Recruiting FAQ
What applicants ask us most about joining 180DC.
We hold recruiting seasons in the fall and the winter, both at the start of the quarter. Each season there is an application, then interviews. Dates for the current cycle are on the Join page timeline, and Instagram (@180dcuci) is the fastest place to catch them.
No, and most people who join don’t have any. We recruit for curiosity and work ethic. The rest you pick up through casing workshops, mock interviews, and your first engagement.
All of them. Our teams mix business, economics, engineering, data science, and humanities, and that mix genuinely makes the work better. Coming from outside the business school is not a disadvantage here.
You get placed on a team of four to six and build something a real organization will actually use. Around that there’s training, socials, retreats, and office tours.
Figure five to eight hours a week while an engagement is running. That covers your team meeting, client touchpoints, and whatever share of the research and deliverables you have taken on.
Yes. Every applicant goes through the same case and behavioral interviews, and what year you are in does not factor into the decision.
Round 1 is a group case interview. You work through a case with a few other applicants while our interviewers watch. The thing worth knowing going in: we are watching how you contribute, not who wins the room. Say your structure out loud before you jump to an answer, build on what other people say instead of talking over them, keep an eye on the clock for the group, and make sure you land on a clear recommendation before time runs out. Running one or two practice cases out loud with a friend helps far more than reading about them.
Round 2 is a behavioral interview plus a market sizing question. For the behavioral half, come with three or four stories you can tell well: a team you worked on, something you led, something that went badly. Be ready to say why 180DC specifically, not just why consulting. For the market sizing half, practice estimating out loud. State your assumptions, break the number into pieces you can actually reason about, do the arithmetic slowly, and check at the end whether the answer sounds sane. We care much more about how you got there than the number you land on.
The casing workshop at our info sessions starts from zero, so you do not need to have done any of this before. If you want to go deeper on your own, these are what we usually point people to: