The NUS MBA Consulting Club

On March 19, 2009 at 2:30 am, as I finally flopped on my bed, and in the 2 seconds before I fell asleep, all I could remember were Srikanth's words, "Just make sure you hold Consultant Unplugged"

The day was Dec 6, 2008. I wasn’t even a month old as the Club President when at the annual ART dinner, one of our alumnus, Srikanth Sridharan caught hold of me and Srinivasa, our student council President, and told both of us that we must hold “Consultant Unplugged”. Our outgoing ex-co had said the same thing and it was already somewhere vaguely in my mind and hence, of course I agreed. I hadn't even planned the event calendar for the year and I was going home for a month. So I lodged it in the back of my head and promptly forgot about it. Back in January, I started planning the events, and thinking about Consultant Unplugged. After much deliberation and consultation, we, the club ex-co, decided on March end. We had 3 months to plan, but no idea what we were in for.

For the next 3 months, at painstaking pace we moved from one step to the next. Talking to people day and night, identifying possible speakers and going through all possible channels to invite other business schools, we were sending what seemed like a countless number of mails.

It is an NUS MBA flagship event and the smallest details mattered. 8 days for designing the registration flyer, followed by faculty invitation cards, publicity email blasts, 5 different versions of the panel guides: each for a different target audience, numerous iterations of each version; every single word, logo and punctuation mark in every single document and e-mail was scrutinized by at least 5 independent pairs of eyes.

There were setbacks, failures and sacrifices. We had to give up looking for internships, going for recruitment talks and even studying for tests. I remember studying only a few hours before my mid term and of course I bombed in it. The last 20 days were the hardest to keep going. Except actually attending classes, we were doing nothing but planning the event. Endless trips to the programs office to finalize the logistics, recruiting volunteers, assigning escorts for outside teams & panelists, countdown reminder flyers, customized reminder emails, 25 versions of the banner, detailed volunteer plans with clear time lines and tasks, down to pasting chits at the points where volunteers were supposed to stand, 250 name tags to be prepared, checked and printed; audience question templates, Panelists introduction briefs, thank you notes and welcome speeches, emcee's scripts, I was exhausting all my writing skills as the team worked full steam. "Consultant Unplugged 2009" had become our lives; the atmosphere was frenzied.

On March 19 at 7:15 PM, as I finally sat down in one of the reserved seats with the volunteers and the rest of the team, and listened to the panelists speak for the next 90 minutes or so; the constant laughter and applause from the audience echoing in my ears, I knew that we had done it!

Appreciation mails have been pouring in since the event. We had created a lot of publicity before the event and its success increased the event's visibility manifold. The bar is now much higher for all future NUS MBA events, especially for "Consultant Unplugged 2010"

Click here for the pictures

-Shipra Gupta

President - NUS MBA Consulting Club

Class of 2010

Shipra Gupta, President - NUS MBA Consulting Club, writes for the IIM Calcutta Magazine, "The Joka-Strategist" ...

People pursue MBA programs for a variety of reasons: switching industries, climbing the next rung of the corporate ladder, taking a study break to go back to the joys of being a student and taking a sabbatical to figure out the next step in life; constitute a few of those. A large proportion of these categories of students explore consulting as a prospect career option. Add to this a large number of students who harbor an informed preference towards this field, and the result is almost half of every new batch that wants to consider a career in consulting. It is this very half that the NUS MBA Consulting Club aims to assist in their journey towards the career of their preference.

Being an entirely student-run body, our mission is to help our members get an insightful picture of the Consulting industry and make informed career related decisions. Working towards this purpose we organize various events of differing scale and magnitude throughout the year. These events can be classified as different points on a 3-dimensional plane; with the actual dimensions being: scale (small vs. large), subject (industry insights vs. career related) and speaker (internal vs. external).

i-Speak is an example of a series of small scale internal speaker events focusing on industry insights provided by students from within the batch who have extensive prior experience in the Consulting industry. These sessions provide an informal platform for students to share their concerns, experiences and opinions about the prevalent work culture, the specific processes, training programs, projects and skill sets.

Diametrically opposite to i-Speak is Consultant Unplugged. An annual NUS MBA Flagship event, it takes the form of a panel discussion between elite members of the Consulting industry in Singapore; with the actual subject of the discussion ranging widely from the panelists’ experiences to insights about the trends in the industry etc.

Between these 2 ends of the spectrum lie a whole plethora of events including talks by alumni on a wide range of topics; resume reviews, mock interview and case analysis sessions; periodic blog and website updates, career interest groups and fun consultant-meets to name a few. All these events serve specific purposes; so while resume reviews & mock interview sessions are intended to better equip our members in their internship/job hunts; fun-consultant meets are just an opportunity for members to let their hair down and de-stress.

As a club we try to attain the optimum balance between the various events, so that at the end of the program, our members feel better informed and equipped to build a career in the consulting industry, while ensuring that they relish the experience of having been a part of the program and a member of the club

-Shipra Gupta
President- NUS MBA Consulting Club
Class of 2010
[ Click Here for the Original Joka-Strategist Edition]

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