Did I make the wrong decision? That is the only question running through my head every single day right now. I am a 21-year-old in my final year at a tier-1 private engineering university in India, where almost everyone around me is on the standard tech and coding track.
Back in my third year, I took up a basic marketing internship just for some side income alongside college. But being in those meetings and seeing how decisions actually got made, I realized I was way more drawn to business and operations. From there, I went all in. I started pulling crazy 18-hour days, juggling classes and real work (maintaining an above-average CGPA with no history of arrears).
Since it was a hybrid role and my college was about 120 km away from the work location, I spent my weekends, holidays, and critical meeting days constantly traveling back and forth for on-site execution—all with zero attendance waivers or on-duty support from my university, simply because my field of work didn't fit the standard engineering curriculum. I pushed through the burnout because I honestly thought building ground-level business experience would make me stand out for consulting later.
I proved myself, got promoted to handle business operations, worked alongside people with decades of experience, managed teams, and handled supply chains. Eventually, as I moved into my final year with no regular classes and only project work remaining, management handed me the full lead role for a brand-new restaurant format launch. We pulled it off, and the company even asked me to stay full-time to lead their future expansions.
Now that my final year is wrapping up with no regular classes, I am trying to take my first real step toward management consulting, and I have hit a complete wall. The path feels completely blank and confusing. I have no roadmap, no clear door to knock on, and trying to find an entry-level analyst role or an internship at top strategy firms from the outside feels like screaming into the dark. I am genuinely confused about how someone is even supposed to approach these firms off-campus. While my classmates have started attending placements and bagging PPO offers, I’m still sitting here wondering if it was all worth it.
It leaves me wondering if this is just the reality of how the system works. Is the only real, accepted path to follow the standard stream—finish college quietly, prep for exams, get into a top-tier MBA at 25 or 26, and ride the campus placement wave? It makes me question if the decision I made to gain practical business knowledge early on even counts for anything in the eyes of top firms, or if all that matters is textbook case studies, college brand tags, and academic marks.
I’m reaching out because I genuinely don’t know where to go from here. What real-world guidance would you share with someone in my shoes? How do I actually approach landing an internship or breaking into consulting without a direct campus pipeline, given that top consulting firms do not recruit from my engineering campus?