Billy Gerhard is a consultant in the Philadelphia office of the Boston Consulting Group, a Big 3 management consulting firm. In 2019, he received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Gunsch Lab from Duke University. His research was on microbial response to water treatment and invasive bacterial species movement. Prior to attending Duke, Billy received a B.S. in Biology and a M.S.P.H. in Environmental Engineering from UNC-Chapel Hill.
What got you interested in consulting?
I enjoy problem solving. However, as I got further along into my Ph.D., I realized that they were not the types of problems I wanted to be solving for the next forty years. Consulting was a way to apply my problem-solving approach to different problems faced by all kinds of businesses. That was really the value in my mind, changing away from just solving niche problems in my field of study.
How do you interact with your coworkers with different degrees? What do you bring to the table as a Ph.D?
I thought they would expect me to be the data and analytics member of the team, having a Ph.D., but other degree candidates [such as MBA, JD] and even undergraduates have these skills, too. Sometimes you bring in knowledge from your Ph.D. field, which is pretty cool, but it does not always happen. I do feel that PhDs are very comfortable with data-heavy cases, since we have been around data for four or five years.
Now that you have been through the hiring process, how would you describe BCG’s culture?
The Big 3 are more similar than they are different. I wanted to get a broad experience across a bunch of industries and I knew that I would get this opportunity at a company like BCG. If I had wanted to work in the healthcare field specifically, I might have looked at another specialty firm. But since I wanted that broad and varied experience, BCG was the best fit for me. The collegiate and collaborative atmosphere at BCG made me feel comfortable which I felt was important as I challenged myself in many other ways.
What is one thing that you did while in graduate school that has benefited you in your transition to consulting work?
When I got my BCG offer, I asked a friend at BCG what I should do in my last year and he recommended an Accounting 101 course to audit. Just being around a bunch of business terms will greatly help the transition from engineering or another field to business. My research got busy and I had to drop it, but even just three weeks of the course paid off in improving my knowledge of business terms.
Obviously 2020 is very different than years past, but can you describe what a typical day looks like at BCG?
Fingers crossed that the people reading this will start at a consulting firm when things are back to normal. Travel is typically Monday through Thursday, and you tend to work pretty hard during those days on the road. I did not mind it, as you were on the road anyway, away from normal home life. Thursday night I would be home for dinner, and then Friday I would go into the office and catch up on things from the week while preparing for next week. I can count on two fingers how many times I have worked on weekends, outside of my personal time on Sunday planning for the week. Obviously shifting to virtual work removed the travel and a lot of the in-person interactions but work itself did not change much.
How does BCG put barriers in place to prevent burnout?
First piece of advice is to not be afraid to take some time between school and consulting. Take a break and enjoy the time. Second piece of advice is that having open communication with your managers helps as well, so you can go to them if you need some time or want to rearrange your tasks a bit.
What is your best piece of advice for the recruiting and hiring process?
Comfort and authenticity are huge during the interviewing process. Do not focus on being perfect. Do what is comfortable and authentic to you. It is not a matter of if you make a mistake, it is when. But being able to make a mistake, step back, and roll with it is important during the interview process.
Editor’s Note: The responses are paraphrased. The actual interview was much longer, so to fit into a blog some of the answers were curtailed and rewritten.
Ricky Hollenbach is a third year Ph.D. student at Duke University in Mechanical Engineering, studying unsteady aerodynamics and mechanical vibrations in jet engines and turbomachinery. He aspires to become a management consultant in the aerospace and defense fields.
Image: Pixabay
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