Pei-Ann Lin Acosta
Pei-Ann Lin Acosta, PhD, is a Consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). She earned her bachelor’s degree in Biological Engineering from MIT and her PhD in Neuroscience from UCSD. During graduate school, Pei studied the effects of alertness on auditory sensory representations in Dr. Jeff Isaacson’s lab and was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Now as a management consultant, she specializes in private equity and pricing strategy, and her work is predominantly focused on tech companies.
Can you describe your academic and professional background? What path led you to pursue this field?
During graduate school, I realized that although I still loved designing, implementing, and analyzing experiments, I also felt somewhat stifled by the process of thinking about and answering the same overarching scientific question for months and years on end. This feeling combined with my desire to see more tangible impacts of my day to day work pushed me to start looking for alternative career paths.
Management consulting seemed to fit what I was searching for— topics vary widely across functional areas and industries, the average project is often only a few weeks to months in length, and there’s also this mantra that is often missing from academia: the 80-20 rule. The 80-20 rule dictates that you can typically get to 80% of the right answer with only 20% of the work. Essentially, if you are ruthless and smart about how you prioritize research and analysis, you will get to an answer that is good enough to accurately drive key strategic decisions for any business. I was intrigued by everything about this career path.
How did you find this particular position, and what was the hiring process like? Is there a typical structure for this in your field?
By the time I realized that management consulting might be the right next step for me, I was 6 months away from defending. This was somewhat problematic because management consulting does operate on standard “cycles” of hiring and firms predominantly hire MBAs fresh out of business school during the summer an entire year before their start date. However, “off-cycle” hiring for non-MBA advanced degree candidates (e.g. PhD, MD, JD) does exist depending on time of year and individual office needs.
In terms of breaking into the off-cycle hiring process, I was able to get referrals to BCG from an old friend from high school and a former post-doc in my lab. This helped ensure that my resume would not be automatically filtered out of the piles of applications BCG gets every week and that a recruiting specialist would personally look at my application to see if I would be a good fit.
The rest of the hiring process moved lightning fast for me due to my desire to start within the year (typically the process can take several months or more). I was invited to an HR informational interview a few days after my application submission, I completed my first round interviews (2 X 30 min on-site) 2 weeks later, and then I completed my final round interviews (2X 45 min on-site) the very next week.
Can you tell us about your current responsibilities? What is a typical day or week like in your role?
For most of this past year, I’ve been specializing in private equity buy-side diligences, focusing predominantly on tech companies. These projects are usually 2-4 weeks long and we are typically tasked with evaluating whether our client, a PE firm, should purchase a certain software company and whether there is potential to grow that company and eventually sell it at higher value.
Diligences require me to learn very quickly about a variety of industries. Some of my most interesting cases have been in industrial synthetic diamonds, hand sanitizer, funeral homes, e-commerce, and bankruptcy administration. In terms of day-to-day work, I am usually running one of three specific workstreams to find the answer for our client:
building a quantitative market sizing and forecast model
designing, fielding, and analyzing a customer or consumer survey
Making phone calls to experts in the industry to get a lay of the land and to test our hypotheses
What do you enjoy about your current job and work environment?
What I love the most about this job is the sheer variety of problems I get to solve week to week and the almost immediately tangible outcomes. In addition to the private equity work I focus on now, I spent 6 months doing pricing strategy work for a large software company and our pilot program ended up successfully driving record price realization compared to control groups—even despite the unforeseen circumstances of COVID! Hearing about these success stories from our clients is really an amazing feeling and makes the job that much more fulfilling.
I also actually really enjoyed traveling 5 days a week prior to COVID. I chose to remain based in San Diego (despite my home office being located in LA) and would spend Mon through Thurs in the Bay Area (where most of my clients tend to be), Fridays in LA, weekends in San Diego. It was exhausting but fun.
What are some of the challenging aspects of your job? Is there anything you wish you had known about your job or industry before joining?
I think most graduate students have worked long hours in their lifetime and are used to the constant grind. However, it’s hard to really understand just how DENSE the long hours are in consulting compared to in academia. Deadlines can be absurdly tight too—it’s not uncommon that I have to start, complete, and present an analysis all within the same day.
So, it’s true that work life balance is not the greatest in consulting and that the job can be incredibly high intensity at times. On the plus side though, weekends are generally sacred in our line of work and there is definitely a “work hard play hard” type of culture.
Do you have any professional plans for the future? What are some future career paths that could open up for someone in your position, 5-10 years down the road?
My current interests are to join the pricing strategy team at a biotech or software company. The great thing about management consulting is that the skills we learn are applicable in a variety of industries and functional areas, and the opportunities that we have a chance to pursue are not necessarily only limited to areas in which we’ve done work in. I believe corporate strategy at senior manager level is a pretty general and common exit for someone of my tenure. Some folks go and work for Fortune 500 companies but many also go to new and exciting start-ups.
What’s changing in your industry? Are there any future trends we should be aware of?
The job has fundamentally changed during the COVID era. Remote work is awesome in that we get to spend more time with our family and friends, but we tend to stay “online” more often and for longer periods of time than when we used to travel. We also can no longer count flight/hotel points and meal expenses as a significant portion of our total compensation. Only time will tell what the “new normal” management consulting world will look like in 2021.
What activities, internships, or organizations would you recommend someone get involved with to help them break into this field?
For anyone curious about management consulting, I highly recommend visiting your school’s consulting career club (if it exists) to learn more and to meet other graduate students who are preparing for the hiring process. At UCSD, this was the Advanced Professional Degree Consulting Club (APDCC).
Keep the following in mind if you are thinking about how to frame your resume and experiences for this industry: firms hire advanced degree candidates for their ability to excel in whatever environment they are in or have been in in the past. The fact that you are getting a Ph.D. means you very likely fall in this category of people. Additionally, they want candidates who think analytically and synthesize new and complex content quickly. In my opinion, this is about all that we do in graduate school, so the grad school skillset is way more well-suited for consulting than most students are aware of!
Is it common for people in your field to have a scientific/academic background (i.e. have PhDs)? Can you think of any advantages or disadvantages someone with a PhD might experience while pursuing or working in your field?
I can only give a rough estimate but I think ~1 in every 10-20 management consultants at BCG is from a non-MBA background (PhD, MD, JD) as opposed to an MBA background.
PhDs have the advantage of being very well-trained in quantitative/analytical skills but typically come in at a disadvantage when it comes to handling ambiguity, designing approaches to very unstructured problems, and being comfortable with driving decisions based on only 80% of an answer at say…only 70% certainty.
Do you have any final words of advice for those navigating these career questions? Is there anything you would have done differently given what you know now?
Try to apply to the summer preview programs at consulting firms (e.g. BCG’s Bridge to BCG program). They can be a great way to get your foot in the door and on a firm’s radar while also educating yourself about what the day-to-day job feels like.
