Did a summer associate internship at McKinsey after my first year of MBA. This was 2024. Writing this now because I see a lot of questions about whether conversion is real, what the return offer actually looks like, and whether the internship is worth taking if you're not sure you want consulting.
First: the internship itself. You get staffed on one engagement for the whole summer, about 10 weeks. Mine was a cost-transformation project for a manufacturing client. The team was 3 interns, 2 full-time associates, an engagement manager, and a partner who showed up for key meetings. I was in client meetings by week 2. That was both exciting and terrifying.
The evaluation is basically: can you add value on a real case, do you handle feedback without getting defensive, and would full-timers want to work with you again. There's a mid-summer check-in and an end-of-summer eval. They're pretty direct about where you stand.
Return offer timeline: got my offer about 3 weeks after the internship ended. The offer for me was associate (post-MBA level), not BA. Base was $192k in 2024 for the associate track, plus performance bonus. They gave me 6 weeks to decide, which I used.
Did I take it: yes. I came in genuinely unsure and left more sure. The quality of thinking you're around every day is real. The pace is real too. One thing that surprised me was how much time associates spend on slide formatting and data requests in the first year. The senior people do the relationship management; you do a lot of the building.
If you're on the fence: the internship is a low-stakes way to actually test consulting life without a full commitment. That alone made it worth it for me. If you come out and hate it, you can pivot. If you come out and like it, you have an offer.
Conversion rate for my cohort: I was told roughly 70-80% of summer associates in my office got return offers. I don't have the numbers for other offices but that's what I heard from the people running our program.