I'm an analyst at Bain, a leading management consulting company. I work in the San Francisco office and what we do is advise other companies on strategic decision such as how to grow revenue or cut costs. Specifically, I use excel to do analysis for fund managers and partners.

EDUCATION | I have a Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

HOW TO GET STARTED | Talk to people who work in management consulting, brush up on Excel skills, and during the interview process, stress your ability to work in client-facing capacities.

MUST HAVE TRAITS | You have to be people-oriented, be organized and have good time management skills. Also, you need to be able to take feedback well, both positive and negative, from anybody ranging from clients to bosses.

how I got started | I did a lot of internships in college. I worked one summer at Booz Allen Hamilton, another consulting company that does more government consulting. I figured that with a business background, I wanted to do more profit consulting and so I applied to work at Bain.

why this job?| I wanted something with variety. I didn't want a job where I had to do the same thing every day. Consulting gives me a chance to work with different industries figuring out different problems. It's a great starting point for whatever else I want to do in the future.

why I love this job!| I love learning from other people. At Bain, we're all assigned a mentor as well as an advisor, who collects input from our managers and gives us advice and direction for our career path. There are also great informal mentors such as the people I work with on projects. They give me insight into my work and what my strengths and weaknesses are. I love that learning process.

my typical day| I live very close to where I work so I'm up at 8 a.m. and in the office at 8:30. I eat the free cereal that they have at my office and usually throughout the day, I have one or two meetings, each an hour or two hours long. The meetings, which are about the projects that we're working on, could be anytime during the day. The rest of the time, I'm doing analysis and putting together PowerPoint presentations, sending my projects to my managers, doing research and working with the information services office that helps me put together research reports. In all, I would say that 30% of my time is spent in meetings and 70% on analysis and research.

what they are | If you're not from a corporate background, then you might encounter some challenges in the politics of a corporate environment. You need to know who to talk to about what, and conduct yourself in a very professional manner at all times. Even if you are straight out of college, you want your clients to feel that they can depend on you. Aside from adjustments to the environment, the work schedule can be demanding at times. Depending on the project, you could have a project with a very short -- sometimes 3 or 5 hour -- deadline. Those are called "fire drills" and they can be stressful.

all about growth | The consulting track is 2 years entry-level analyst, promotion to senior analyst, usually followed by 2 years of business school. If you choose to come back to consulting, you may be promoted from Consultant to Manager, and after a long time as Manager, be promoted to Partner. If you do not stick with consulting, you can do any number of things such as work for a non-profit organization, something that I'm personally very interested in, or go to law school or pursue something entrepreneurial.

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