MBA Students Take On Real Consulting Work At The Rady School

There is a moment, somewhere around the second or third week of the Rady Action Project, when students stop treating it like a class. The kickoff meeting is over, the scope has been defined, and the first weekly status report is due – this time going to a real client: a senior executive at a local biotech company, or a startup founder trying to crack a new market. 

The shift is intentional. The program places students in consulting engagements before they head into their internships, where their work must stand up in front of people making actual business decisions.  

BUILT TO FEEL LIKE REAL WORK 

Sandy Kenny, executive director and instructor of the Rady Action Project (RAP), designed the program with a specific goal: to mirror the realities of professional consulting as closely as possible. 

“At many business schools, these experiential learning programs are run by academics,” she says. “My background is in corporate consulting.” 

Before joining Rady, Kenny spent years running consulting engagements at another university, where corporate clients paid upward of $15,000 per project and she built C-suite relationships across industries. That experience shapes how RAP is structured – not as a classroom exercise, but as a client-facing engagement with real expectations.  

Students don’t receive a prompt and go solve it. They build a project charter, develop a detailed work plan, and submit weekly status reports to clients who are almost always at the senior or executive level.  

That structure is designed to build the skills and confidence students will need to manage client work after graduation. As Kenny puts it, “I give them the structure and the framework, and I coach them — but I never say, ‘go do this, and you’ve solved your problem.’ The discomfort is intentional.” 

Discomfort is exactly what makes the learning stick, Kenny says, because in the real world, no client will hand you the answer either. 

FROM SCOPE TO SOLUTION

Before each RAP engagement, Kenny and corporate outreach specialist Meredith Mendez spend months sourcing client organizations across San Diego’s economy — from established defense and energy firms to biotech companies to international consumer brands.  

Students rank their preferred clients and are placed onto teams by Kenny and Mendez, in consultation with career advisors. The process mirrors how real organizations actually work: You don’t choose your colleagues, and that’s part of the learning. 

Teams receive a deliberately vague scope document. The first client meeting becomes a lesson, as students must extract the details themselves and transform a fuzzy challenge into a structured plan.  

Over seven to eight weeks, they conduct market and competitive research, report to clients weekly, present internally to Kenny in a graded rehearsal, and then deliver final recommendations directly to the client.  

A noteworthy class innovation: All teams attend each other’s final presentations under NDA, so the entire cohort learns from every project, not just their own. By the end of the quarter, each student has seen several distinct business challenges across industries from biotech to gaming to energy, building a consulting perspective no single project alone could provide. 

WHERE THE WORK LANDS

The companies that partner with RAP bring genuine strategic challenges that have often resisted easy internal solutions.  

At Catalent, a global pharmaceutical company with operations in San Diego, the local team had previously sought budget approval from corporate headquarters in Florida to purchase a key piece of equipment without success. A Rady student team built a full market and competitive analysis, modeled the financial case, and delivered a presentation to senior leadership outlining the investment case. 

“Their ability to frame the problem in a way that could be easily recognized by executives like myself was impressive,” said Bryan Knox, general manager at Catalent San Diego. 

The work helped revive internal discussions and elevate the business case within the organization. 

Vikk AI, a legal tech startup, turned to RAP for help positioning its AI platform in a fast-moving market. A Rady student team delivered competitive landscape analysis, a SWOT assessment, and pricing recommendations that sharpened the company’s go-to-market strategy. Shortly after, Vikk AI was accepted into a competitive Amazon program that provided funding to accelerate its growth. 

“What stood out most was the team’s ability to translate broad market research into practical strategic recommendations,” said Haytham Allos, CTO of Vikk AI and a Rady School MBA alum, who has worked with student consulting teams at multiple universities. “It was valuable to have a team that could step back, analyze the market independently, and provide recommendations that supported executive decision-making. We really appreciated the professionalism and effort the students brought.” 

Some partners return for additional engagements. Others bring the RAP relationship with them when they move to new organizations, creating a steady pipeline of new projects. Recent partners include Catalent, Abzena, SDG&E, Raytheon, Qualcomm, Gore’s medical division, Avia Games, and Doughlicious, a U.K. brand entering the U.S. market for the first time. 

SKILLS EMPLOYERS ARE LOOKING FOR

At the heart of every Rady Action Project engagement are three capabilities: problem solving, teamwork, and communication. These aren’t incidental to the program – they’re the point. And the business world has noticed their absence elsewhere: the Wall Street Journal consistently cites all three as the top skills missing in new hires, and AACSB, business education’s leading accreditor, has moved to make experiential learning a formal curriculum requirement – effectively validating what RAP is practicing. 

At the Rady School, those skills are the architecture, not an afterthought. Problem solving is built into the consulting frameworks students apply each week. Teamwork is embedded in the grading structure: students evaluate each other’s contributions, mirroring how performance is assessed in actual organizations. Communication is coached explicitly, including by an outside consultant who encounters each team’s project fresh — delivering the kind of unfiltered, executive-level perspective that real clients bring. 

THE PAYOFF YOU FEEL AFTER GRADUATION 

Students often feel the impact of the Rady Action Project most clearly after they step into an internship or first job. The work plan, the project charter, the weekly client reporting cadence – tools that felt like overhead during a demanding quarter – turn out to be exactly what the professional world requires. Research across experiential learning program confirms what Rady alumni report: appreciation for this kind of hands-on training grows significantly in the year or two after graduation, once students have had the chance to put it to use. 

For Kenny, the program’s value shows up most clearly at the end of each quarter, in the moment after the final presentations, when students leave having delivered real work to real clients.  

“At the end, when their presentation’s over, I think they feel a very strong sense of accomplishment – and a confidence that they can go on and do this in the corporate world,” she says. “That’s what it’s all about.”  

It’s a confidence built not on classroom theory, but on having done the real thing. 

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Sudhanshu Agarwal is a Full Time MBA Candidate at UC San Diego Rady School of Management, where he supports the school’s communications and social media team. Before the MBA, he worked in software development; he has since interned in strategic and finance consulting – a transition shaped in part by his experience in the Rady Action Project. He writes about the Rady community and business education. 

The Rady Action Project is a core course in UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management full-time MBA program and in its Flex and Executive MBA programs. Learn more.

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