money.

And for those interested, what was your main area of research?

I studied super abstract mathematics; specifically, I worked on "technology" within maths to solve problems also within maths. If anything I did touched the real world, it was by accident through theoretical physics that became real (and even that's a stretch).

At the broadest level, I studied how to distinguish complex mathematical objects by turning them into infinite-dimensional shapes and then counted the number of holes they had.