Foster Freshman Consulting: Seattle Gourmet Foods

Skill building through the Foster Consulting Program

I had a great experience as a student consultant for the Foster Consulting Program. I had an amazing experience last quarter, so I decided to apply again. I was excited when I heard back from the program. I had learned a lot about consulting the previous time, and I was excited to learn more and continue to do work that could benefit the local community.

When I met with the other student consultants, project manager, advisors, and client for the first time, it was a bit more of a familiar process to me and I was excited for the project ahead. I had more confidence in my ability to work virtually with everyone on the team since I had gone through a consulting experience before and had learned how to navigate that. My project manager did an amazing job from start to finish and helped to make this whole project run smoother and this process of virtual consulting much easier to manage. My teammates and I were excited to work on this project together.

While working on the project and with my team, I learned many new skills. I learned how to work with a change in the project scope, and how to adjust and be flexible and still work to provide thorough recommendations for the client. I learned how to utilize a mostly open ended survey with some multiple choice questions to get qualitative and quantitative feedback from potential customers. I also learned how to organize that information and to apply that understanding of the demographics and preferences of those customers to the recommendations for the client.

Even with all the work that we had to do on the project and communicating for our work, my team was able to take on the challenge. Outside of weekly client and team meetings, I met with team members to work on research for our sections. I met with team members and advisors to make sure that we could make the best recommendations for our client, and that these recommendations have had not just a lot of considerations to them but were also thoughtful and well presented. I learned a lot from my team members and have become better in my consulting skills as a result. I also really appreciated the support from advisors and having them as mentors who are experienced in their field helped not just with my confidence in this project but also in learning how to be a better consultant.

I am grateful for the experience and new learnings I gained from being a part of the Foster Consulting Program. I’ve been able to learn even more about consulting and work on a new area of consulting that I hadn’t explored before. I’m glad to have been part of such an amazing team and doing this program has given me invaluable experience in my path of working towards a consulting career.