Lion City Leap
By Xunliang Huang
Xunliang Huang shares her experience traveling to Singapore with her BCom peers to complete the intensive Global Management Consulting subject.
During the summer semester of 2023, I joined Dr. Helen Hu and a team of twenty curious and enthusiastic Bachelor of Commerce students in Singapore for the Global Management Consulting (GMC) subject. GMC is an intensive summer subject where students are assigned to teams to tackle business-related problems overseas. To best describe my experience of the program, I will break it into four stages: initiation, brainstorming, deep dive, and delivery.
Stage 1: Initiation prior to departure
Before taking to the skies for Singapore, participants engaged in a series of online workshops organized by Dr. Helen Hu to gain an understanding of the responsibilities involved in management consulting. I was overwhelmed by the group’s excitement and eagerness to travel to Singapore - a key financial center in the Asia-pacific region. Like other students, I arrived in Singapore a day before the program’s commencement day and was met with many new cultural experiences, such as the palpable heat, the delicious hawker food and the scenic gardens. Keystone Investors, the host company to which my team was assigned, was in Ocean Financial Centre, an office tower situated at the heart of Singapore’s financial belt. We were provided with an introduction to the company and given a rundown of our business tasks after meeting our main stakeholders.
Stage 2: Collaborative brainstorming
My team’s first task was to complete the project scope, detailing key issues and our deliverables that addressed a key question. The project scope served as an informal agreement between the team and our client, outlining expectations for the deliverable. While drafting the project scope, we addressed the challenges we faced such as working in a two-week time constraint, and identified realistic and actionable goals within the time frame. During this phase, the team also got to know one another better, which helped us identify collective and individual strengths.
Stage 3: Diving deeper
The deep dive was the most important phase, where much of our time and effort was spent conducting research and formulating an outcome. Our routine closely coincided with that of our host company. Every day, the team would have breakfast together at the hotel before arriving at the office at 9 a.m. We scheduled daily catchups with our client to ensure that we were moving the project in the right direction. Reflecting on our experience, these meetings played a crucial role in our subsequent success as they provided us with opportunities to ask clarifying questions and test our ideas. Our client also provided us with tools and resources that were circulated internally to aid our research.
Stage 4: Delivering project insights to our stakeholders
The final phase of the project was delivering the outcome. We presented our findings in the format of a research report and a presentation to the key stakeholders, including Keystone Investors’ CEO, CIO, and other stakeholders who would be involved in implementing our recommendations. The presentation was followed by a Q&A session, where we addressed our client’s questions. The feedback we received was constructive.
My GMC experience was a memorable one. The program provides students with exposure to professional-level management consulting, as well as the unique opportunity to experience work culture in a foreign country. I also want to express my sincere appreciation on behalf of my team to Keystone Investors for all the support and guidance they provided us, and to Dr Helen Hu for making the program possible for us in 2023. I would highly recommend GMC to any Bachelor of Commerce students interested in management consulting.
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