The manager welcomed me into the room and I got seated. To be honest I had been awake for almost 2 days as the summer placements of my B-School was going on and naturally, I was a tad nervous. He asked for a brief introduction and went deep diving into my resume. I was asked about my previous internships, my position of responsibilities and one live project that I had done a few months back. I was asked why do I want a career in Consulting, why they should hire a fresher like me and what do I know about Bain and Co. Fortunately me and some of my friends had been preparing for Bain beforehand and I had quite a bit of knowledge about the company which I described to the interviewer and from his facial expressions he seemed pleased with the answer. After that I was given the following guesstimate: “ A water bottle manufacturer wants to expand his product portfolio and is interested in manufacturing sparkling water. He has asked us to figure out the market size of sparkling water in India.” I began with asking some preliminary questions as to what exactly is sparkling water and some of its characteristics. Following this, I asked for a minute to structure my approach and gather my thoughts. Afterwards, I explained my approach and began making certain assumptions. If some of assumptions were a little off, the interviewer corrected me. I was almost 3/4th done with my solution when the interviewer told me to stop in the interest of saving time and told that he understood my approach. After this, he asked me a question which I had been waiting for. “Do you have any questions for me?” As I’ve mentioned before, me and some of my friends had been targeting Bain ever since we entered the college, so I had read up a lot of news about the company. I asked about a case of M&A that they were handling at that time and also some of the technologies which the company had recently developed. Furthermore, I asked some questions about the day-to-day activities of an Associate in the company. This segment of my interview stretched for around 15 minutes and definitely helped me gather some brownie points as I had shown genuine interest in the company and the role.