How I became a Big 4 consultant with no business degree

I didn't study business, and it didn't matter

No economics. No management degree. No Masters, no MBA. I studied physics at Imperial College London — because I loved solving problems, and physics is a degree in solving problems.

That turns out to be the entire point. Consulting firms are not hiring people who already know business; they're hiring people who can take an unfamiliar problem apart. A science degree is evidence of that. Nobody at Deloitte ever asked me why I hadn't studied economics.

I spent my first year trying things — and my second year wasting time

In first year I went to every insight day going: Citi, Goldman Sachs, BDO, EY, Deloitte. Some of it was CV padding, honestly. But it taught me what I didn't want, which is worth more than it sounds.

I'd already done J.P. Morgan's Winning Women programme after my A Levels, and the offices were extraordinary — but I knew, standing in them, that I didn't care about markets. It just wasn't me, however much my dad would have liked it to be.

So I lined up a summer internship in accounting, through a friend's mum who knew someone who owned an accountancy firm. Networking works, and it works earlier than you think. I hated the internship. Came out as clueless as I went in.

Then second year, I lost the plot entirely. Got absorbed in university social life and stopped thinking about my career at all. I'm still slightly shocked by it — this was a person who sold sweets at school at eleven and started an Instagram jewellery business at seventeen. Time is the one thing you can't get back, and I spent that year spending it on other people rather than on myself.

The thing that changed everything was a person

At the end of second year I met someone at university who I ended up co-founding a startup with over the summer. That pulled me into the startup scene, and suddenly I cared about something again.

Find the people who make you ambitious. Not the ones who are impressed by you — the ones who are slightly ahead of you and pull you along. They become your support system, your honest feedback, the reason you keep going.

My biggest regret: I bet everything on one plan

By third year I was certain: I was going to be an entrepreneur. I volunteered at Techstars. I entered Startup Weekend and won it — with, I'm afraid, a home STI testing kit called Bangcheck. Roast me; I've earned it.

Because I was so certain, I didn't apply for a single internship in my third year. The cycle opened, and I ignored it. That is my biggest regret from university.

Because the startups were failing. I couldn't acquire customers, and the ones I got didn't stay. And slowly I realised the honest truth: I didn't know how to build or scale a business. I'd been trying to run before I'd learned to walk.

Have a plan B while you're pursuing plan A. Not because plan A will fail, but because the cost of a backup is almost nothing and the cost of not having one is a year.

I found consulting late, and panicked

Fourth year, career fairs, and I finally heard about consulting — embarrassingly late. People ask why I didn't just stay in physics, and the answer is that I didn't want to spend a lifetime on one narrow problem. I wanted to solve problems that changed something quickly. Consulting offered exactly that, except the problems were businesses.

The received wisdom is that education, extracurriculars and experience get you the job. I was average on education, okay on extracurriculars, and frankly poor on experience. And the consulting roles had closed.

That feeling — that you've missed the boat and your whole life is ruined — I promise you it's survivable.

What I actually did

First, I checked I'd even like it. I messaged people on LinkedIn relentlessly, asking whether consulting would genuinely teach me how to build and scale a business. Not networking to get a job — networking to find out whether I wanted one.

Second, I built a story instead of pretending I had one. You do not need to show you were always destined for consulting. I wasn't. What I did was connect the dots honestly: physics taught me to solve problems, the startup taught me I couldn't scale one, and consulting was the fastest way to learn how. That's a real story, and real stories land better than invented vocations.

Third, I got relevant skills rather than a relevant logo. With almost no consulting roles open, I took what I could get: internships at Jaguar Land Rover — where I joined in purchasing and manoeuvred my way into strategy work on connected-car features — and BAE Systems, where I ended up doing operations consulting despite not joining in that team. Neither was a consulting internship. Both gave me consulting skills.

Industry felt slow to me. I wanted something more intense. After going to programmes run by Deloitte, PwC, McKinsey and Oliver Wyman, I knew.

Two doors, and I took one

By February, graduated, no consulting experience, almost every role closed — there were exactly two open: Deloitte and PwC, both in tech consulting. I didn't want tech consulting. I'd heard it was "just implementation," which is wrong, and I knew it was a way in.

I got both. Waiting a year for the next cycle would have cost me a year of learning and a year of earning, for a purer starting position I didn't need.

What I'd tell you

Don't let your degree, your grades or your missing internships decide what you're allowed to want. Create the opportunity: message people, take the adjacent role, build the skills somewhere nobody's watching.

And this one matters most: your first job out of university does not have to be consulting. I was so stressed about this, and it simply isn't the end of anything. It won't reduce your chances. You can always switch — people do, constantly.

Everyone's route looks like a mess from the inside. Mine certainly did. If you're figuring out where you're stuck right now, the Stuck Type Diagnostic takes two minutes — or read the mistakes I made once I got there, which is the sequel to this story.