Consulting Cup

The CEO of McDonald's calls you into the office and asks: “How can we improve our business?”

The wheels in your head are probably turning.

You start thinking: What’s McDonald’s trickiest business challenge? Is it that customers with kids are spurning Big Macs for healthier options? Is it the nationwide push for a $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers? In situations like these, what should a company do?

These are the kinds of questions—and answers—that will define your sophomore year at the Gabelli School.

The event is called the Consulting Cup, and it begins at the start of a semester-long integrated project course, when you and a team of four or five classmates are given a real company to investigate.

You have four months to identify your company’s biggest problem in the marketplace, come up with an innovative solution, and present your proposal to a panel of industry judges and professors. The exercise—which mirrors what business consultants do in real life—draws upon all the knowledge of strategy, marketing, accounting, IT, management, and other business disciplines that you’ve learned from our core curriculum.

It’s the best real-world business practice you can get.

The winning team school-wide takes home $3,000 in prize money—and has its members names engraved on the Consulting Cup, which is displayed in a glass case on the third floor of Hughes Hall.

Start envisioning how this competition will help you stand out when applying for an internship, and how the experience will help you at work.