I had the opportunity to spend the summer of དྷ at Dalberg, meeting some great people and working on a social impact case at the intersection of gender, financial inclusion and agriculture!
Since there's been quite a bit of interest on my internship experience and the application process, I've penned this piece down so that it may be of help to everyone applying this year!
I've covered 3 key aspects of the application process:
- CV and essay submissions
- Aptitude Test
- Interviews
CV & Essay Submissions
The application required 3 components: A one-page CV, an essay describing my interests in international development and social impact, and a copy of my academic transcripts.
It's important to note that your CV is probably the most important part of your application, and therefore, needs to be furnished with the utmost care. Beyond the standard rules of CV-making for a consulting role, (using action words, highlighting outcomes over processes, quantifying scale of impact, etc), you can use this opportunity to describe any work that you may have taken part in, in the social impact space. You need not have past experience in the social sector (I didn't), but describing your motivation to work in this sector through past experiences (tangential, as it may be), is necessary to show that you understand the nuances of working in the development space.
This is also where you can use the essay as a narrative device. The one thing that you should focus on avoiding, is for your essay to be a descriptive version of your CV; Instead, use the essay to answer the 'why', not the 'what' or the 'how'. The essay should enable the reader to understand you beyond your CV: your motivations, choices and your professional trajectory. While your CV describes what you did, how you did it and what you achieved, the essay should ideally tell the reader why you did it, and what you wish to do in the future, both up to and beyond working with Dalberg.
As for the transcripts, while it's difficult to say if there is a CG-criteria, maintaining a CG above 8 should ensure that you're in a safe zone with respect to shortlists.
Aptitude Test
The second step of the process was an eliminative aptitude test, which was about ~70 minutes long, covering 10–11 sections, across quantitative aptitude, logical reasoning, language and comprehension, puzzles, etc. We had about ~3–4 days to practice before attempting the test, and there's no definitive way to practice for this or predict questions. I practiced a few previous years' CAT papers, which I think suffices to develop an understanding of what can potentially be tested.
Following this round, there was another shortlist, which was directly for the interviews.
Interviews
Interviews at Dalberg are eliminative in nature and tend to be ~1 hour long, consisting of 4 segments: A general interaction with your interviewer, a case interview, fit-based questions and questions with regard to your previous professional experiences (from your CV).
General Interactions
The most important question that can possibly be asked in the interview is to tell the interviewer about yourself. Making this answer short, structured and open-ended enough to spark a conversation with the interviewer sets a great tone to the interview.
Additionally, there may be some time reserved towards the end of the interview for you to ask questions to the interviewer. This is a wonderful opportunity to ask the interviewer about the work that they may have done with the firm, as well as their personal career trajectories. It shows your curiosity and enthusiasm, and allows you the chance to gleam insights into the firm's work and culture.
Case Interviews
Cases that are asked at Dalberg are not traditional management consulting cases (profitability/market entry), but are cases focused on social impact and development. A general overview of traditional consulting cases generally helps to get used to the case solving process, and what's important to note here is that memorising frameworks from traditional consulting cases is a crutch and does more harm than good. Developing a robust understanding of the first principles from which those frameworks are constructed enables you to replicate the process for social impact cases, while simultaneously being inclusive of components which traditional frameworks will not cover.
An excellent resource to do this, is the blog on the 5 Ways to Be MECE in Case Interviews by Crafting Cases, which is the most comprehensive series I've found so far in my preparation. This can be supplemented by solving a few cases (~10–15 should do the trick if you're new to case solving) from CIC (the IIT B casebook) or Day 1.0 (the IIT M casebook), to get an idea of what solving cases is like. Avoid reading through cases, and always solve them with a case partner (ideally someone who has solved cases before, and a huge shoutout here to all my friends who tolerated my incessant asks to solve cases at odd times), to simulate interview conditions.
Once you have a fair idea of what case-solving looks like, you can directly dive into solving social impact cases from this list of cases that Dalberg shared when they visited campus for placements a couple of years ago. A lot of these cases are mega-cases (a term that I use in my head to refer to cases that contain multiple sub-cases), and therefore take quite a bit of time (> 1 hour) to fully solve. Different things work for different people here; Personally, what worked best for me was to fully solve mega-cases as I started out, to push my thinking, and closer to the deadlines, I began time-limiting the cases to simulate real-life interviews.
One more thing to note is to be mindful as you solve cases, as these are most likely real problem-statements that your interviewer has worked on. Adopting a mindset of solving it as if you were on the case-team works wonders. For example, one of my cases was to calculate the potential GDP impact of ~100M rural women coming online over the next 5 years due to low-cost smartphones and increasing internet penetration. A key constraint that helped streamline my structure was the realisation that these women most likely have certain obligations towards domestic duties and childcare which are immovable in their schedule, and that the smartphone may not be owned individually, but communally (shared within the family) leading to constraints on when they can use it, how long they can use it and how they can use it, which automatically eliminated a huge chunk of analysis that I would have otherwise had to do. Additionally, this grants you some brownie points for demonstrating an understanding of the stakeholders that you are solving for.
Fit Questions
Fit questions are weighted just as much as the case interview (~25–30 minutes each), and so should be prioritised just as much. Common questions can include "Why consulting?" and "Why social impact?". Key pointers to keep in mind are:
- Be genuine
During my time at Dalberg, I had the privilege of getting to know individuals from different nations with diverse backgrounds, and motivations ranging from interests in nuanced problem solving, to working in interested niches such as healthcare and energy. In my personal experience, the firm encourages and celebrates authenticity and letting yourself be authentic is far, far more important than feeding generic answers to the interviewer.
2. Be structured
The ability to articulate your answers crisply, demarcate, and clearly communicate them cannot be understated. Period.
Number different components of your answer to demarcate them and root your answer in first principles (the what, the why, the how, and so on) to answer the question.
3. Don't be afraid to get personal
While counterintuitive at first sight, you have to be persuasive, to make the interviewer want to select you. Explaining to your interviewer why this internship is personally important to your career and to you as an individual is a surefire way to persuade them to select you. This is a double edged sword: a story that does not inspire works just as much against you as a story that inspires works for you.
Other fit questions commonly tested in consulting interviews are your strengths and weaknesses, your greatest achievement, your greatest regret or failure, and so forth.
CV-based Questions
No big-brain moves here. In addition to following the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) framework for answering questions, starting your answer with 1–2 lines of context about the firm where you interned at, a particular position of responsibility that you assumed, etc can ground your answer in some context that may otherwise be missing.
Additionally, focus on what you did. Most common answers describe efforts undertaken by a team and results achieved by a team that you may have been a part of. Specifically focusing on what you did allows the interviewer to gauge your contributions and abilities.
The entire process lasted about ~3 months (from application deadline mid-November to offer letter mid-February), so it's important to pace yourself and not let your nerves get to you. Here's to everyone applying — I'm rooting for you! :)