I was studying abroad while applying for the role, so both rounds of my interviews were over Skype, whereas normally it would have been Skype for the first round and in-person for the second round. If you are applying from a core recruiting school, your first round may be on your campus. In each interview round, you will have two forty-five minute interviews back-to-back with two different people. These people don't talk between the calls, so if you bomb your first interview, relax, because you get a clean slate for your second! Bain does a case interview format. For me, the first 10 minutes of every call were spent getting to know each other and asking some behavioral questions before we dove into the case. The case is going to be a simplified version of the actual work that Bain does. Some interviewers use hypothetical cases, whereas some modify real cases they have worked on. There is lots of good advice online for "cracking" the case interview, so I won't go into too much depth here. What you need to know is that they will give you a very broad question to answer, such as how X client can halt falling sales or increase profitability. You’re not supposed to know the answer right away, or start blurting out possible solutions. Rather, ask to take some time to identify a logical structure in which to search for a solution. Many people memorize standardized frameworks exist for solving these. From everyone I've talked to, you should not copy and paste a pre-designed framework to make it fit the problem. I stuck to drawing an issue tree from scratch every time based on the specific problem given to me, and it worked great. Once you have your structure, you can ask if there is anywhere the interviewer would like to begin, or you can just dive in. The question is broad, but the interviewer has more details to give once you start working the problem. Typically within the interview, there will be one point where you have to do calculations. The interviewer will give you the data you need, and you'll have to work it out by hand. This freaks many people out, but really isn't too hard if you remain calm. My best advice is to keep your work extremely organized, especially during this part, because it can be easy to drop zeros or lose track of numbers if all of your work is a mess. Also, don't sit there calculating silently. Talk your interviewer through what you are doing! It’s like showing your work in elementary school-- if your answer is wrong but your process was right, they give you partial credit or tell you where to check again. Once you have your answer, consider it in the context of the problem and see if it makes sense. If you're figuring out how many donuts Mary needs to sell in a day to turn a profit and it’s in the billions, it's probably wrong. If you go on without noticing that, it's a big red flag for the interviewer. During one case, I also had a brainstorming challenge as a warm-up. Basically the question was where a shaved ice vendor might consider for their next target market. Knowing that profits are higher when you have a captive audience, I listed places like zoos, carnivals, etc. Interviewers love to hear you apply real-world experience to your cases to know that you're more than a case-cracking zombie whose head has been in Ace the Case for six months. Over the course of a month of preparation, I spent probably 10 hours researching case interviews online, and I did six simulated cases with current Bain employees. I didn't buy any resources like Ace the Case, but I did have a friend email me a lot of sample cases. At the end of the interview, they ask if you have questions. I had questions prepared beforehand, and you definitely should, too. I asked about things that truly interest me: social impact work and chances for international travel to Latin America. By nothing short of the hand of God, the person I asked about Latin America had just finished a case in Colombia, and the person I asked about social impact was the Bain Social Impact director for all of Texas. These questions matter! The office you intern in is going to be the office where you receive a full-time offer, if your internship is successful (the majority are). Consider this as you are applying. If you have major life circumstances change and need to switch offices, this is a possibility but isn’t guaranteed. If you need to switch offices, contact Bain ASAP so they can adjust accordingly before the hiring process is complete in your new office. They really will do everything in their power to keep you, and being open about your circumstances doesn't hurt your standing in your old office. Finally, if you are still on the fence after reading all this, just know that the people make it all so worth it. Bainies are incredible and really do want to help you succeed in every way possible! The expression at Bain is that "A Bainie never lets another Bainie fail", and I have seen that repeatedly during this process.