BOSTON--What in the greater Boston area has a huge library, a full-service cafeteria and spacious suites filled with 20-something hipsters and lots of fun toys?

If you guessed Harvard, you're close. But wrong.

At Bain & Company, a strategy consulting firm headquartered in Boston's Back Bay, workers have many of the comforts of college, but are paid to do the thinking.

Bain's Copley Place office, located several floors above the mall by the same name, is at once both elegant and open. Associate consultants, just a few years out of college, work in "bays," groups of large cubicles, located in the same hallway as the glass-walled offices of managers, partners and even the CEO.

"Bain especially, and consulting in general, has a very relaxed atmosphere," says Dan M. Burns, an associate consultant and 1997 graduate of Amherst College.

Another similarity to college life is that, according to Burns, there are few routine days, or even weeks, in the life of a consultant.

"One of the really great things about this job is that there are really no typical days," he says. "It makes it easy to get out of bed each day and go to work."

Consulting work, Burns says, is better looked at in terms of specific cases.

At Bain, each associate consultant is a member of two case teams. At some other consulting firms, he says, each consultant works on only one case at a time.