This article originally appeared on Fuqua’s Weekend Executive MBA student blog and is shared here with permission.
By Alex George, Weekend Executive MBA ’25
As a chemical engineer in biotech, my career is deeply technical and full of detailed problem-solving. While many of the work challenges I tackle in the highly-regulated life sciences industry are prescriptive — following polished standard operating procedures and processes — my favorite projects have always been those that require creative, ambiguous, and collaborative solutions. When I joined Fuqua as a Weekend Executive MBA student in 2023, I was excited at the opportunity to solve these kinds of problems outside of an engineering context.
Management consulting has always been an intriguing, if enigmatic, industry to me. On the one hand, problem-solving is the job, and technical skills and attention to detail are highly valued as they are in engineering. On the other, it seemed so intangible compared to my current career, concerned with amorphous problems, estimates, assumptions, and unknowns — something I felt I needed to experience for myself. When the opportunity arose to do just that with the Fuqua Client Consulting Practicum (FCCP), I jumped on it.
The Fuqua Client Consulting Practicum (FCCP) Project & Team
The FCCP is an experiential learning course in which a group of students are staffed by Fuqua on a consulting engagement with a real company and work on the project while taking classes to learn the “tools of the trade” of the consulting industry.
Through the FCCP, I, along with a team of four other students consulted with a small life sciences consulting firm that was in a very interesting position. Just months prior to the start of our engagement, the company had been acquired by a private equity firm and then made an acquisition of its own, adding entirely new services, leadership team members, and geographic locations to its business.
In one of our first meetings with the CEO, he told us that another acquisition was in the works to be closed in the next month. With all this change hitting the company, the overall goal of our consultant team was to develop a holistic strategy for the new, combined firm. Which potential clients to target? How to position their services? What should their talent model be? What capabilities should they develop?
These were big, impactful questions the likes of which I had never tackled before. Luckily, my team had three big advantages: First, FCCP provided a clear structure, timeline, and resources for our team as we worked through the project. Second, FCCP happens during Term 3 in the Weekend Executive MBA program, so we had already built core knowledge of accounting, finance, marketing, and operations and were able to leverage our professors during the project. But it is still a class, after all, so we weren’t expected to be experts. Finally, the combined experience of my team was seriously impressive, spanning biotech, MedTech, accounting, and small business ownership.
An added bonus was that FCCP teams comprised of students from both the Weekend and Global Executive MBA programs. I was able to meet and work with classmates with whom I normally don’t interact. Fuqua’s Executive MBA programs combine for the elective terms (Terms 5 and 6), so I am excited to catch up with my teammates in a few short weeks.
My Experience
After many client meetings, primary interviews with industry experts, surveys, brainstorming sessions, and more, my FCCP team delivered our objective to an impressed CEO, leadership team, and head of the owning firm. The experience I gained from FCCP was exactly what I had hoped for — true exposure to the consulting industry and a big, interesting, ambiguous problem to solve with a team of creative and smart people.
The lessons I learned during the FCCP aren’t only applicable to consultants; the experience has been eminently valuable to my day job as well. Though the pipes, tanks, regulations, and chemistry I deal with are less ambiguous than defining where a recently acquired, actively acquiring consulting firm should go next, the consulting approach is universally applicable. Never underestimate a good framework!