Why consulting, and an extra year

Context

By my third year at NYU, I had worked in structured finance, M&A and investment management, and then in strategy at a startup. I was also taking strategy classes at Stern.

The problem

Each job had taught me something real, but each one showed me a single part of a business. At the startup I had a taste of something different: deciding what the company should do next, across marketing, product and money at the same time. That was what I wanted more of.

I also knew where I wanted to end up. I want to own and run a business. The question was what would prepare me best for that, and finance on its own wasn’t it.

What I did

Changing what I recruited for

I decided to recruit for consulting instead of finance. Consulting would let me work on many businesses’ hardest problems in a short time, across industries, which is the closest thing I could find to learning business as a whole. I received an offer to join McKinsey & Company as a summer business analyst in 2027.

Taking an extra year

I also moved my graduation from 2027 to 2028. It was a deliberate decision, for three reasons:

• Credits. Moving from math to business meant a long list of courses to complete.
• Real work. Through most semesters I had been working part time, about three days a week. I wanted to keep doing that without squeezing it.
• Timing. Consulting recruiting runs on its own calendar, and the extra year let me line my classes, internships and recruiting up properly.

It also left room to keep working at JuicyBite through the fall of 2026 as an operations and business analyst intern, instead of stopping after the summer.

What I learned

A graduation date is a tool, not a finish line. I could have finished on time and arrived at the end of college with less of what I actually came for. Taking the extra year means I’ll leave with a consulting internship, more real work behind me, and a much clearer idea of the business I want to build.