Shailaja Dadhwal

My preparation started with the 4 member group that CRUX made. Initially, I played the role of an observer in the group.  Solving cases with the seniors also helped me get a reality check on my progress. Post-case analysis was perhaps the most important part of my preparation as it helped me understand my strengths and weaknesses. 

Personally, I believe that post-case analysis should be done after some time so that your mind is fresh again and unbiased with your first attempt. 

I also found unconventional cases to be extremely important as they mimic real-life cases where you need to think on the go. One should keep solving unconventional cases from the very start and not leave them for the end.

For Auctus I had 3 rounds. The first was a buddy round done on the call before the consult day. In this round, I was asked to make a decision tree and give answers in numbers. 

The second round was more of a behavioral round where I was asked different situational questions. It was mostly stakeholder management. In this same round, I was given an unconventional case where I was told that our client is a high-net-worth individual who wants to donate 200 million USD to ensure that the primary school dropout rate is zero. I was asked to find out if this quantum of money was sufficient. I used the 4A framework and found out that staff training was the pain point. I was further asked to a guesstimate of the number of teachers, students, and the money required to decrease the dropout rate in primary schools. 

My third round was a holistic CV  and a  traditional case-based round. 

I feel like I started my case analysis quite late.  I would have really liked to increase the number of cases and case analyses that I did. Also, more unconventional cases would have been good as they would have helped me test my inherent case-solving abilities. 

I would also want to do more cases with my seniors and spend some time developing my own frameworks and case-solving style. I had a few personal case  solving approaches but I would have wanted to spend more time there.