Tag: Coursework

Consultancy, Baby!

So now we’re on to the most exciting part of the programme – Consulting! Real companies, suits and boots and a whole lot of competitive bidding action. This year, we have been provided with briefs from a range of different companies varying in size, geographical location and industry. The big trade-off our group meetings were centred around is whether to go for the prestigious brands or the smaller start-ups, given that the former could provide a great CV boost, whereas the latter could involve campaigns that have a much bigger impact on the chosen business’s performance. But the key is to really understand which skills of the team as a whole are best suited to the projects on offer.

The Ten Commandments of Group Work

(Scroll half-way down the page if you’re here for the serious stuff)

1. Thou shall upload numerous photos of your group ‘working hard’ into the early hours to Facebook, evidently the most productive use of thy time.

2. Thou shall draw obscene images of male genitalia on your group member’s iPad during particularly fruitless brainstorming sessions. Thou shall do this often and it shall never cease to amuse thou.

3. Thou shall post infinitely affectionate and enthusiastic comments on assessed discussion forums, with generous use of emoticons that reflect the exact opposite of what thou are in fact feeling.

4.

Feeling like a firework!

Monday was pretty eventful as far as Mondays go, despite the 6am start to prepare for my group presentation on the Consumer Behaviour module, which, to our great pleasure, got excellent feedback. The presentation was based on a research experiment conducted within our cohort two weeks ago, and my group’s topic of choice was ‘The Influence of Gender Identity in Purchase Decision-Making’. Gender was probably the most interesting component of my Sociology A-level, followed closely by Class, so I thoroughly enjoyed designing the experiment and then evaluating the findings within a marketing context. I think it really stood out from the standard taste test related studies this level of research tends to drift towards.