How to Ace My Application

What do we look for?

Assisting our clients to the best of our ability starts with our recruiting process. We look for driven individuals with a real passion for social impact and who want to leave their mark on the world. We also expect to see a consistent commitment towards the project, providing the space for you to learn and improve on your soft and technical skills. Most importantly, we want you to have fun! Having a passion for continually learning from those around you, maintaining a positive and collaborative attitude, encouraging open communication and having a creative mindset are all qualities present in 180DC Consultants.

Your experiences and interests provide unique perspectives on our projects, allowing for greater depth when presenting final solutions to the client. Unlike many other consulting societies, 180DC is largely composed of students from non-business disciplines, e.g. psychology, engineering, medicine. Whether you’re a 1st-year Commerce student looking for some insight into a consulting career, or a 4th year in Medicine student who is simply curious and wanting to make a social impact, all are welcome to apply!

Tips & Tricks

Receive all the tips and tricks you need to ace your interviews!

Use the STAR method

The STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method is a great way for you to clearly lay out your role in a significant scenario and how it has come into fruition.

We recommend this structure as it nicely blends people and impact together, and allows us to recognise your past experiences!

Make sure your responses are structured and direct

As much as we love a good story, there are only so many you can remember, particularly in one session! Therefore, it is incredibly hard to follow without structured responses.

To ensure that your response is targeted, we recommend signposting - using firstly, secondly, etc. It helps with pacing and more importantly, a clean structure.

We invite you to consider and reflect on what makes you you - think about experiences that might have shaped your leadership, conflict, and teamwork style, strengths and weaknesses, conflict style, passion areas, etc.

Make sure to outline your thought process

A case interview is a hypothetical business situation used to determine how a candidate thinks about a problem, commonly used across consulting firms.

At 180DC, the purpose of the case interview component is for us to understand how you think. It’s also the best time to show us your creativity or innovation, as well as your logical reasoning.

Hence, we are less interested in whether or not you get the ‘right’ answer, and more about how you thought about the problem and why you thought that.

Practise Sample Cases

Before entering the interview, it is important to get a feel for case interviews and how you might approach them.

Attempting them beforehand allows you to get familiar with working through a business problem and it mimics the scenarios you might face as consultants, which will help you become prepared for the work you will get involved in throughout the project cycle.

Sample Case Study

Please note that while our cases often reflect the type of work we do, this case is based on an entirely fictitious client.

Problem Set 1

Your client is a small local hospital in Western Sydney, and has come to you with the issue that they are extremely restricted on capital. The hospital operates like a normal public hospital, however, they also have a small fundraising arm, wherein the funds that are raised are used to treat people who are in financial need, or fund research and clinical trials for particular medicines.

Today, the hospital would like to know how they can increase their funding.

You’ll be given 20 minutes to work on this together with your partner, and then 3 minutes to present your recommendations, after which there will be a 2-3 minute Q&A. Please ask any questions you might have about the situation or client, as there is some more information we haven’t given.

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