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

It’s Facebook for Sean Patrick Doyle

Sean Patrick Doyle came to Haas knowing he wanted to work in technology. Before business school he’d worked at Groupon in an operational finance role. His purpose in going to school was to shift into a sales or management role. “I definitely was not targeting Facebook when I started,” he says. “I thought I might want to work for a smaller company,” he adds, noting that he’d gotten to Groupon in its early days and liked the craziness of trying to build something from the ground up.

But then he did a trek to Facebook and was swayed. Even though it’s a big place, he saw a lot of fast-moving, start-up qualities when he visited. When it came time to choose an internship, Doyle found himself in the enviable position of choosing between offers from a few big tech companies. At Facebook, he interviewed with the woman who would be his manager that summer, which was a stark contrast from the other firms, who couldn’t even tell him who his manager would be. “Facebook was very flexible with me and made me feel comfortable,” he says. Even when he divulged that he was choosing between Facebook and two other companies, they had nothing but good things to say about the other companies, he says. They also gave him the choice of working in either Chicago—where he and his fiancé are from—or Menlo Park.

He ultimately chose Facebook, where he was one of only four or five MBA interns in the sales function, he says. He opted to work out of Facebook’s Chicago office. “The team I worked with was amazing—super helpful, especially since I had no advertising background and knew very little about that world,” he says. A big part of his work was helping the team pitch campaigns to McDonald’s. “It gave me a day-to- day look at what the client solution manager role is like,” he says, adding that the woman in that role let him shadow her and even take the reins in certain instances.

He also learned that McDonald’s has a separate Facebook page for each of its 14,000 locations throughout the United States. “I got to work with our internal engineering team and a third-party client to try to come up with a better process to get all those locations uploaded.”

In terms of his recruiting process, Doyle, like his classmates, credits the guidance he received from the Career Management Group. “I came in knowing I wanted to do tech, but I thought I wanted to be in product management,” he says. “But in talking to Career Management, I quickly learned that product management was different from what I wanted. They really helped me align what I wanted to be doing with the jobs that would let me do that.”

He also sang the praises of the small but mighty Haas alumni network. “In the recruiting process it was always easy to get an informational interview, and I was able to talk to multiple people at Facebook,” he says. “When I decided I was going to intern there, Dean Lyons sent an email to all the Haas alumni there to say I’d be there for the summer and to get in touch. Even though it may be smaller, the strength of the network is incredible,” he says.

On the final day of his internship, his manager told him he would be getting an offer, which came a few weeks later. “I knew from the get-go that if they offered it to me I would take it,” he says. “The benefits that Facebook offers are spectacular, and the overall compensation package was everything I wanted. That, plus my comfort with the company—there were never any red flags,” he says.

Again given the choice between Chicago and Menlo Park, he and his fiancé have decided they are ready to make the West Coast their home. He’ll start in mid-July, after attending four weddings and two bachelor parties and returning to Chicago to do some planning for his own wedding next April.

Google Spots Googliness in Mohsin Alvi

Mohsin Alvi came to business school thinking he wanted to go into consulting, went through the recruiting process, secured an internship at Deloitte and converted his internship into a full-time offer.

Along the way, he got an unsolicited email from Google about a project process manager role. “On the back end, they have a resumé book of a bunch of business schools, and they email students whose experiences they believe might align with what they thought the role would entail,” he explains. That led to a call with HR, which led to an onsite interview. Four interviews later involving six to eight different people, Alvi got an offer from Google. “Fortunately, it came before I had to respond back to Deloitte,” he says with a laugh.

Deloitte was disappointed that he turned them down—even still encouraging him to come to their scout weekend. “They had me seated with one of the more senior partners, who definitely gave me the soft sell,” he says. “They really did make a good effort and it wasn’t the easiest choice, but in the end it was the right one for me.”

For Alvi, Google offered an opportunity to explore and still be a generalist. “They have hired me as a generalist in business operations—even now I don’t know my defined role, but I will get to choose between eight available options before I start,” he says.

Even though he relied on the Career Management Group to prepare for the recruiting process for consulting, the help he received ultimately aided in his interview process with Google, he says. “The people in the Career Management Center really challenge you to think about what you want and why you want it—and they encourage you to have meaningful work and follow your calling,” he says.

Before business school, Alvi taught middle school in Baltimore as part of Teach for America and then worked in operations consulting. Throughout the interview process with Google, they were testing him on how he could leverage both his teaching skills and his operations process thinking. “I actually talked more about my teaching than anything else in my Google interviews,” he says. “Google looks for ‘Googliness’—that you are passionate about something beyond the average person—and it doesn’t matter what it is,” he says. “I talked a lot about my students—it was really, really cool how naturally that came out.”

He does wonder whether maybe he should have skipped the consulting route and considered tech from the beginning. “But the reason I was so successful in Google interviewing was because I had done consulting and case prep,” he says.

Though Alvi didn’t ultimately need to rely on the Haas alumni network much in his job search, he does love it when his path crosses with another Haasie. “We take our defining principles really  seriously,” he says. “They can seem like taglines when you’re looking from the outside in, but we genuinely believe in them, especially ‘confidence without attitude,’” he says. “When you meet another Haasie, it just feels like family.” Two of his interviewers at Google were Haas alumni, he adds.

“It is really important to me to be at a company that at least exhibits Haas principles,” he says. “The top ten Google ideas and the concept of Googliness are very much aligned with the four defining principles of Haas.”

Five Distinct Paths, One Common Bond
What rang through in each of our interviews was the importance of the Haas defining principles to the students at the school, and chiefly “confidence without attitude.” Almost every student we spoke with referenced it specifically. The school’s mission page defines this principle as follows: “We make decisions based on evidence and analysis, giving us the confidence to act without arrogance. We lead through trust and collaboration.”

Haas feeling like home and fellow Haasies feeling like family was another common theme. And all of the students remarked about the Career Management Group’s encouragement to really spend time looking inward at what type of work and experiences brings greatest fulfilment and then map that to a career.

We wish each of these recent graduates great success in their new roles and hope to have them report in from the field down the line!

This article originally appeared in its entirety on clearadmit.com

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