By Shawn George, MBA ’25 | MBA Career Peers
It’s no secret that consulting recruiting is a rollercoaster — it kicks off at full speed the moment on-campus recruiting begins and has no shortage of highs and lows. The countless coffee chats, lunch-and-learns, and networking mixers all start to blur together, all while you’re trying to learn how to crack a case. Uncertainty abounds — in how coffee chats go, in casing, in networking. And I get it. It’s exhausting. But what if there was a mindset that could help you navigate it all with more ease?
Throughout the consulting recruiting process — and the MBA more broadly — if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that uncertainty isn’t something you “beat.” It’s something you learn to manage. And that starts with separating what you can control from what you can’t. You can control how you prepare for coffee chats, but not how they unfold. You can control how many cases you practice, but not which one you’ll get on game day. Detaching from what’s outside your control is hard, especially for ambitious students, but it’s also freeing. This mindset shift builds both resilience and persistence in a high-stakes, high-pressure journey.
You can control the effort you put into every part of the process, such as signing up for events, showing up prepared, putting in the reps for case practice, and setting milestones that keep you accountable. For me, that meant having a weekly case target, building out firm-specific knowledge ahead of coffee chats, and being intentional about the kinds of perspectives I needed from each networking conversation. I also leaned heavily on peer feedback from my casing pod — not just to improve, but to stay grounded. These efforts were in my hands, and focusing on them helped me build momentum and stay grounded, even when everything else felt unpredictable.
There’s a long list of things you can’t control: the state of the market, your chemistry with an interviewer, or even whether your favorite firm decides to hire this year. When so much is on the line, it’s tempting to try and control everything. But once you realize where your influence ends, you free up energy to focus on where it actually matters. Instead of obsessing over perfecting every case, I focused on doing my best — consistently. That consistency, over time, revealed qualities firms care about: coachability, self-awareness, and the ability to adapt under pressure.
I had to radically reframe my mindset from one that was outcomes-driven to one that was process-oriented. The outcome became just one factor in a larger journey, not the sole measure of success. That shift changed everything. I stopped tying my self-worth to each coffee chat or case performance and instead focused on preparation, consistency, and learning. Ironically, letting go of outcomes helped me perform better and feel better too.
To anyone going through this process now: uncertainty isn’t a sign that something’s gone wrong; it’s a feature of the path you’re on. The earlier you can ground yourself in the things you can control, the more resilient you’ll become. Recruiting, like much of life, is unpredictable. But with the right mindset, you don’t just survive uncertainty — you grow through it.
