Edition #6: Hritika Ghosh
Explore Before You Commit
Hritika's path wasn't linear, and she's adamant that's the point. Across her five-year degree, she cycled through financial advisory, consulting, private equity and investment banking before choosing McKinsey, treating university less as a countdown to one destination, and more as a window to test several.
Each stop taught her something different. PwC, at 19, was less about technical accounting and more about the basics of professionalism - showing up, managing her time and working full-time while balancing societies. Kearney then gave her a first real look at what consulting delivers for clients: staffed on a cost transformation project, she found herself, at 20, presenting findings directly to the client. Her private equity internship at Five V Capital put her alongside people years further into their careers, an early education in how investment theses get built. But it was UBS that sharpened her technical skills the most, and forced the real decision - banking versus consulting.
When weighing the tradeoffs, Hritika boiled it down to three things: the type of work, client interaction and breadth. Here, Hritika found that consulting was the perfect mix. It offered a continuous, intellectually complex set of problems to solve, with C-suite exposure occurring far earlier than most careers, and a level of breadth across industries that would help her develop a transferable skillset.
It's a lot like David Epstein's case in Range: Why Generalists Triumph In a Specialised World, where he argues that sampling widely before specialising often beats committing early. Hritika's internship trail reads like a case study in it.
Case Competitions as The Bridge
If internships gave her exposure, ICCs gave her the reps. Hritika represented UNSW at three international case competitions, placing first at both BI Norway and HKUST, and reaching the global final of Cornell's PropConnex competition in New York — judged by executives from companies like Equinor, Norway’s largest company, and HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks.
"There's a whole toolkit of skills in the art of communication and execution and how you convey those ideas to executives - that's fundamentally the biggest gap between what you learn at university and what you actually need on the job."
You can read about frameworks, but nothing teaches you to think on your feet like forty minutes with partner-level judges staring you down. Case competitions gave Hritika the pressure that internships rarely demand in a single sitting.
Societies as The Throughline
Most people pick one society and go deep. Hritika ran three at once - FMAA, 180DC and UCC - from first year through to executive roles. As Vice President of Operations at FMAA, Australia’s largest finance society, she learned how communication and logistics operate at scale. As Vice President of Consulting at 180DC, the world’s largest student-led consultancy for not-for-profits and social enterprises, she saw a society that mirrored a firm's hierarchy closely enough to call it a preview of the job a decade in. At UCC, as Vice President of Education, she found her most personally rewarding role: mentoring younger members preparing to compete on the same stage she once did.
What tied the three together wasn't a skill, but rather a habit of setting a vision each year with her executive team, and thinking about how they wanted to be remembered.
"The people are what make the experience worth it"
It's a habit she's carried through every stop on her path - treat the people in the room as the reason you're there, not a footnote to it.
Closing Comments
It's not easy getting into McKinsey. The acceptance rate is marginal.
But when we asked Hritika what actually got her there, she didn't point to a credential. She pointed to conviction - a "why" for consulting that only came from genuinely testing the alternatives first, not assuming them.
It echoes the Japanese concept of Ikigai, or "reason for being": the idea that real fulfilment sits at the intersection of what you're good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you love. Hritika didn't map that intersection out in advance - she found it by testing each corner one internship, one society, one competition at a time, until consulting was the only option that satisfied all four. The "best" career was never going to be some universal answer sitting at the top of a prestige list - it was always going to be the one that fit her, specifically, and that's the part no one can figure out for you.
For students early in their university journey, her advice is the same: work backwards from where you want to be, and let curiosity, not urgency, set the pace. The ‘best’ career is never going to be some universal answer sitting at the top of a prestige list. It’s always going to be the one that fits you, and that’s a question that no one can figure out for you.
But you don't have to have it all figured out from day one. The real value is in finding your true passion along the way, one step at a time.
This article was written by Siddharth Ramachandran, and edited by Melissa Tan. All experiences and opinions are their own unless otherwise specified, and do not represent the views of the UNSW Consulting Club or any affiliated organisations and sponsors.
