Consulting Internship at McKinsey: A Comprehensive Guide

This article gives you an overview of consulting internships at McKinsey. Overall, landing an internship is as rigorous and competitive as securing a full-time consultant role, and interns handle a workload nearly the same as full-time consultants.

What does a consulting intern do at McKinsey?

By nature, consulting interns’ work is very similar to full-time consultants. In general, full-time consultants oversee the “manual” work of a project, while Engagement Managers manage the big picture.

Both consulting interns and full-time consultants will act as “content ambassadors” between complicated client context and knowledgeable & expert consultant. 

The job of those “content ambassadors” can be summarized into two big tasks: gather and create content. While this sounds simple, in fact, the consultants will have to put in a large amount of work. They must be able to solve the problems first, then deliver the solution as a proposal to the clients, or their director. 

The process is usually like this:

• Problem-solving: A consultant would come to the client, gather data (through research, interviews with clients, mystery shopping, etc.), then analyze the situation, break it down into smaller pieces, and finally get a proper solution. That consultant can bring in experts who know best about a particular field (either function or industry experts) for support.

• Deliver technical expertise: After the long "problem-solving" process, the consultant consolidates every small item into the big picture and articulates everything into a specific proposal to the client.

To understand the work of a consultant better, you can watch this video: What the heck does a consultant DO, exactly? 

What kind of consulting internships does McKinsey offer?

Two main tracks: Undergraduate & MBA

McKinsey consulting internships typically fall into two main tracks: undergraduate and MBA. Undergraduates are generally recruited into Business Analyst Intern positions, whereas MBAs are recruited into Associate Intern positions. 

At McKinsey, Associate positions are one level above Business Analyst positions, although this might not be the case at other consulting firms because of different namings. To have a better visualization of where these positions are among the consulting career path at McKinsey, you can look at the image below.

Undergraduate internships - Business Analyst Intern

At the undergraduate level, as mentioned above, successful candidates are often assigned into the main track of the McKinsey Internship program - the Business Analyst intern role.

In the McKinsey’s career website, you can see that intern positions opening for undergraduates can come under different programs. They can be Sophomore Summer Business Analyst Intern, Business Analyst Intern or Fellow Intern.

In a project, Business Analyst interns are usually assigned to support a senior Business Analyst or Associate with a big workstream. In some rare cases, interns can lead a small workstream. If you, as an intern, are assigned to support a Business Analyst or an Associate, you will report directly to that person. If you lead a small workstream, you will report directly to the Engagement Manager (EM).

MBA internships - Associate Intern

At the MBA level, successful candidates are often assigned into the Associate Intern role. Again, their work structure is very similar to that of full-time Associates.

The Associate intern position is an interesting position. Upon their entry, Associate interns are already much more senior than other interns. Hence, even though Associate interns are technically newbies in the McKinsey world, the company will make sure they enter senior positions very shortly.

Specifically, McKinsey does this by assigning more responsibilities to Associate interns: they typically get to lead or semi-lead a workstream. One common practice is that the Engagement Manager will assign another lower-ranked yet senior employee, e.g. a Business Analyst, to help show the McKinsey way around. Throughout the project, Associate interns report directly to Engagement Managers.

McKinsey internship information - Duration, salary, acceptance rate and others

McKinsey internships are typically 10 weeks duration

The timing and duration of internships are determined by each individual office. In general, and in most locations, a McKinsey internship lasts around 10 weeks.

However, there are exceptions. For example, internships in the Almaty and Astana offices last 9 months, the Sao Paulo office offers internships ranging from 8 to 12 months, and programs in Mexico City and Monterrey run for 10 to 12 months.

So while 10 weeks is the standard length in many offices, some locations offer significantly longer internships. Be sure to check the recruitment updates from your target offices to confirm the exact details and have a proper preparation.

McKinsey internships salary and benefits are extremely competitive

The consulting industry is famous for its tremendous high salaries, especially at one of the most prestigious firms like McKinsey. In that sense, interns’ salaries cannot be low. McKinsey once said on its website: “Our interns are paid a competitive salary and receive some of the benefits of our full-time colleagues”.

As there’s no official data, we can take a look at the data available on Glassdoor to see the competition in the salary of an intern in McKinsey. Below are the data we’ve collected from Glassdoor.

Since Glassdoor data comes from mass surveys, it may have a wide margin of error, so it’s best not to rely on it too heavily.

The data above shows noticeable salary differences between roles. However, based on our information, consulting interns earn nearly as much as full-time consultants. So, for more accurate figures, consider reaching out to current or former consultants at your target office.

Regardless, it’s worth highlighting that both Business Analyst intern and Associate intern positions still offer impressively high pay ranges. Besides the salary, according to McKinsey, interns are also provided a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for them and their family.

McKinsey internship acceptance rate is estimated at just 3-5%

Securing an internship at McKinsey is just as rigorous and competitive as landing a full-time position. Usually, only about 25-30% of applicants pass the screening stage and get to the interview round. From there, only 3-5% receive an offer.

Its acceptance rate is on par with the admission rates of the world’s top 10 most selective universities. According to the U.S. News, some of them include Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale universities. This level of selectivity highlights the importance of thorough preparation and a standout application if you want to be among the few who receive an offer.

What if you fail applying for the internship?

According to McKinsey’s Careers FAQs, “If you are not selected for an internship, you can still apply for full-time positions.” You can view the full statement in the image below or visit the link at the end of this section.

However, based on our information, if your internship application is not successful, you might face a reapplication ban of 1 to 2 years. During this period, you could be ineligible to apply for any other roles, including full-time positions. It’s important to keep this in mind when planning your application strategy.

To avoid any misunderstandings, be sure to carefully read all recruitment updates or directly contact the HR representatives at your target office to confirm the reapplication policy and prepare accordingly.

Read more from McKinsey’s Careers FAQs website: Careers FAQs | McKinsey & Company. 

Consulting interns at McKinsey can get a full-time offer

At McKinsey, interns who meet the firm’s performance expectations may receive an offer to return in a full-time role after graduation. This pathway allows outstanding interns to skip much of the usual application process and transition smoothly into a full-time position.

Even if an immediate offer is not extended, high-performing interns are often given priority over new applicants in the full-time recruiting process. This means your internship is more than just a short-term learning experience. It is also a valuable chance to prove yourself, build relationships, and secure a long-term career with the firm.

Where to find more McKinsey internship information?

If you’re interested in applying for a McKinsey internship, it’s important to look for information directly from official sources. Internship availability, application timelines, eligibility and program details can vary by office and change from year to year. To avoid missing out or misunderstanding any key information, make sure to check McKinsey’s latest recruitment updates regularly.

For the most up-to-date details on McKinsey’s recruiting process, visit their student careers page: https://www.mckinsey.com/careers/students.

To find current internship openings, you should check McKinsey’s job search page: https://www.mckinsey.com/careers/search-jobs. 

When searching, try using keywords such as intern, business analyst, associate, or fellow to narrow down relevant opportunities.

Three-round recruitment process at McKinsey

Application round: Resume / cover letter screening

The first step in the McKinsey internship recruitment process is the application round. Application materials typically include:

• Resume: Summarize your experiences and highlight your leadership, achievements, and problem-solving skills.

• Cover letter: While optional, a strong cover letter can showcase your motivation and explain why you’re a good fit for both McKinsey and the consulting industry. 

• Academic transcripts: For undergraduate and master’s candidates, McKinsey often requires transcripts as part of the application.

Read more about consulting resume / cover letter here: Consulting Resume  / Consulting Cover Letter

McKinsey Problem Solving Game - Solve

After passing the resume screening round, you will be asked to complete the McKinsey’s assessment game, called Solve. The test is composed of 2-3 “mini-games” which on the surface are about ecosystem research and preservation, but in fact, deep down they are all designed to simulate consulting work.

Because McKinsey Solve is fully digital, it can be taken at home (as long as you have a working internet connection).

Currently, there are three available mini-games you may encounter while taking McKinsey Solve, including Ecosystem, Redrock and Seawolf.

Read more about McKinsey Solve here: McKinsey Solve (Imbellus Game) - 2025 updated overview

Interviews: Personal experience interview and case interview

Each McKinsey candidate will have to undergo 4-6 interviews during 4-8 weeks. The first 2-3 interviews are often conducted by Engagement Managers; later interviews are conducted by the more senior Partners or Directors. McKinsey interviews usually consist of two parts: The PEI/Personal Experience Interview (10 minutes) and the case interview (30-45 minutes).

Personal experience interview (PEI) is about “that one time in your life” when you did something extraordinary. In the 10-minute PEI, the interviewer will ask you to tell one story, then drill down to extract insights about your soft skills and personal traits. Some of them could be “Tell me about a time when you overcame a significant challenge” or “Tell me about a time when you convinced people to change their viewpoints”. Besides these stories, the interview might also ask you the “Why consulting/Why McKinsey?” questions.

In a case interview, you are given a business problem and asked to solve it. That problem, together with the whole surrounding business context, is called a case. McKinsey case interviews are often interviewer-led. At the most extreme of this format, the interviewer “leads” the problem-solving process by asking separate questions related to the case context. The candidate cannot decide how to approach the problem. In actual cases, however, the candidate may be given some autonomy depending on the interviewer.

Read more about McKinsey Interviews here: Overall of McKinsey Case Interview: Insight You Must Know!

How to prepare for the McKinsey recruitment process?

Some big-picture preparation advices

Prepare as early as possible

Consulting prep is ideally a long process. You may spend a year or even more learning the fundamental skills and embracing the mindset, and at least 2-3 months preparing for the resume screening, the tests and case interviews.

To equip yourself with the most well-rounded skill set for consulting, read up and practice on the following topics:

• Management Consulting: Job, firms, industry and culture (especially the firms you target)

• Consulting Math: Math in business context, mental math, and chart-reading

• Tests: McKinsey Solve, BCG Potential Test, BCG Casey, Bain Online Test, etc.

• Case Interviews: Interviewer-led and candidate-led case, tips and techniques

• Fit Interviews: Stories to suggest your outstanding, consulting-fit qualities

Build networks early on

A big part of the McKinsey internship selection process involves case interviews conducted by managers. These interviews are expensive because they take away revenue-generating hours from said managers.

To make the most out of these expensive interviews, consulting firms highly favor candidates with positive reviews from inside the firm or the alumni network. That’s why networking is especially important in the early stages. If you can connect with a mentor, ideally a current or former consultant at your target firm, it’s even better. Beyond the potential for a referral, they can offer valuable insider advice to strengthen your application and interview performance.

So when should you start networking? As early as possible, because relationships take time to build. If you’re still in school, network a year before career events to be one step ahead of the competition, then try to get referrals. Referrals increase the chances of your CV being reviewed by recruiters in the first place.

Below are three common methods, but are less effective in general:

• Networking through acquaintances: Start with the consultants you know, followed by anyone your colleagues, friends and family can introduce. The biggest limitation is accessibility – you might not find any potential lead.

• Networking through events: This method is most convenient for applicants from target schools. Consultants here are complete strangers, but they do expect applicants to approach them after the events, so you do have a higher chance than the next method.

• Cold-emailing/Cold-calling: The least effective, but the most scalable method. You find them through LinkedIn or similar means, send emails to establish contact and request for a meeting. Most of the time, you will be rejected, but if you play the cards right, you will get someone on your side.

How to prepare for the resume / cover letter screening round?

Read the full guides here: Consulting Resume  / Consulting Cover Letter

One thing you should keep in mind while preparing the resume and the cover letter is that these papers must be written in the consulting style. In both of these papers, explicitly but objectively show off your consulting attributes: leadership, achieving and problem-solving.

The content

Whatever stories you tell in your resume and cover letter, they must emphasize the three attributes mentioned above. They must either be about leading and influencing people, doing analytical work, achieving the extraordinary, or any combination. 

More importantly, you must be highly specific and result-oriented. Instead of rambling on with your list of experiences, show the screener quantifiable results of your work, which shows you are the best.

For example, even if you flipped burgers, say something like “Set the new speed record for flipping burgers, surpassing the previous record by 50%”. Specific statements are thoroughly more impressive and more trustworthy, even outside the consulting industry.

The presentation

Regarding the format, there is no other option but black-and-white. You should keep it absolutely formal and professional. Fancy-looking resumes might get you creative jobs, but will get you cold rejections in the conservative consulting industry. Same goes for the cover letters.

Regarding the structure, every bullet point in your resume must contain similar parts. The language of these bullets must be totally formal as well. Communication must be top-down, both in resumes and cover letters.

How to prepare for McKinsey Solve?

Read the full guides here: McKinsey Solve (Imbellus Game) - 2025 updated overview 

Spend 2-3 weeks to do 15-25 mock tests

For best results, you should start about 15-20 days in advance. It means that you will have 5-7 days to prepare for each mini-game. For each, you should do 15-25 mock sessions. In that way, you can get yourself exposed to all kinds of scenarios in the test and get really fluent with the interface.

Many people don’t start to prepare until the invitation for Solve comes. Consequently, when they receive the invitation, they just have 7 days left, meaning only 2-3 days per mini-game. This leads to the fact that they won’t have enough time to practice, and the risk of making mistakes and facing unexpected issues while taking the real test is rather high.

One of the reasons why people hesitate to start the preparation might be: they think preparation means paying for courses and mock tests. And they feel whatever money they spend on it would be wasted if they don’t receive the invitation.

In fact, you can totally start without spending any money. You should focus on the fundamentals, and make use of all the free online content. We have a lot of free deep-dives on our site. Read them all, pay attention to the illustrations and examples, and you can get yourself acquainted with Solve without spending any money at all. Then, once you have received the invitation, you can buy the courses and mock tests.

But, again, that’s not something we would recommend. If you can afford the mock tests, you should get them about 15-20 days in advance for better preparation.

Focus on math and charts first

Math and charts should be the first items on your preparation list because of the two reasons: they are the basis for Redrock; and math is present in both Ecosystem and Seawolf.

As for Redrock, the math-and-charts exercises there are mostly related to data-analysis tasks. They could be reading and creating charts, making comparison-related calculations (change over time, percentage, ratio, etc.), statistics (mean, mode, median), and probabilities.

As for Ecosystem and Seawolf, what you need is good mental math (same as case interviews). It’s not that you have to do the math there mentally (as they allow calculators). It’s because if you are good at mental math, you can “eyeball” the right answers much quicker.

Then comes problem-solving

Next on the list, after learning math-and-charts, is problem-solving. Specifically, we’re talking about consulting problem-solving, in all its issue-trees-and-hypotheses glory (in plain English: you have to raise hypotheses and test them repeatedly). 

You need this specifically for Ecosystem, because the theory behind that game is exactly what we consultants use on the field. You will have to group species into groups, and test each group to see if it is feasible to build a food chain from it. 

The same theory applies in Seawolf. There you will have to set criteria yourself as to what makes an “usable” microbe, then test microbes against those criteria, and hopefully, from already-tested microbes, build a treatment for each site.

No need for business knowledge and video games

Business-specific knowledge (such as business strategy, accounting, finance, etc.) is not required in Solve. McKinsey explicitly says as much, and we think that claim is justified. Every single test takes place in pseudo-biological settings (i.e. involving animals, plants, and ecosystems).

Likewise, contrary to our claims a few years earlier, video games don’t help. Especially with Invasive Species / Plant Defense (the most game-y of all the Solve games) out of the picture. It’s for one simple reason: there is basically no game on the market resembling the current Solve games.

How to prepare for PEIs / fit interviews?

Read the full guides here: Fit Interviews at MBB: Categories and Requirements 

Sometimes, each question type in the PEI will be used for the same kind of story. This means that, even if you draft 10-12 stories, 2-3 for each question type, you may only use only one story for every question.

Instead of preparing on a question-answer basis, a more efficient approach would be to focus on the stories. You should prepare three to five stories and make them as detailed, all-rounded, well-presented as possible. View them from every possible angle, each corresponding to a trait required by McKinsey, or to one of your personal values. With such an approach, you also gain flexibility. As with well-developed stories, you can respond to ANY kinds of questions, even the unexpected ones.

How can you prepare such stories? Spend your efforts on three layers of a story - the content base, the plot, and the style.

You can read our full guides with the link above for detailed and step-by-step prep guidance.

How to prepare for problem-solving interviews (case interviews)?

Read the full guides here: Case Interview 101: The Online Guidebook

To prepare for case interviews, especially McKinsey case interviews, we recommend you to follow these steps:

#1. Get familiar with some case examples

To grasp how McKinsey cases “flow”, we encourage you to go out there and find as many examples of interviewer-led cases as possible. There are six such examples on the McKinsey website with suggested answers.

• Beautify 

• Diconsa

• Electro-Light

• Transforming a national education system

• Talbot Trucks

• Conservation Forever     

#2. Practice consulting math

Consultants work with quantitative data dozens of times a day. It simply takes too long to pull out a calculator every time they need to calculate something, and doing so in negotiations looks really bad. This is why interviewers place such high emphasis on the mental math skills of prospective consultants.

In the beginning, consulting math can be difficult for some; nonetheless, we have a few tips for you to ease the process and still practice effectively: 

• Use your head daily: Do all your daily calculations mentally unless an EXACT answer is required.

• Flatten the learning curve: At the start, a piece of scratch paper and a 5% margin of error really help; once you are confident, discard the paper and narrow down the margin.

• Establish a routine: Allocate some time for daily practice. This may seem hard at first, but once you’ve overcome the initial resistance, you can literally feel the improvement.

Read more about consulting math: Consulting & Case Interview Math Practice Guide.

#3. Develop business intuition

Having business intuition significantly sharpens your performance in case interviews.

Working on any kind of intuition is a gradual process that takes practice every day. You can improve your business intuition in two ways:

• Written sources: I suggest reading business papers daily; you can also visit McKinsey, Bain, and BCG websites for their excellent articles. Beware though – it’s not the pages you read that count, but the insights you draw from them.

• First-hand experience and observations: Don’t just come to your workplace to work; try to examine what senior managers are doing – what’s the rationale for their decision, and how has it impacted the organization?

#4. Learn fundamentals and question types

As a consulting intern at McKinsey, you will need to tackle real business problems. Hence, knowing the fundamental concepts of consulting problem-solving is crucial. In the candidate-led case interview, particularly, make sure to master the use of hypotheses, issue trees, MECE principle – they are the backbone of this interview kind.

The other key to conquering interviewer-led cases is in methodically mastering each and every basic question type; then you will be ready to tackle the more complex and less predictable ones.

For each type, there are always tips and techniques to deliver an ideal answer; you can check out an even more comprehensive guide in our Case Interview Questions. The key takeaway is to treat interviewer-led questions like mini-cases, and take a structured, MECE approach to each.

#5. Self-practice solving the case examples 

When getting the fundamentals of a case interview, you can try to solve case examples by yourself first. With McKinsey’s official practice cases, you should solve the case based on what you’ve learned, then compare your answer with McKinsey’s official answer. 

In that way, you can both get familiar with the process of solving a case, and find out your weaknesses in case-solving at the same time. Besides, you can also broaden your problem-solving angles by learning from the new approach of the official answers.

#6. Perform mock interviews

The best way to train on something is to do it.

Well, you CAN’T simply come to McKinsey and ask them for a case interview, but you CAN find a partner to conduct mock interviews for you. It’s better if you can find a former consultant to do it – they’ve been through countless case interviews, both mock and real.

Make the best of every mock interview you do by recording them, then replay again, and again, and again. You’ll realize a lot of mistakes you made, and how you can fix them.