Oh! You plan to take up GMSC. Of course, you can. You are single. I may have considered it if I were not married!
The comment came from my friend Crystal, when I told her about my intentions of opting for GMSC in the spring semester. On seeing me confused, she told me that people in GMSC usually end up seeing their teammates more than their spouses during the length of the spring semester. Okay! No worries for me, but this certainly didn’t sound good. More opinions followed from other sources:
GMSC was one of the best things that I have done at Goizueta. Only problem was that I had to be reminded to breathe.
Yes, People have taken Market-Intelligence and GMSC together in past, but some of them died in the process.
It’s that time of the year again, when first year students are picking electives for the spring semester and some of them are debating whether to go for GMSC. Having waded through the past semester and GMSC successfully (and alive!), I think it’s time that I too keep my promise and share my opinion on the subject. Well, I must admit that the comments above are only slightly exaggerated. GMSC was far more rigorous than what I had expected, but looking back, I am happy that I could not be dissuaded from going for it.
For the uninitiated, GMSC stands for Goizueta Marketing Strategy Consultancy and is the most sought after course for MBA students interested in the fields of Consulting and Marketing. Under this course, teams of MBA students are partnered with leading organizations to provide strategic marketing solutions for a current problem that they are facing. Last year, we had the opportunity to choose from a variety of projects including developing the social media strategy for Manheim – the world’s largest automobile auction company, a Go-to-market strategy for GE and a joint sustainability initiative by Disney & Coca-Cola.
What I liked the most about GMSC is that it is perhaps the closest that you can get to a real world consulting experience before you actually join a consulting firm. Real world consulting issues are rarely well-defined to begin with, and very often, what you finally recommend to the client is very different from what they had originally in mind. It was no different for us too. Our key question for the project underwent several iterations, many team-meetings, multiple sessions with the guiding faculty, and several telephonic conferences with the client, before we got a clarity on what is the exact ask for the project. And even then, what we finally recommended was nowhere close to what they had initially expected. But then, that’s what you often hire a consultant for: to give you a perspective that is different from yours.
GMSC was my first practical exposure to how learnings from different courses blend into forming the solution of a real business issue. Real world problems do not come labelled as marketing problems, or finance problems. Of course, GMSC is primarily a marketing strategy project, but by the time, we completed the project, we had applied concepts from Market Intelligence, Decision Modeling, e-market Analytics, Managerial Accounting, Corporate Finance and bits and pieces from many other courses. And what about data? Unlike the cases from the regular courses, we had no luxury of finding all the data we needed neatly lined up in the appendices of the case. We first had to know what data we needed. Then, we need to figure out who to ask for and what questions to ask. And once the responses were in (close to a thousand responses in our case), it was time to filter out noise from the data before we can use that for any meaningful interpretation.
The four month journey concluded with all six teams presenting to their respective clients. If I had any doubts about our client’s seriousness about implementing our recommendations, those were dispelled when we presented our recommendations at the client’s headquarters. The 200-seat auditorium was packed to capacity and the presentation was attended by most key decision makers for the company including the CEO, CFO and Vice-President of Marketing & Consulting. We faced some grilling questions, but overall, our recommendations were very well received. It was really good to know about the level of visibility the project had in the company. As an aside, later in the summer, I interned with Manheim, and helped with getting started on the implementation of our recommendations. Though GMSC was one of the key things that pulled me to Goizueta, I had no idea that it involved this level of business impact.
The client presentations were shortly followed by the presentations at the school, where all the six teams competed for the Best Project Paper and Best Project Presentation awards. This time, we were presenting to a large audience, consisting of about 150 judges from the business community of Atlanta representing 80+ companies including big corporates like Coca Cola, CNN, Turner, Yahoo!, Cisco, Home Depot and AT&T to name a few. After the terrific response we had got from our client, we were expecting to sweep the awards, but of course, the other teams had similar experience and expectations, and we had to be content only with the Best paper award. In any case, the biggest award for any consulting project is to see your recommendations accepted by the client, and by that standard, every GMSC team turned out to be the winner.
This year is the 20th anniversary for GMSC and the new leadership is all set to make it bigger and better. Keep following the GMSC tag on this blog for more GMSC stories.
Read the full article: My experiences with GMSC