Natalie Kirchhoff Nelkin

I spent more time preparing for behavioral interviews than I ever expected to.

Not because I didn't have the experience. I had plenty. I'd competed as a professional triathlete, worked at Disney, moved to Luxembourg to run a sports organization, and held roles across tech and sales. On paper, I had a lot to work with.

The hard part was excavating it. Sitting down and pulling out the specific moments, the decisions, the projects that actually shaped me — then figuring out how to articulate them clearly in an interview.

That process took more time and emotional investment than I anticipated. Hours of journaling, racking my brain, writing out key moments from each experience. Figuring out which stories fit which questions. Making sure I wasn't leaning on one job too heavily. Then taking a long, messy story and distilling it into a clear two-minute Problem, Action, Result answer that would land.

It was painstaking. But it paid off.

During my first year in my MBA program, I was the first in my class to receive a Bain summer associate offer. I returned full time, working across the Dallas and San Francisco offices.

Through Cornell and Bain, I ended up on the other side of the table — coaching classmates, interviewing candidates, leading webinars on how to prepare. I've worked with hundreds of people through this same process.

The advice I give every single time is the same: don't wait. The behavioral interview is not a formality. It carries as much weight as the technical.

Groundwork takes the process I did alone — the journaling, the excavating, the structuring — and gives you a coach to walk through it with you. You still do the thinking, the reflecting, the sharing. That part doesn't change. But instead of staring at a blank page trying to figure out which stories to tell and how to tell them, you have a coach guiding you through it step by step. So you can spend less time excavating and more time practicing.

You already have the experience. Groundwork helps you find it, structure it, and use it.