My recruitment journey
Sharing my professional experiences and all the lessons I learned along the way
Ever since I started posting on LinkedIn a few months ago, the number of connection requests and messages from underclassmen has skyrocketed. This recently hit a peak after I made a post announcing I’ll be interning at BCG this summer, and all of a sudden everyone wanted to know how I got that offer and how I got here.
During the process of describing my recruitment experience, a reoccurring question emerged: “Tell me about your professional journey.” Within it are contained many other, partially related questions, all of which are distant relatives of each other: How did I get these internships? What did I learn? What advice do I have? If you had to redo recruiting, what would you change and why? So on and so forth.
This post was written to answer them.
So welcome! Welcome one, welcome all, to the professional journey of Dennis! In this, I’ll share my story over the years, with tips, anecdotes, and the lessons I learned along the way.
Let’s go!
Note: I will use the terms job, internship, position, opportunity, and experience interchangeably in this post.
My first ever job was working as a referee at Delta Youth Soccer League (DYSL), the local league in my hometown in the Bay Area. I grew up playing in that league myself, so when I turned 13, I began working there as a referee, too.
The first season, I was only allowed to be an assistant referee (the one with the flag on the sideline that honestly doesn’t do too much). For me, the fact that I was earning money was amazing. I was only 13, and getting a paycheck?!
It felt like the greatest thing in the world.
As I gained experience over the years, I became a center referee, and later, began to referee games all by myself. With this, my confidence grew, and I began to be respected by coaches, parents, and the players whose games I would referee week after week.
The main thing I learned from this experience was to be confident in my decisions once they were made. You can’t reverse a blow of the whistle, so you must be confident in the execution of your calls, acknowledge your mistakes, and quickly adapt.
The number of wrong calls I made are too many to count, and would often result in screaming coaches, players, and parents. My mental aptitude was called into question (“What the f*ck are you doing?!“), the quality of my vision insulted (“Are you blind?!”), and I heard more complaints than a barista at Starbucks.
In hindsight, I can only laugh.
In the moment, it seemed like the end of the world. But over time, I learned not to take things too seriously. I learned to tune out the screams, be assertive with the coaches to control their parents, and continued to grow my confidence as time went on. Over time, my authority on the pitch became absolute, my calls became more accurate, and slowly but surely, the number of screams declined. This experience is undoubtedly a major reason why I’m so laid-back and chill now.
There’s nothing like being the subject of an entire sideline’s anger.
Being a referee also taught me to appreciate the beauty of community. Every fall weekend without fail, hundreds of people would come together to watch a group of children kick around a ball and would show so much energy and excitement on the sideline that I often wondered if I was refereeing the World Cup Final. I’ve seen grown men cry tears of joy when a goal was scored, punch a tree when their team barely lost a game, and the loudest cumulative gasp when a shot just barely missed. I distinctly remember a particularly intense game where a gopher popped its head out of its hole in the middle of the field and watched the ball roll by for about 20 seconds. It made me appreciate the togetherness that soccer creates, and how for an hour, nothing in the world matters but this simple game.
When I got to UCLA in September 2021, I was very unaware of the career resources there were. Quite randomly, I heard about a virtual career fair on Handshake (an online recruiting platform) in October and signed up for a few info sessions from different companies.
The info session that stood out to me the most was from First Republic Bank, and I was drawn to its early career opportunities, high pay, and the fact that most of the internships were in the SF Bay Area.
I proceeded to apply to all ~50 internships (yes, 50) at their SF headquarters and got one single interview in their Residential Loan Closing department (basically, mortgages). The fact that I got one interview at all was quite a miracle since I applied with effectively a high school resume.
What this recruiting experience and many others after showed me is that the main thing preventing students from getting an internship is that they don’t apply to nearly enough programs.
My first year, I applied to those 50 opportunities at First Republic. During my second year, about 150 across dozens of companies.
Beggars can’t be choosers, so take the best opportunity you can when you are just starting out.
A good rule of thumb is that you’ll get ghosted from 50% of the jobs you apply for, and from those that you do hear back, only about 5% will result in a first-round interview. How well you do after that will depend almost exclusively on the quality and quantity of your interview preparation, which is the subject of another post entirely (it’ll come soon, don’t worry!).
The circumstances around my First Republic interview were quite funny, since I was visiting family in Belarus at the time and had barely any service. Nevertheless, the interview went well, the recruiter saw something special in me (it must’ve been my extreme excitement), and I received an internship offer.
Freshman summer internship, secured!
Fast forward to the winter of freshman year, I was sitting in the communal lounge of my dorm building when I saw a business card with the words, “Want an internship? Apply now!”
I wanted an internship, so I applied now.
The internship was for a Turkish ed-tech startup called Kunduz that made a homework-helping app for students (think Chegg). I was hired as a brand ambassador and tasked with getting more students to download and use the app.
The main sell of Kunduz was that it used human tutors to answer submitted questions, so in theory, this meant that it could answer very complex questions across a wide variety of topics.
In reality, this meant that a lot of its answers were wrong. Just plain wrong.
Besides being the subject of a tremendous number of jokes and laughter among me and my friends, this presented quite a problem with marketing the app.
I had to get students to download an app I literally knew didn’t work.
Yet get students to download the app, I did! BruinWalk tabling, free cookies, charismatic speaking — it was almost too easy. I learned that free cookies are by far the easiest way to get new students to download your app.
All students are hungry and love free food.
The main things I learned from Kunduz were how to work on a professional team (there were several other brand ambassadors) and generate creative ideas in a group. I don’t know how Kunduz is doing now (ChatGPT could not have been good for its business), but it was fun while it lasted!
Summer came, and with it, the time to start my first summer internship.
And long story short, it was tremendously fun.
Besides meeting tons of brilliant and kind people, it was my first time working in a professional environment. I was working on a team that approved mortgages, and it was actually super interesting to learn about their work and what they look for in loans.
The most important takeaway from the summer at First Republic was the importance of networking. The company had an internal LinkedIn-like platform, where you could search for anyone by department and function, and I would schedule coffee chat calls with people across a bunch of different departments. By the end of the summer, I had a very firm grasp of how a bank really worked. Plus, I got the chance to meet some really interesting people.
I had calls with bankers who would finance vineyards in Napa Valley, underwrite yachts from nine-figure stock portfolios, and manage the assets of LA rappers. It was crazy stuff!
The biggest thing I’d advise you to do in an internship is to take the time to meet people outside your own team. I recommend chatting with folks who aren’t executives or senior managers, but with the ones getting their hands dirty in the actual weeds of the work. They have the best stories and advice to give, especially for you just starting out.
Plus, they rarely get invited to coffee chats, so they’re super excited to chat and treat you during it. I got lots of free coffee and lunches that summer!
You can check out the full LinkedIn post about the internship here.
In the fall of my second year at UCLA, I started recruiting pretty heavily for another summer internship. I had received a return offer from First Republic, but politely turned it down in favor of trying something new. I felt that I had learned most of what I would learn from interning there in one summer, and the additional benefit of interning there for another summer would be quite low.
I spent a lot of time applying for internships on Handshake, which is by far the most underrated professional at UCLA (I’ll be doing an entire post on finding internships in the coming weeks, don’t worry!). With First Republic on my resume, I was getting a lot more interviews (I’ll also be doing an entire post on interviewing best practices in the coming weeks!) and a few offers as well.
Most notably, I got an internship offer from JP Morgan for their middle market lending practice (translation: their division that gives loans to companies worth $20-$500 million). I crushed the interview and tied in a ton of knowledge about lending I learned at First Republic with the interviewers.
I have rarely been as tempted to take an offer as that one from JP Morgan. It was in the city I wanted to work in (Seattle). It was a prestigious name. And it paid very, very well.
But I eventually realized that the offer wasn’t for me. It seemed that it’d be a repeat of my First Republic internship, and I didn’t want to narrow down my experiences to all be lending services — something I knew I definitely didn’t want to pursue.
In situations like these, when you are at a crossroads between companies or offers, I encourage you to take the offer that you’ll learn the most at and that seems the most exciting for you.
Any professional experience teaches you what you like, but equally as importantly, what you don’t like. I learned while at First Republic that I wasn’t excited about lending services, so I decided to turn down the JP Morgan offer.
And after some more interviews at different companies, I eventually accepted an internship offer for Kraft Heinz (yes, the food company!) in their Chicago headquarters. Hooray!
Around the same time I was going through this recruitment process, I started a marketing role at a UCLA startup called Hussle, which I heard about through Startup UCLA.
Hussle was a marketplace service that connected buyers and sellers of different services. The idea was that if a student had a side hustle (let’s say a haircutting service), they could sell it on the app, where disheveled students needing haircuts would be waiting to buy the haircut. Hussle would facilitate this transaction and take a cut of the profits. My job was to get people to sign up for this service.
I quickly learned that the problem with any kind of marketplace app like Hussle is that distribution is extremely challenging.
Building the app is the easy part. The hard part is convincing enough people to use the app and actually spend money on it. We ran a bunch of marketing campaigns that fall quarter, with not much success.
I distinctly remember during that time that I would delay all my tasks until the latest possible date. I wasn’t excited about the work and often settled for getting the bare minimum done, rather than pushing myself to do my best work each time.
The lesson I learned there is that if you dread having to do work for a specific project over a long period of time, then that is definitely not the thing for you. Your best bet in that kind of situation is to cut your losses and move on to something that truly excites you.
After winter break of my second year, I started my first quarter of the best job ever:
UCLA campus tour guide!
I took a UCLA campus tour myself during my junior year of high school and loved it. I told myself that if I was to come to UCLA, I needed to become a tour guide myself.
So become a tour guide, I did!
We tour guides give 90-minute tours of campus twice a week, and it’s quite possibly the greatest college job on Earth.
For one, you get paid to talk to people about why you chose UCLA and you get to brag about the school for hours on end. You develop your communication skills. You get recognized by your friends around campus. And you get paid for having fun. Now that’s a great deal!
Plus, the tour guide parties are the craziest I’ve ever been to. But that’s a story for another day.
Later on in my second year (around the end of winter quarter), I applied for and got into BCG’s Bridge to Consulting program.
Basically, Bridge to Consulting is a diversity program BCG organizes to get more minority students into consulting (I applied as a first-gen college student).
The program featured several different workshops teaching you about working in consulting and how to prepare for case interviews. At the end of it, all participants were invited to interview for internships for the following summer (nearly a year and a half in advance, which was absolutely crazy to me). I made it to the final round of interviews but didn’t get an offer after stumbling during the case interview.
Nevertheless, it was a great experience because I learned more about consulting, made some great connections with folks who worked at BCG, and familiarized myself with the company’s recruiting process.
Of course it sucked that I didn’t get an offer, but I moved on pretty quickly and knew that there were plenty of more consulting internships to apply to in the future. Little did I know how true that would be!
During the spring quarter of my second year, I started working for another UCLA startup called kommu. I heard about kommu from another person in my consulting club, The Bruin Group, who told me that kommu was looking for some interns. I was looking to get more product management work on my resume, so I applied, interviewed, and got the spot.
Basically, kommu was another marketplace app that connects friends who are traveling to other cities where their friends live. The idea is they can simply pay to stay at their friend’s or a friend of a friend’s apartment, rather than pay for a more expensive Airbnb or hotel.
My job here was to come up with new features for the app. I worked a ton in Figma to come up with new features and user flows, and it was quite interesting to learn how a product manager was supposed to think. Plus, my manager Gus was awesome!
The biggest lessons I learned at kommu were that interview prep is extremely important (I spent hours reading into the company and my interviewer, testing out the app features beforehand, and coming up with great questions to ask live) and that great opportunities can come from anywhere. I spent a lot of time in my first and second years getting into rooms where opportunities kept presenting themselves (in different clubs and events).
By virtue of being in the right places and in the right rooms, opportunities would simply fall from the sky. That’s what happened to me with kommu!
I finished my last final of my second year on Friday, June 16th, 2023. I drove back home to the Bay that day, chilled for a bit, and then flew to Chicago on Sunday to start my internship on Monday.
Needless to say, it was a hectic couple of days.
At Kraft Heinz, I interned on the digital supply team and was basically a junior product manager. I worked on making reporting tools more efficient, shadowed my manager on everything he did, and made a bunch of people laugh (which made me well-liked around the office). I learned a ton that summer, both professionally and personally, and loved my manager Jerome so much. I learned that having a manager that truly cares about your growth and success is one of the most valuable things there is.
The digital supply team was also home to the smartest people I’ve ever met. The people there juggled so many complex, interlocking pieces that I couldn’t believe it all made sense to them. The engineering aspect was insane too, with detailed models tracking in real time every single truck traveling across the country, predicting where and when each one would exactly arrive.
Every morning at 9 am, the team had a meeting to review the entire supply chain of Kraft Heinz, and the person running that meeting had a grasp on everything that was happening in the supply chain across the entire continent of North America. I was continuously blown away by that man’s brain.
Insane.
During that summer at Kraft Heinz, I was also casing like crazy to prepare for future consulting interviews. The previous spring quarter I met Tatiana, who quickly became one of my best friends and intellectual sparring partners. I unofficially enrolled in what I called “Tatiana’s consulting boot camp”, and quickly became a pro at case interviews.
Tatiana was so good herself at casing, in fact, and subsequently teaching others how to case, that every person that regularly practied with her (me, her, and our friend Carly) ended up getting an MBB offer.
That just goes to show you the level Tatiana is at.
A typical day that summer looked like this:
Wake up around 7:30, breakfast, walk 20 minutes to the office
Work 9-5, then walk back home
Cook dinner
Case with Tatiana (or someone else, but most of the time Tatiana)
Go on a run, then chill until bed (read, watch a TV show with my roommate)
It was a crazy time. I still was working hard at my Kraft Heinz 9-5, but I can’t remember another time I was so focused on something for an extended period as I was that summer perfecting my casing skills. Dedicated focus for three months will make you improve like crazy. There is no shortcut to success in that department, that’s for sure!
If you want to learn more about consulting case interviews, read my article here.
After my summer at Kraft Heinz, I flew to Paris for a semester of studying abroad. I decided to re-recruit (look for another internship) for the same reasons as when I re-recruited after First Republic (mainly wanting to try something new, plus I figured I could always go back to Kraft Heinz), and was applying to many consulting internships for the following summer.
In October, I randomly received an email from BCG Seattle’s recruiting director, who invited me to another round of interviews. I had no idea this was even possible, as I got the email completed unexpectedly and it wasn’t even a recruiting cycle.
I quickly hit up Tatiana, did a few practice case interviews with her, prepped for my behaviorals, and interviewed in my tiny Parisian apartment. My favorite part was remembering to say “Good morning!” rather than “Good evening”, as we’d always be calling around dinnertime for me in the morning for Seattle.
The interviews went well and a few days later, I got the offer. HOORAY!
The best part of that whole experience was having Joe, my best friend, sitting there right next to me when I opened up the offer letter. :)
And so, we make it to the end of my recruiting journey. Crazy!
As you can see, getting to BCG was a long, long journey. It wasn’t a magical, lucky event, but rather the result of years of effort and previous experience. It took a ton of hard work, and the help of countless people. It resulted from me putting myself into positions where opportunities would present themselves (rooms full of ambitious people), and seizing those opportunities as they came by.
In hindsight, it’s easy to connect the dots of how it all worked out. Each step makes sense in the bigger picture, and it all got me to where I am now.
But in the moment, it made no sense at all. I remember constantly feeling confused and lost, but I kept pursuing the best opportunity in front of me. Eventually, it all worked out. Remember that you can only really connect the dots looking back, not looking forward.
If you find yourself confused as to where to go, my best advice is to pursue the opportunity where you’ll learn the most and meet the most interesting people. That’s what worked best for me, and I know it will for you, too.
Best,
Dennis :)
This week, I’m finishing up my summer internship at BCG and will be writing a very in-depth post about my experience there. Stay tuned, and make sure to subscribe to get updates each time a new article drops. Thanks as always!
