This is usually the first question, and it's a fair one. The honest answer: they can. Plenty of students recruit successfully without any outside support. This program doesn't claim to be the only path.

What it changes is the odds, and the cost of getting it wrong.

Here's the situation most students are actually in when they come to me: they're motivated, capable, and working hard – but they're guessing. They don't know which firms to target, whether their resume is actually competitive, how many people they should be networking with, or what a real case interview even looks like. They find out what they got wrong only after they've already missed the recruiting window for the year – and in consulting, there often isn't a second chance until the next full cycle, sometimes a year later.

The program doesn't do the work for your child. It removes the guessing – replacing trial and error with a system that's already been tested across dozens of students, so the time they do spend is spent on the right things the first time.

If they try it entirely on their own and it works out, that's a fine outcome too. What this protects against is the far more common outcome: months of effort, and nothing to show for it, discovered too late to fix. 

This isn't a "pay and you're in" program. Every student goes through a free mentorship interview first – a conversation where I assess their background, goals, and specific gaps before anyone is invited to join. Some students I recommend not join yet, and point them toward what to work on first instead.

If your child has been invited to enroll, it's because I've already assessed that this is a good use of both their time and your investment – not just that they asked.

I want to be upfront rather than let this surface as a surprise later: the program doesn't offer refunds once enrolled. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight – it reflects the level of hands-on work involved from day one (target firm strategy, application review, ongoing coaching), which starts immediately regardless of outcome.

What it does offer instead is no time limit. Support continues until your child lands a full-time offer — through a full internship cycle and, if needed, the full-time cycle after that. "Not working yet" and "not working" are treated differently: if the first recruiting season doesn't land an offer, support continues rather than ending.

If you have questions about this specifically, I'm glad to talk it through directly before any commitment is made.

Career centers offer general resume review and interview prep for all careers, which is genuinely useful. What they typically don't offer is a system built specifically for consulting recruiting – a referral-based networking process, consulting-specific case interview practice, or someone who has personally reviewed consulting applications on the hiring side. Many students in this program use both.

Support isn't limited to 1:1 time with me alone. Students have access to a community of other students in the program, group coaching sessions, and recorded mock interviews from other students to learn from – so support doesn't bottleneck entirely on my personal calendar.

The baseline time commitment is roughly 5–7 hours a week, increasing during active interview periods. Most students find this manageable alongside coursework, though it's a real time investment and worth planning around, not something that happens passively in the background.

If cost is a genuine barrier, I'm happy to have a direct conversation about it – reach out and we can talk through the options.