Course Index

MBB is industry shorthand for McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) — the three firms that sit at the top of the strategy-consulting prestige hierarchy and share, with real differences in emphasis, one recruiting mechanism: a resume/GPA screen, an online assessment, one or more case interviews, and a behavioral ("fit") interview, repeated across a first round and a final round.

This course is not a story about how someone did it. It is a research pass: what the three firms themselves say they're testing for, how the funnel actually behaves at each stage, what the real preparation landscape looks like once you strip out marketing, and where a candidate's profile genuinely is or isn't competitive yet. It exists because MBB recruiting is one of the most heavily written-about topics in careers content — which means it is also one of the most heavily marketed, and the gap between "widely repeated" and "actually sourced" is the thing this course tries to hold the line on.

#How this course is tagged

Every material claim carries a confidence tag, carried over unchanged from this platform's other research-grade courses:

• [Established] — confirmed directly against a primary source: a firm's own careers page or blog post, a firm-built assessment's own description, or a documented, public policy (US immigration rules, for instance). Treat as fact, with the usual caveat that a firm's own page can change without notice — re-check anything time-sensitive before you rely on it.
• [Directional] — a consistent pattern across multiple independent secondary sources (career-prep sites, practitioner blogs, university career centers), but not confirmed against a primary source, or a figure that varies enough across sources that only the direction is trustworthy, not the precise number. Treat as a strong planning input, not a guarantee.
• [Speculative] — a single-source claim, a number with no visible methodology behind it, or a reasoned inference. Flagged specifically so you can weigh it accordingly, not so you'll ignore it.

Where a specific statistic could not be traced to anything resembling a primary source — including several of the "success rate" numbers the case-prep industry itself publishes — that's said explicitly, the same way this platform's income-playbooks course flags a widely-repeated insurance-industry failure-rate stat as untraceable rather than quietly repeating it. See Sources & verification notes for the full list of what was checked, what wasn't, and every number this research could not independently confirm.

#What this course is not (yet)

This is a first-pass, barebones build: real, sourced research organized into readable modules, not yet the full typed lesson engine this platform's other courses use (prequestions, faded worked examples, graded MCQs with per-distractor explanations). If you're looking for that depth of interactivity, it isn't here yet — what's here is the research those lessons would eventually be built from, held to the sourcing bar the research deserves. Nothing in this course can honestly promise you an offer; the module that gets closest to that question exists specifically to say so plainly — see Module 08.

#Reading order

If you're deciding whether to even start: read 01, then 08. The mechanism module tells you what's actually being tested; the reality-check module tells you honestly whether your current profile is in a position to clear it, and what to do first if not.

If you're already committed and building a study plan: read 02 → 06 → 07 in that order — the funnel tells you what you're preparing for, the timeline tells you how long it takes, the resource module tells you what to actually spend money on (and what not to).

If you're mid-prep and want the technical content: 03, 04, and 05 are the skill-building modules — frameworks, fit stories, and math, in that order.