A non-business background does not automatically hurt you. Firms routinely interview candidates from science, medicine, law, and other fields. The key question is whether you can think in a structured, business-relevant way during the interview.

That means you do need to understand some basic commercial language and concepts. You do not need to arrive sounding like a consultant already, but you do need to interpret the case with sound judgment and show that you can learn quickly.

So yes, casing matters a lot, but so does building enough business intuition that your answers do not feel detached from how companies actually operate.

I came from engineering and was fine. The bigger issue was learning to think commercially, not memorizing jargon.

What is your academic background? If it is technical, you may already have more transferable problem-solving experience than you think.

BCG cares way more about how you think than whether you worked in finance before.

Read a few basic business resources and then just case a ton. That was enough for me.