Angelina Lu took a pay cut to quit management consulting and join a tech startup.
Angelina Lu
Angelina Lu is a former business analyst at McKinsey & Company.
She left her $140,000 consultant job because of burnout and describes a difficult workload.
Lu says she was too proud to admit her declining mental health to managers and coworkers.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Angelina Lu, a former McKinsey consultant. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I studied material science and engineering as an undergrad at Northwestern University. But after spending two summers working in a research lab, I realized that research life was not what I wanted — I didn’t feel excited by the repetitive routine of going to the lab and conducting research.
I became more interested in the business side of material science rather than the technical side and considered another career path — consulting, a popular track for many Northwestern graduates.
I was hired by McKinsey & Company as a business analyst
When I joined in 2016, my base salary was $80,000 plus an additional performance bonus. McKinsey provided a retirement program contribution of 7% of qualified compensation, and I also received a sign-on bonus of $5,000. That brought my total compensation in my first full year to $106,650.
The bonus was based on my performance after the first year, and it was calculated as a percentage of my base salary. If I performed exceptionally well, I got a bonus addition to my base. Then in the following year, this bonus, combined with my base salary, was my new base for compensation.
By the time I left McKinsey as a senior business analyst, my salary was around $130,000. As far as I know, McKinsey doesn’t negotiate salaries, and they don’t play the numbers game. It doesn’t matter if you’re hired as a business analyst or associate, or even if you have competing offers from other companies — there is no negotiating your salary.
For me, the $130,000 salary wasn’t worth it, so I walked away and took a pay cut to join a tech startup. I also wanted to explore something else in my career.
The McKinsey workload was mentally agonizing
We averaged 12- to 15-hour work days. On a typical Monday, I’d wake up at 4 or 5 a.m. to get to the airport and catch the earliest flight to wherever my client was located. On the flight, I would either catch up on work, get ready for the day, or nap a little just to get more rest.
I still recall how depressed I felt during one flight to a client’s city. Just as the flight was touching down, my phone was going off with a ton of email notifications. The sound of the notifications was stressing me out so badly that I moved the Gmail app to the last screen of my phone just so I could stop looking at it and try to calm down.
There were some weeks that were specifically known for having crazy workloads, like the two-week due diligence period. This is when a consulting firm thoroughly investigates a client’s business, operations, and other relevant aspects. During this time, some of us had work until the early hours of the morning and were only able to sleep a few hours before returning to work at 8 a.m.
I was also stressed out by a not-so-friendly colleague. He was an associate on my team who had been at the firm longer than I had been. Whenever there was an issue with the project we were working on, he said it was because I didn’t do my job properly, which made me look really bad in front of leadership. This whole situation was super stressful — I remember it was wintertime in Chicago and I started to have severe face allergies and stress-induced eczema on my hands. I just couldn’t stop scratching.
I started losing my humility and patience
McKinsey recruits extremely smart people and, in general, all these smart people share similar backgrounds — most are extremely intelligent academically or very accomplished in their fields. We consultants got used to a certain well-manicured lifestyle. We stayed in upscale $400/night hotels, and the company gave us food credits of $120 each day. We also never had to worry about the more extraneous administrative tasks — McKinsey took care of all that for us.
For example, McKinsey has its own dedicated travel team that books flights for consultants. If we needed to change a flight, instead of having to wait in line and contact airline agents, we would just call our internal travel desk and they’d sort everything out for us. It saved us a lot of time.
But I realized I was getting too used to this lifestyle, and I personally found myself losing humility and patience. I remember a time when I was waiting in an extremely slow-moving line. I became extremely impatient and thought, “How can these people be so inefficient?” Reflecting on this now, I recognize that I was under a lot of stress and was used to this consultant lifestyle where the firm tended to my every need. Real life, as I came to understand, operates quite differently.
I was too proud to share about my declining mental health
Saying “I’m having a mental breakdown” aloud makes you sound defeated, so I never admitted it. A lot of consultants I know are proud, myself included.
This often meant that I couldn’t admit when I didn’t know how to do something or that I was on the brink of a mental breakdown — it would make me look defeated and not successful, and it meant that I didn’t have enough grit to make it through.
Since everyone had their plates full, I didn’t want to burden others with my emotions as well. As a result, I never publicly talked about my mental strains with my team, mentors, or managers.
There were positives to working at McKinsey
It wasn’t all bad. The mere fact that I got into a place like McKinsey and was able to speak up in a room full of senior consultants gave me a confidence boost. McKinsey also gave me a platform that makes it much easier for me to open doors: I’ve been able to get conversations with potential companies that I’m interested in because I have “McKinsey” on my resume.
McKinsey also provides a program called “Secondment.” This is a temporary assignment where a McKinsey consultant or employee is placed within another organization to work on a specific project or initiative, like an internship. So if you wanted to take a break while working at McKinsey, you could join other companies affiliated with this program and try out new roles without really leaving.
I chose a small consultancy in Kenya and worked there for six months. It was an incredible experience where I got to explore the country and build a strong network there.
I even met my husband through McKinsey — we just got married this March, and we are very happy.
I’m now a product manager in tech and love seeing the impact I make right away
After McKinsey, I became a product manager at WealthSimple, a Fintech company. Unlike my time in management consulting, I’ve met many people with diverse backgrounds. College dropouts have gone on to successfully build their own startups, for example.
Another thing I like about my job as a product manager is executing projects. In consulting, I did high-level strategy and walked through one or two use cases, only to hand it off to the clients to implement and finish. But in tech, I’m able to collect feedback and make an impact right away.
I think it’s important to discuss the realities of consulting. Many people only hear about the positives, but I believe it’s crucial to mentally prepare people for the challenges they might face in the industry. This way, they might be able to make informed decisions about pursuing a consulting career, for reasons beyond the glamour and prestige.
McKinsey & Company did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
If you’ve left management consulting and would like to share your story, email Aria Yang at ayang@insider.com.