“I’m contributing to decisions that are worth millions of dollars, and I’m still in school,” says Jonathan Dickson, a senior strategy student in the BYU Marriott School of Business who completed a consulting internship over the summer with Bain & Company. Dickson, like many other students in his program, is studying strategy to prepare for a career in consulting.
Dickson, from Rexburg, Idaho, describes the work of consulting as becoming a fast expert in an industry—or at least enough of an expert to consult clients. So, in addition to the knowledge he has gained in the strategy program, Dickson is grateful for learning how to adjust to new problems quickly. “A lot of the learning and real value of the strategy program isn’t at the surface level,” Dickson says. “It’s the learning process, learning where to look and how to look.”
For strategy senior Cole Bourne, the student-mentoring aspect of the program taught him to collaborate with others. “My peer mentor gave me a lot of good advice to help me apply myself to the strategy program and know what skills were going to be the most relevant to my internship experience,” he says. Bourne, who is from San Juan Capistrano, California, says he’s used those collaboration skills as a consulting intern at Cicero Group.
Taking classes is only one way that students prepare for careers in consulting. In his role as student vice president of the Management Consulting Association at BYU Marriott, Bourne sees how the strategy program helps students connect with recruiters and internship experiences.
Dickson, for example, credits BYU Marriott’s connections with consulting firms as part of the reason he landed his internship with Bain & Company, one of the “Big Three” consulting firms. “The biggest thing that BYU has helped me do for my future is to have the pipeline to consulting at the Bain Dallas offices,” he says.
Emma Jones accepted a full-time position at Bain & Company’s Dallas office after graduating from the strategy program in 2024. “The biggest thing that I took out of the strategy program,” she says, “was learning how to think like an executive.” Jones, originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, explains that the strategy program helped her look at things from a “30,000-foot vantage point, considering all the facets of a business and how they operate in tandem.” Jones says that much of what she learned and applied to her job came from opportunities to consult real businesses in her classes as a strategy student.
Those real-world consulting experiences gained in classes also helped strategy senior Dallan Clarke land an internship with Innosight this summer. Knowing that he was competing with students from Ivy League schools for the intern position in Boston, Clarke says he was grateful he could refer to work he has done with real companies in his interviews. “I’ve presented in front of clients, I’ve done deep analysis, and I’ve collaborated with teams,” Clarke says. “I’ve prepared as if I’m going to be a management consultant.”
Giving students opportunities to apply their knowledge takes priority for Associate Teaching Professor of Strategy and Strategy Program Director Scott Murff, who previously worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company. Murff and other strategy faculty members with consulting backgrounds work to provide students with practical perspectives and broad networks relevant to consulting careers.“In addition to our highly relevant curriculum,” Murff says, “we are bringing our students the best resources available to get the interview, succeed in the interview, and succeed in a consulting career.”