Matthew Burke

I'm Matthew. I was at INSEAD before joining Bain.

I learned a lot about consulting while I was at business school. The real important thing for me was creating a path and a career that would allow me to marry my medical background with the business knowledge that I was hoping to develop going forward. Consulting fit that profile really well. I think it's almost like an MBA 2.0 at some levels. It has also given me a lot of flexibility in terms of professional and personal life, which was really important to me.

"Prior to business school, I was a doctor in Ireland, where I worked in the field of surgery, mainly urology, for about four years."

I was lucky to be a summer associate at Bain before joining full time. That gave me a great opportunity to try out Bain, and also for Bain to try me out. One, I really loved the culture. Second, I was working on a digital case at the time, and I was impressed with how Bain invested in its own employees to upscale within digital, rather than outsourcing all that to some outside experts.

The first case I was on when I joined full time was a retail banking case. We were brought in to basically help them restructure their loan strategy. It was really impressive to see how much we were interacting with the executives at the bank. The CEO was in our team room every day, and we got to see the direct impact we had on the next steps the bank was making.

I've been at Bain London since joining. Within that time, I've worked both in Ireland and in the greater London area on different cases. That gave me some great flexibility. My fiancée at the time was living in Dublin, so Bain enabled me to stay in Ireland during the period of that case and do a reverse commute, really, just coming back to the office when I needed to. That was really great from a personal perspective. Now my fiancée has moved to San Francisco, and thankfully Bain is arranging for me to relocate to the San Francisco office and continue my career there.