How These Haasies Landed Jobs at McKinsey, BCG, Apple, Facebook and Google

Veteran Olivia Anglade Heads to BCG

A self-professed “Navy brat,” Olivia Anglade grew up in Seoul, Korea, went to Stanford as an undergrad with an Army ROTC scholarship, picked up a master’s degree in engineering while at Stanford, and then set off to serve her country in exchange for the education she’d received. “I can do this,” thought Anglade. “Serve my country, have school taken care of, have a guaranteed job when I’m done and apply the skills I learned at school.” And so she did—commissioning in the Army as a project manager for construction units mostly in Hawaii. “My soldiers were carpenters, electricians and plumbers, and we built stuff,” she recalls.

When a 2010 earthquake struck in Haiti, where Anglade’s family is from, it was a pivotal moment, she says. “That’s when my professional expertise as a builder and my personal background collided. I had always thought I would work in Haiti, and there was now no excuse—I could actually apply my skills to helping the country.” She transitioned out of the Army and worked as a contractor for USAID in construction for two years in the disaster-ravaged island nation. “It was an incredible opportunity for me to understand the history of Haiti and the infrastructure and to apply my own expertise in rebuilding the country,” she says.

She found the work incredibly rewarding and frustrating at the same time. “There are huge swings of optimism and despair,” she says. As she began to consider options for her next step, she landed on an MBA as a natural progression for her career. To date, her entire career had been in public infrastructure. “I didn’t know what the private sector looked like, period.”

Because she’d already been working for seven years, the general age of students, compounded with class size, were her most important considerations. “I knew I wanted to go to a school where I would get to know my classmates very intimately and they will get to know me—I did not want to just be a body walking around.”

She confesses that an element of weather also came into play. “Having lived in islands that begin with ‘H’ for the past seven years, I was not ready for a harsh climate.” Finally, Haas’s defining principles also resonated—particularly “confidence without attitude.” As a veteran who had lived in one of the poorest countries in the world, Anglade has seen a lot of things many students haven’t. “But at Haas, it’s not having to prove that thing, it’s just being who you are surrounded by people who are curious about that.”

Like Chin, Anglade was struck by the “soul searching” element she encountered in her work with the Haas Career Management Group. With this guidance, she was able to identify that she gets greatest fulfilment through service. Client service as a consultant promised to give her exposure to many different industries and functions she had never experienced. “Within a month, I landed on the idea that consulting would be a great path for me,” she says. Longer term, she has her eye on something in the social impact or nonprofit world, but she recognizes that to truly have an impact on a small organization, she would benefit from greater exposure and broader breadth first.

Also like Chin, she credits the resources of the Consulting Club and Career Management with helping her prepare for intern recruiting. She also praises the Haas alumni network. “Alums from the Bay area would always reach out,” she says. “The commonality I found with them was great. They greet you with open arms. ‘I’ve never even met you before. This is great!’” she remembers thinking during such encounters.

In terms of classes that most prepared her for full-time work at BCG, two immediately come to mind. The first is an Excel modeling class taught by Professor Sarah Tasker, which helped her understand how to design financial models with a focus on usability—specifically how to create models that the client can use, that are clear and concise and that limit the potential for mistake. “I am going to walk into BCG with what I learned in that class in my back pocket, and that is going to be incredibly valuable,” she says. Another, “Negotiation” taught by Juliana Schroeder, already came in handy when she sublet her apartment to a classmate.

Anglade was a Consortium for Graduate Study in Management Fellow coming into Haas, which meant she got to take part in a Consortium Orientation Program (OP) even before classes started. At OP, she connected with Starbucks, who actively tried to recruit her for a consulting role. If she had just been returning to the United States to work in a construction role, it probably would have been perfect, she says. But because she knew she wanted to branch out and take a risk, she persevered through the official first-year recruiting process. That said, having an offer from Starbucks really enabled her to narrow down the number of consulting firms she targeted. “I told myself, ‘I am only going to apply to consulting firms I can really see myself at, because if not, I will go to Starbucks.’” This positioned her to really evaluate consulting firms in terms of culture and take her time in making a decision. Her summer at BCG made her know she wanted to return. “The people and the culture I found aligned really closely with Haas,” she says. “Honestly, clients will change, but what is steadfast is the people.”

“Haas helped me figure that out, too,” she says. “What is important to you? You can have the best job in the world but if the company culture isn’t good, you are going to leave.”

And so she’ll start at BCG, but not until January 2017. “This is also a reflection of my experience at Haas,” says Anglade, who describes herself as a go-go- go person with zero white space on her calendar. “Thinking about taking seven months off before work terrified me,” she says. But Haas has enabled her to be more reflective. BCG offers five options for start dates rather than receive all full-time consultants at once. “If you choose the January start date, BCG provide a fellowship to do a language immersion program anywhere in the world in any language of your choice,” she says. So she will travel to Morocco to learn French as part of her time between now and January. She’ll also devote a month to spending time with her 86-year- old grandmother, work with classmates on some startups, maybe do some nonprofit strategy-type work and also visit family in Belgium, Abu Dhabi and Montreal.

Armin Hoebart’s Journey from Haas to Apple
Austrian-native Armin Hoebart worked in consulting before coming to business school for a small company in Europe that served very traditional companies in the manufacturing industry. “I came to Haas because I wanted to explore multiple options,” he says. “I knew I did not want to go back into consulting or to do finance, but that was about it.”

Hoebart echoes Anglade and Chin in praising the exploration the Career Management Group encouraged him to do. “They were great about allowing me to explore different routes without pushing me into any one direction,” he says. To start with, Career Management helped connect Hoebart with area startups, enabling him to work with one during his first year.

Career Management also helped Hoebart recognize that he was looking to make two switches—country and industry. He wanted to work in the United States upon graduation rather than returning to Europe, and he wanted to shift from the slow-paced manufacturing industry to a very fast-paced industry. “The advice I received—and I am very grateful for it—was to keep operations a theme,” he says. From his tech undergraduate studies to his operations work as a consultant, the fact that he is a very numbers-driven, analytical person shone through.

The “soul searching” process he did with the help of Career Management helped make three things clear. “First, I want to work on a tangible product—something I can touch and see and be proud of what I have achieved in the end.” His second discovery—further supported by the Haas curriculum and outside activities he took part in—was that operations is something he is not only passionate about but also good at. And the third thing he realized was that he wanted to work for a company that is the leader in what it does. “With Apple, I have totally achieved all three,” he says.

The soul searching that led to these discoveries included answering a very detailed questionnaire about the work and activities where he felt most engaged, what he had enjoyed in previous jobs and what he hadn’t. “It was as least five pages for sure, and it took quite a while to fill out,” he recalls. But it meant that at his first meeting with one of the CMG advisors, he already knew what he brought to the table and what would potentially be a good fit or not.

He continued to meet regularly with his advisor, at least every other week or every three weeks. “They are there whenever we need them, but they don’t force themselves on us,” he says. “If I decided to talk to an advisor literally every other day, that’s absolutely possible—but if I decide I don’t need an advisor at all, that’s fine, too.”

This advisor-guided self-exploration was only the first step, Hoebart explains. Apple came to campus and he had the chance to connect and have initial conversations, but even more important were the Haas alumni he was able to contact who work in operations at Apple. “Everyone I reached out to prior to my second-round interviews responded,” he says, agreeing immediately to take his call or meet for coffee.

“I don’t want to say they helped me prepare for the interviews—I don’t think there is really a good way to prepare because the Apple interviews are so unique,” he says. “But they really helped me understand what the culture is like and what the company looks for when they hire employees.”

Though he doesn’t know the exact number of students who applied for internships at Apple and how many the company took, the process felt very competitive. “From the sheer number of interviews—it was six or seven in total—it felt definitely competitive,” he says. “The sense I got is that Apple is very careful about picking people that fit into the company culture and also bring the right set of skills.”

Hoebart received his full-time offer right after his internship concluded. He didn’t do any additional recruiting in his second year, but he did continue his part-time work with startups to try to figure out whether working with a big company was what excited him most. Ultimately, Apple just felt right.

“Especially working in operations, there’s still a lot for me to learn,” he says. “And what better place to learn operations that at a company where it is really taken seriously?” He also saw Apple as a good place to grown and enhance skills that he could later apply toward a startup when and if that felt like the right thing. “Even though Apple is already a big company, it is incredibly nimble and you get a chance to work on great projects,” he says. “It really felt more entrepreneurial than I thought it would when I started.”

Though he didn’t ultimately choose to pursue the startup path straight out of school, he’s grateful to Haas for helping him have those experiences to test out. He worked for not one but two startups during his time in business school. For the first, a four-person team called Compression Kinetics that makes a wearable sports device, he helped build up the supply chain. For the second, an Austrian company called i5growth that helps Austrian startups establish a foothold in the Bay area, he helped with corporate business development. “Both were in the startup space, and it was important for me to get a sense of what this space looks like and whether it was something I wanted to pursue,” he says. “If I had not been at Haas, I’m not sure I would have had these opportunities.”

Beyond the soul searching help of the Career Management Group and the opportunities to connect with startups, the Haas alumni network stands out most for Hoebart. “We are only 240 people per year—as compared to 800 at other schools,” he says, which made him somewhat hesitant about Haas at the start. But he was positively surprised to discover not only that he could find Haas alumni at any company he was interested in, but also that they were helpful and responsive and willing to talk. “The connection amongst our classmates and other classmates and alums is tighter, so people feel more obligated to help one another,” he says.

regions: San Francisco

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