The GCP

The Global Consulting Project (GCP) takes place between March and April for a whole month in full time. It is our opportunity of conducting a consulting project in an international environment and it was one of the reasons I chose Cambridge over other business schools. I believe a hand-on approach is essential and we have to leave the lecture rooms and actually do it in order to learn in a real life context.

There is a list of possible projects given by the University but we are free to try and get a project by ourselves in a specific area. This is where all the hard work starts. As far as I’m concerned most projects on the list are not very interesting to me. Maybe because of my consulting background, I’d rather have something really different and try it out.For that reason I started search for projects with some people from the MBA. Turns out it is really hard to get to key contacts and even when we do, it’s not easy to convince them. I would think having 5 highly qualified MBA students for free during a whole month would be attractive to everyone. Apparently I was wrong. It seems if the project is in a different country, companies start to get concerned with travelling expenses (which they are responsible for). So my advice for any future MBA student is: start working on the GCP really early. Ideal time would be November, otherwise it will be very hard to secure what you want.

Fortunately, I just got good news. The seeds we launched a couple of months ago brought us back a very cool GCP. So after a long process of searching and contacting people, I believe I will be able to work for a whole month in an industry that I really think is interesting.
I suppose it is part of the MBA to go through stressful moments and have many things running in parallel. But I can assure you that it is quite frustrating contacting more than 20 companies and get the same number of rejections. I think this was a good test to our determination and luckily being persistent really paid off.

Later on I’ll post some more details about the project and obviously I’ll post my experience during the GCP. But for now, it is time to celebrate! I got the GCP I wanted!