Join Us!

Business & Software at Berkeley (BSB) is a student-led think tank and consultancy at UC Berkeley. Members engage in experiential learning by providing consulting, software engineering, and product development services to real-world clients, while being part of a fun, tight-knit student community.

It's easiest to think of the recruiting process as consisting of two segments: pre-application, and post-application.

The pre-application segment consists of coffee chats, info sessions, and the case workshop—all things that happen before our application is due on Friday 09/12, at 3pm.

The post-application segment consists of application review and the interview process. After the application deadline, we begin application review, looking at the materials you submitted in your application and considering your involvement in the pre-application segment. By Friday night, we extend interviews. All applicants admitted to BSB will have completed a minimum of two interviews—one group interview and one individual interview. Additional interviews may be extended on a case-by-case basis.

No, and sort of. We don't expect members to have previous consulting experience when they are being staffed on strategy or management consulting projects. We teach the skills necessary to succeed on these projects. For our coding engagements or technical projects, we expect some degree of familiarity with the technical skills involved, but we don't expect you to be an expert. Many of our members have experience in both technical and non-technical work because most skills necessary to succeed in our client engagements can be taught or self-learned.

The scope of our work is broad, and so is the range of our clients. We've developed end-to-end products for startups, delivered market expansion strategies for large retailers, optimized supply-chain operations for manufacturers, and more. BSB aims to expose its members to a wide breadth of work across a wide breadth of industries, so you get a taste of multiple domains spread between a variety of verticles.

The time commitment for staff members is 10-12 hours per week, encompassing project work, socials, meetings, and any other BSB-related activity.

Don't overthink it. Here's what we recommend for most applicants: show up to an info session and the case workshop, have a coffee chat with a staff member, and send in the application. We intentionally make our application quick to fill out because we don't want you spending a ton of time on the application process.

Be yourself. There isn't a specific applicant profile we filter for, and we discourage applicants from trying to fit a type of mold that they believe will increase their chances of admission. We do think it's really cool when someone is visibly authentic.

No. Everybody applying to BSB fills out the same application. We'll do the work to figure out where you would best fit within the semester's upcoming projects and our current staffing.

Fill out our application form, linked to here. Our application is short and simple, containing three main fields: (1) your resume, (2) courses you recently took, and (3) an optional 200-word field for you to write anything you'd like. This last section, the 200-word field, is truly optional—you can leave it blank or max it out.

A “coffee chat” is a 15-30 minute conversation between you and a BSB staff member. Coffee chats allow applicants to gain a better understanding of BSB—our culture, our organizational objectives, and what we have in store for upcoming semester—and also help us learn more about you, putting a face to a name. While coffee chats are casual in nature, we encourage you to think about how you want to direct the conversation, ahead of time. In other words, we can tell when you come prepared and we remember it when we're reviewing applications. That being said, coffee chats are not required to apply.

We highly encourage “double coffee chats”—instead of the coffee chat involving only you and a BSB staff member, bring a friend! We find that a three-person conversation lessens any pressure and lightens the mild awkwardness that comes with meeting new people.

For Fall 2025, we're limiting the number of coffee chats per applicant to one, including if you signed up for or took part in a double coffee chat.

Here are the recruitment events we're hosting for Fall 2025:

Info Session 1: 09/08, 8-10pm, Dwinelle 229

Info Session 2: 09/10, 8-10pm, Wheeler 120

Case Workshop: 09/11, 8-10pm, Dwinelle 209

We recommend most applicants attend one of the two info sessions, as well as the case workshop. Our info sessions cover BSB's background, staff member introductions, and application tips. Our case workshop prepares applicants for our consulting interviews—we go over a mock case that would be expected in one of our interviews and we guide our attendees through solving it, which is a fantastic way to practice for the actual interviews. If you're a purely technical applicant or an applicant that is only interested in coding work, there's no need to attend the case workshop.