In today's competitive labor market, hands-on experience can be a decisive factor for a potential employer. Since the founding of the Goizueta Marketing and Strategy Consultancy (GMSC) over twenty years ago, Goizueta has been at the forefront of inorporating experiential learning into both curricular and extracurricular opportunities for students, resulting in graduates with not only an advanced knowledge of business issues but also a track record of solving them.
While case studies have long been a staple in business school curricula, GMSC captitulated the case study approach to a level of experiential learning unmatched by other leading business schools. Initially a co-curricular competition, GMSC became an official source in the Full-Time MBA program in 2000, taught and led by Reshma H. Shah, assistant professor in the practice of marketing. Over 1,500 students and nearly 90 companies from across the globe have participated in the program since its inception in 1991. Many companies have participated in the program multiple times as repeat clients, reflecting the value they derive from working with Emory Goizueta students.
In the GMSC course, teams of MBA students leverage their newly acquired knowledge from core courses and their previous work experience in diverse industries to solve business problems for companies in the U.S. and abroad. "We provide students with innovative, state-of-the-art tools and resources, enabling them to produce high quality, actionable recommendations and project solutions," says Shah. "We have continuously made improvements to GMSC by learning over time what works best and what needs to change. The course has a proven process and provides the right amount of structure and rigor to allow students to succeed in delivering high value to their clients."
This year's clients sought aid on a variety of topics, including expansion into emerging markets, channel partnerships, and social media strategy. Students provided comprehensive analyses that included industry situational overviews, competitor analysis, and both secondary and primary research findings to arrive at their strategic and tactical recommendations and implementation plans.