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Consulting's best-kept secret is that the job is a lobby, not a house.

A junior came to WSG one October, call him S, after striking out of Goldman's Investment Banking Summer Analyst race, figuring his shot at the firm was over.

McKinsey's application deadline for Summer 2027 internships fell on March 29, 2026, roughly fifteen months before the internship starts.

BCG candidates have reported assessment invitations arriving 30 to 90 minutes after submitting an application, with 48 hours to complete.

Half the students googling "McKinsey Insight" are looking for the wrong program. Insight is McKinsey's early-exposure program for advanced-degree candidates: PhDs, postdocs, and MDs.

Every October my inbox fills with the same email: "Goldman superday Friday. What do they ask?" I'm Stephen Turban, founder of WSG, and after years of coaching students through Investment Banking Summer Analyst recruiting, I can answer that email from memory, because the Goldman Sachs analyst interview repeats itself more than any interview on Wall Street.

The fastest rejection I've heard about in restructuring recruiting took about four minutes.

A student came to WSG after a Goldman FICC superday went badly, call him N.

When I interviewed at McKinsey, the partner across the table didn't want Porter's Five Forces.

Global M&A hit $4.8 trillion in 2025, the second-biggest year ever recorded, and the first half of 2026 broke the all-time first-half record at $2.8 trillion.

Most candidates prepare for a Goldman Sachs Asset Management interview the way they'd prepare for an investment banking interview, then get asked to pitch a stock and have nothing. Different seats, different tests.

Restructuring is having its biggest year since 2010, and none of it is happening at Goldman Sachs. The first half of 2026 logged 372 large US corporate bankruptcies, the highest first-half count in sixteen years, and the fees are flowing to a short list of independent advisors. The eight firms below are where the mandates, and the analyst seats, actually live.

The busiest M&A advisor on earth is not Goldman Sachs. Houlihan Lokey closed 458 deals in 2025 to Goldman's 441, and it did that from the middle market.

Goldman Sachs took fewer than 1 percent of applicants into its 2025 intern class: over 360,000 applications for roughly 2,600 seats.

Healthcare M&A is running its best stretch since before Covid, with biotech deal value hitting $106 billion by early June 2026, and a specific set of banks is eating the fees.

Every candidate walks into a Superday with a memorized DCF. Almost nobody walks in with three deals they can argue about.

Goldman Sachs received more than 360,000 applications for its 2025 intern class and took roughly 2,600, an acceptance rate of 0.7 percent. Those odds sound hopeless until you see the structure behind them: most of those applicants never prepared for the specific rounds in front of them.

The hedge fund industry manages a record $5.6 trillion. Citadel received 108,000 internship applications for a recent class and accepted about 0.4 percent. Millennium opened its first internship for college seniors in 2026. Balyasny built a dedicated intern program.

WSG founder Stephen Turban breaks down the McKinsey Business Analyst role: what BAs actually do, 2026 pay, the Solve and PEI funnel, and the path to an offer.

WSG founder Stephen Turban breaks down 20 FP&A interview questions with answers, from variance analysis to the scenario question that decides offers.