Natalie Kirchhoff Nelkin

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

Not for lack of experience. I had plenty. Pro triathlete, Disney, sports director in Europe, roles across tech and sales. On paper, a lot to work with.

The hard part was excavating it. Sitting down and pulling out the specific moments and projects that shaped me. Figuring out how to turn each one into a story I could tell clearly and coherently under pressure. It took hours: journaling, racking my brain, working out which stories fit which questions, making sure I wasn't leaning on one job too heavily, then distilling each long messy story into a clean two-minute answer that would land in an interview.

It was painstaking. But it paid off. In my first year at Cornell, I was the first in my class to land a Bain offer. I went back full time and worked across the Dallas and San Francisco offices.

Along the way, first as a student and then at 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 candidates just like you through this same process.

The advice I give every time is the same: don't wait. The behavioral round is not a formality. It carries as much weight as the technical, and in the age of AI, even more.

Groundwork is the process I did alone, journaling, excavating, structuring, except now you have a coach to walk through it with you. You still do the thinking and the reflecting. That part doesn't change. Instead of staring at a blank page, you get guided step by step, so you spend less time digging and more time practicing.

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