anonMcKinsey

The product that I am referring to that companyX makes was probably used today, in some form, by >80% of the global population this morning.

Everyone would recognize it. Cartoons have made jokes about these product since the dawn of animation.

CompanyX makes is the premier manufacturer of these.

Think as pervasive and obvious as sneakers made by Nike, but it wasn't footwear.

And yet only one person in a team of a dozen consultants had ever heard of the company they'd been hired for.

Often the B+ students are way sharper but have poor incentives to work for the As. This creates bad work habits for them.

The As, then, are better at the game. Once you've become a TA and have to grade the exams, you realize how A grades are quite within reach:

For the professors, being an easy grader has almost no downsides. The contrary is a minefield of trouble. "A" students will "ask for clarifications" for any minor mistake, knowing professors will often throw them a point or two.

The exams are, typically, slight variations of problems from assignments. Often, they are the same.

Exams have no curveballs; problems or situations that you have never seen unless you did extra readings. No problem which to solve you must have read more or fully understood the core material.

The TA is primed to give 40% of a problem's points for free - just restate the problem in math and draw a picture and right out the door you get 2 out of 5 points.

Note that, as far as I can tell, this is not generally true for "hot" topics like CS or bio. These programs have so many eager kids that the material is hard. But then these fields get hard working, bright, kids that don't actually care about the material - they go to McK. Within ten years they've forgotten everything and are just consulting parrots.

I was a B/B- student from a foreign top 100 university. I don't know how I got accepted to a top 5 engineering school in the US. I accepted and ended my PhD with a 3.3. Im not very bright or hardworking.

What did I see at the university? Very hard working people. Very interesting research. Very shallow knowledge outside a narrow domain expertise.

These are the folks McKinsey hires... but these shallow thinkers are sent on 6 week projects for companies in industry they hadn't even heard before.

Once, no one in the team knew what product CompanyX sold... CompanyX is a a top tier multinational consumer product brand that routinely sponsors sports events, including TV ads.

"US produce... mostly not very bright people?"

The top universities are not setup to mold intellectually rigorous and curious people. It's setup to make hard working, and increasingly sycophant men.

My lab mate is a former drug addict with two years of art school. Easily more intellectually curious than anyone I met at McKinsey.

99.9% of the world doesn't live in the US with a 4.0 GPA from a top ten university.

They're not very bright, most of them. But they're very hard workers and high achievers. They stay for the resume candy or the health care.

Not really when you normalize by hours you are expected to work. You're also surrounded by spineless sycophantic keeners without an original thought in their heads who would throw you off the building for a good review.

It reminds me of Lewis' "National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments"

The health care is amazing, though. $30/mo for a family $900 deductible? Something like that. If you have a sick family member it's a no brainer.