In this episode, we sit down with Bethany Rolan (HBS ’22) to unpack her journey from small-town Texas to UT Austin, McKinsey, and ultimately Harvard Business School. Bethany shares how she discovered consulting, why she took the GMAT during finals week, and what made her pursue an MBA. She dives into her application strategy – including how she managed feedback, selected recommenders, and leaned into her unique background. We also explore her biggest takeaways from HBS – from classroom insights with Professor Ryan Buell to building lifelong friendships during the pandemic. Today, Bethany is focused on people and organizational performance at McKinsey, with an eye toward eventually “getting the ball” as an operator.
My story starts in
I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, which in Texas is what we call a small town - it's about 250,000 people. I was born and raised there through high school and then found my way to UT Austin for undergrad. I studied supply chain management and economics, and I was in the business honors program at UT, which is also a major. I spent a lot of time in class, was super involved, went to every home football game, was in student organizations, and just did the full Texas D1 college experience and loved every second of it.
That's where I was introduced to McKinsey. When you come from Lubbock, there are no Fortune 500 companies - nobody's parents work at one, there are no hedge funds, there are no consulting firms. I don't think I even knew what business was until I got to college. But then I met older students who had just come back from consulting internships and started asking questions. I actually did my first internship in supply chain management at Fiat Chrysler in Detroit. It was fun, but when I saw what people were doing full-time after undergrad, I wasn't that excited by the entry-level purchasing role. So I started looking around again and thought, why don't I try consulting? I did a McKinsey internship between my junior and senior year, and after that I was sold. I went there after graduation and did what young consultants do, which is work on everything from luxury retail to steel manufacturing to pharmaceuticals and just tried it all. Before business school, I also did an internal rotation - a secondment opportunity within McKinsey with their global social responsibility group - where I got to help manage charitable giving and pro bono consulting for the firm, which was a fun bonus experience before going to HBS.
The idea of an MBA actually came into my mind long before I was at McKinsey. My mom is a professor and my dad teaches at a medical school and runs a residency program, so education and growing up in academia was very present for me. I often joked that going straight to work out of undergrad made me the least educated person in my family. I always had this idea that everyone goes to grad school. It was actually during undergrad that I learned these consulting companies will pay your tuition to get an MBA, and that was a super attractive idea to me. From day one, that was part of the plan - to see if I could get McKinsey to pay for it.
Did you study for the GMAT while still in undergrad?
The one piece of advice I got after my McKinsey internship was: if you're thinking about this at all, take the GMAT while you're in study mode. So I took a GMAT class in Austin my last semester and scheduled the test during finals week - it just felt like another final at the end of the semester. I took it once and that was it, so it was over quickly.
Now people at work come and ask me how I did it, and I have to tell them honestly that I didn't do it the hard way. I've seen what other people go through and it sounds really hard. My advice is just take a four or five week leave of absence and treat it like a full-time job.
Every year I stayed was just going to extend my total consulting time, because I knew I was going to have to come back after the MBA. So I just thought, let's make it sooner rather than later.
At McKinsey there are third-year opportunities - I spent nine months with the global social responsibility team - and I wanted to take advantage of one of those. That's what took it from two years to three years versus the classic two years of consulting. And after that, it was more that I knew consulting was not the endgame for me. I did not want to be a partner at McKinsey.
In those three years, did you develop a hypothesis about a certain industry, company size, or focus area you wanted to go deeper in - or were you looking to pivot and get exposure to more things?
It was largely the latter. I had spent about my last year in B2B marketing and sales, using heavy analytics - machine learning, optimization, all that - applied to B2B sales organizations. I was shocked to learn that most B2B organizations still have you call someone to order something; there's no website. So there was a lot of ground to cover when we were saying, "We're going to do machine learning on your pricing."
I loved using data to drive decision-making across a variety of insights, and I was also looking to merge that with time I had spent doing corporate social responsibility, looking into pro bono and charitable giving. I had this idea of how corporations can be a force for good. My initial hypothesis on business school was figuring out how to merge those two - doing something that felt like it made a difference in the world and using data to do it. I grew through the MBA, as many people do, pivoted, and found new things to be excited about. But that's what I was thinking going in.
There's debate about whether you need an MBA to continue to succeed at a place like McKinsey. It's a great stepping stone, a great network - you can get a lot of great jobs without it. And yes, you have the option of McKinsey paying, but it's still two years where you're not making an income. They don't buy you dinner; they just pay for the school part. Your living expenses are still very much on you.
It's a super personal choice because I have absolutely seen people succeed inside and outside of McKinsey without an MBA. I don't think it's as required as it was a decade ago. What I tell people is: it depends on what the end goal is. If your goal is making partner at McKinsey as quickly as possible, it's probably not a necessary thing to do. If you want to exit to a McKinsey client or leverage your McKinsey connections to exit, probably not either.
For me, it was a lot about the pure education and reflection - broadening my experiences, living in a different part of the country, meeting new people. I didn't even feel like I knew what all the options post-McKinsey were. I wanted to explore, take a minute after a very intense first three years of my career, and reflect and learn. I always loved school, and my family really values education. On paper you don't need it, but I think it will serve me for the rest of my career. Getting an infusion of friends in your late twenties is pretty cool, and when those friends can also explain industry topics to you or help you think about your career - even better. I met professors I stay in touch with. I'm very confident it will serve me for the next thirty years. But did I need it? No.
The end goal I talked about was a little fuzzier than some of the other things I heard - and that was the thing I was most nervous about through the whole application process, because I didn't have a specific end goal in mind. I felt like other people were saying, "I'm going to have this position at this company," or "I'm going to start a company that does this exact thing - here's the value prop," and I did not have that at all. I talked about the type of leader I wanted to be, using data, and companies that were more mission-driven or thinking about how their for-profit business could be a driver for good in the world. So the role I wanted to play in companies, and how much I loved data and was a total nerd. That was the end goal I talked about.
I also talked a lot about what I had done up to that point to get myself on the path to that vision - putting myself in heavy analytics work even though I don't have a technical undergrad, learning that, working with data scientists, and taking the opportunity to spend nine months with global social responsibility to understand how a really large company thinks about its impact. Showing that this is real, that I am investing in myself along this journey.
I also talked a lot about my background - growing up in Leach with a single mom, and not knowing what consulting was when I stepped onto campus for undergrad. At a place like HBS that's all case-based, the value you bring into the room is the diversity of your experience. In a lot of ways I was not diverse - I'm a white woman from McKinsey - but working in factories, being very comfortable in that environment, having lived in an agricultural area of the country, growing up in a two-person household: those were unique experiences I could bring, and so I talked about that as well.
Did you consider an admissions consultant, and how did you narrow down your final narrative?
I did consider it, and I met -
I never sent essays to six people at once. I batched feedback for that exact reason, because if too many people are commenting on your PowerPoint, things will go awry. At first I just talked to a lot of people - I'd ask for 20 or 30 minutes, grab them a coffee, and say, "Tell me specifically about applications: how did you think about it, what was your narrative?" A couple of close friends even let me read their essays, which was really helpful before I even started drafting.
Once I started drafting, I would send it to two people at a time. A lot of it came down to seniority - I wanted to wait for the most senior folks, just to save them time and make sure they were getting the best version before they weighed in. Sometimes, unlike at work, when you have conflicting opinions about your own personal statement it's a little more personal. I remember fretting over whose commentary to take, thinking, "I actually don't agree - that's my favorite sentence, and I'm not going to take it out." At the end of the day it is a judgment call.
I did the DIY version, as I call it. At McKinsey there are plenty of people who've been to business school, so I was lucky to have mentors I could ask about their experiences, and then a select few who actually read my essays and gave comments, did practice interviews with me, and wrote letters. I just utilized my network to write 18 versions of the same essay iteratively and hone the narrative down into something that made sense.
How did you choose your recommenders at McKinsey?
At McKinsey you don't have a direct manager, and a lot of times you just work with people for a couple of months, so that was tricky. I ended up picking a partner and a senior partner at McKinsey - one that I had worked with super closely on actual client work and another that I had worked with super closely on McKinsey extracurriculars and the things I was doing with recruiting and office building, because I was just super involved outside of the client work.
That was for HBS. I had slightly different groups for each school because I made sure I had an alum be one of the recommenders for each school. I don't know if that actually helped, but in my mind it did.
I thought about who am I close to, who can actually speak to me at work, but also me as a human - because I felt like that's what I was applying with too, just trying to be really real and a whole person, talking about all the parts of myself. Then I made them packets - probably more than they needed or even read - of: here's the narrative I'm trying to follow; here's how we've worked together and, if you want to talk about this, I didn't draft anything, just bullet points like "I'm talking a lot about data analytics - remember we did these three heavy data analytics projects, those could be helpful to talk about"; here's a draft of my essay; here's the resume. The cover sheet had the deadlines, the process, and the links. So I made them recommender packets.
Because McKinsey is such a close network, I nudged a couple of people - for the most senior guy, I nudged someone he worked with closely to review it for him, since I wasn't reading the letters myself. I said, "Hey, this person is writing my letter. If you wanted to be second eyes on it, I think that would be great." Luckily, she said, "Oh yeah, I'll ask him - we'll work on it together."
If you had to go back and do anything differently for your application, what would you do over or do differently?
Honestly, it's hard to say because I got in and was thrilled to pieces. It worked out well. It was really great to use my network to give me feedback because it felt really personal. It's a written process, so it felt pretty straightforward to me.
I applied to GSB, Wharton, and HBS - the classic consulting trifecta. I was a little bit tempting fate, because I knew that was a very narrow set. I had decided consulting is not a forever career, so I was tempting the universe: these are the places I'd be really excited to go, so let's try it, and if none of the three works out, that will be my nudge to leave consulting and either delay the MBA or not do it. It was intentionally narrow.
I went through the process and was admitted to Wharton and HBS, so that became the decision point. I had initially planned to do admitted students weekends wherever I got in and use that to help make the choice - that was really helpful in my undergrad process, just the gut feel of who do I want to hang out with, who do I click with. But I was admitted in the spring of 2020, so admitted students weekends were online, and listening to a couple of panels just wasn't giving me the feedback I needed. It came down to a gut decision - thinking about the alums I knew at work and who I wanted to be most like. There was no spreadsheet or pros-and-cons list. At the end of the day, it just felt right.
Can you share one or two highlights from your HBS experience - whether in the classroom or outside of it - that stand out as hallmarks of your time there?
Gosh, I could talk about twelve.
The classroom was definitely a highlight. I took a Managing Service Operations class - which is a very boring title for a very lovely class - with Professor Ryan Buell, who continues to be a sounding board for me. It really changed the way I thought about what I wanted and my thesis. I had been struggling, as I talked about, with: is it for-profit, nonprofit, social impact? I knew I wanted to make some sort of difference, but that class really helped crystallize what I had been wrestling with. I'm a for-profit girl - I like a target - but you can still have a really people-focused impact through service businesses. I fell in love with that idea, and it changed the way I think about my career. That was definitely the classroom highlight.
The out-of-classroom highlight was the small groups. My first year was pretty COVID, but I actually think it worked out really well for me, because we got to do things like small board game nights. When classes were still virtual, me and seven other women rented a house in Cape Cod and posted up for a week and just got to hang out. Those were really deep relationships - getting to talk to people about what they're excited about, what they did, the exploration of both the career side but also just the personal side of making actual friends. That was really fun.
We had missed our winter formal and then a spring event. I remember we brought the dresses we would have worn to the spring thing up to a Maine night and did a dress-up night - drinking and playing drinking games in formal dresses. We were also boiling lobster in formal dresses. It was great.
It is the most academic - I think I was envisioning that as an on-the-margins thing, but now that I've had friends go through other programs, they are real serious about the school up there. Everybody goes to class, everyone is prepared. They assign more than is humanly possible to do - one girl's opinion. I did not know that going in, and so it took me some time to adjust and realize that I could not approach this like undergrad, where I just did every piece of assigned reading and every piece of studying, because after doing that for the first few weeks I was like, wait, I have nothing else. This was not the business school I was sold - I thought this was going to be fun. I had to readjust, but I think that was great. I would choose it again. I'm a total nerd, but it is very different, and they're very serious about the classroom and the academic side of it.
For two years now, every year since we graduated, I've had a group of HBS friends - six or eight people - come to the Houston Rodeo, which is a giant fair plus rodeo plus country concert. We all wear matching cowboy hats and do a day at the rodeo and a weekend in Houston. A lot of these people have never been to Texas and certainly never pet a cow, so it's been such fun to watch.
I've done some girls' weekends, too. Every time I'm in New York it's so fun because I have a ton of people to see and meet up with. I've been to weddings and engagement parties. One of my closest section mates actually lives in a suburb of Houston, which I wasn't expecting. When I made the decision to move to Houston, I figured I would have to travel quite a lot to stay connected, but I feel still very connected. The HBS Club of Houston is nice too - I travel so much for work that it's hard, but I've been to a few events. It's just another way to meet people in Houston and get more connected.
Since business school, I have focused completely in the people and organizational performance space - everything from org design, big culture and change, DEI, anything that has to do with the people side of the business and how you run your business. That's been really meaningful, because I think that's something I figured out at business school: I feel a lot of purpose with the people. People spend most of their time at work, so how can we make that a positive experience that then makes them a more fulfilled, more developed, happier person in the rest of their life? That's what gets me really excited. I've been able to focus on that across industries, but just functionally, and it's been fun.
What comes next is a great question. I have long been saying that I'm an operator at heart. For me it's going to be something pretty hands-on, pretty directly related to the P&L. We often say in consulting that we're coaching - we're on the sidelines, we're not playing the game. I would like the ball is how I describe the next step. I would like to go get some operational experience, and then - this is the most cliché HBS thing to say - maybe in five or ten years do a self-funded search. We'll see how it goes.
Being really crystal clear on what you want out of the experience is helpful. Even if that is relationships or having a fun time - no judgment on what it is - just what are the three priorities, because it comes at you like a bus. There is so much to do every day that every day you're having to make a trade-off between: do I go to this dinner or on this trip, or do I go see this really cool speaker, or do I study a little harder for this class that I'm super interested in or want to get close to the professor? You're constantly having to choose. It's just so busy. Having that clarity on what you want out of it so that you can make those trade-offs in the moment is important.
A lot of folks come from intense careers, so also think about how you use it to invest in yourself and your health. Someone once told me - and it just hit me in my heart - that you won't remember this project that you're up until 3:00 a.m. working on, but your body will remember in 50 years that you did this. Figuring out what the healthier habits are, or the rest, or the going to the gym more - the classic HBSer is really good at focusing on the job and forgetting the body a little bit.