After failing to pass MBB first round interviews in college a few years ago, I have another shot in one month. Many people claim to be bad at case interviews, but I'm atrocious. I'm curious: Has anyone overcome the following shortcomings with enough reps? Is a 1 month timeframe realistic for drastic improvement, with 4h practice/day?
Background: I'm not unintelligent according to my accomplishments on paper (ivy league school, 3.8 GPA, academic awards).
I fear two things will keep me from being successful in these interviews:
1. My working memory is crap. I'm exceptionally slow when it comes to math, and struggle to write down initial case information in about 50% of cases. Generally, I can't keep track of multiple data points in head at once, and therefore can't synthesize and draw conclusions quickly enough in case scenarios.
2. Unstructured in verbal communication. Because my brain can't keep track of everything in working memory, I ramble a bit as I work through things.
I write in a structured way, but only because I have time to do a brain dump and organize thoughts logically when I have a 45-minute exam essay or similar task.
One positive: case partners consistently say I have a natural instinct for business/cases, and my brain moves quickly and intuitively through a case by default. I've also learned this working the past 3 years out of school. Of course, operating intuitively is the antithesis of what firms want to see. They want a tiny bit of creativity in brainstorming or framework creation, sure...but ultimately, they want a hypothesis that is explored using a framework that is attacked logically and evolves/changes based on data they present you.
