Imagine this: you and your team, all packed into one conference room, faced with an actual business problem affecting thousands of people. The client is looking at you, expecting nothing but innovative solutions that can save their business millions of dollars. Intimidating? Welcome to the world of consulting, where high school students are being asked more and more to solve complex business problems.
This is the catch of consulting work: it's not necessarily all about great ideas. It's about dealing with messy human dynamics, attempting to broker impossible schedules, working off incomplete information, and learning to sell solutions that can kill or cure companies. The type of challenge professional consultants deal with on a daily basis are the same types of challenge that you will deal with when you go into consulting careers, whether through competitions, internships, or actual client work.
Seeing these challenges is not meant to frighten you - it's meant to prepare you for success. When you can demonstrate that you've conquered real consulting challenges, you're not merely a good grades student; you're somebody who can deliver under pressure, think strategically, and generate results under uncertainty.
Challenge 1: Managing Scope Creep and Changing Requirements
One of the most frequent issues you'll encounter is scope creep - when the requirements of a project extend beyond what was originally agreed. This is because clients often don't fully know what they need in the first place, or requirements are developed as the project unfolds. For student consultants, it is infuriating as you've laid out your plan with careful attention only to find the goalposts have been shifted.
Scope creep happens on over half of all consultant projects, so it is not an issue specific to students but an issue of pervasiveness. The difference is that professional consultants have learned how to anticipate and manage these changes, while high school students are caught off guard.
How to do it: Early in any consulting project, work with your client to obtain clearly defined deliverables, timelines, and success measures. Put everything in writing, and don't hesitate to ask questions to untangle when requirements are unclear. When unexpected requests arise during the course of a project, determine how new work affects your schedule and discuss these ramifications with your client prior to agreeing to the changes.
Challenge 2: Dealing with Difficult Clients and Stakeholders
Most high school students anticipate using adult clients to be professional and direct, but this happens to be the opposite of the truth because clients tend to be hostile, unreasonable, or demanding. This is most difficult for teenage consultants because clients can challenge your experience or authority based on age.
You may be forced to negotiate between two opposing stakeholders - a forward-thinking marketing manager receptive to new concepts and a traditional operations director resistant to change. Acquiring the ability to manage these conditions involves diplomatic methods with which many high school students are not yet acquainted.
How to do it: Establish credibility through professionalism and preparation. Study your client's industry, understand their competition, and come to meetings well-prepared with prepared questions and first thoughts. If clients don't accept your ideas, don't become defensive. Rather, ask questions to understand their concerns, address the points that make sense, and refine your thinking.
Challenge 3: Dealing with Incomplete or Inconsistent Information
One of the most frustrating things about actual consulting is that you're never, ever going to have all of the information you need to make the optimal decisions. Businesses bring in consultants exactly because they're presented with difficult issues with no simple solutions. High school students usually struggle with this indecision because school settings usually permit complete information necessary to adequately solve problems.
In consulting, you may find that financial information is old, important stakeholders give contradictory facts, or vital documents are not present at all. Some clients won't give you sensitive internal information, while others give you information that is not relevant.
How to do it: Start with what is really needed versus what would be nice-to-have. Do your best to get the most critical data in your initial attempt at solving the key issue. Where there is no data, make an informed estimate from existing data and document your assumptions clearly to clients. Create several scenarios based on different possible outcomes.
Challenge 4: Managing Tight Schedules and Time Pressure
Consulting assignments have extremely tight deadlines since companies require solutions fast so that they can stay competitive. Case competitions or client assignments in high school could translate into the timeline being unrealistically tight. You may have a couple of days to learn about a complicated industry, analyze information, make recommendations, and present them in a winning language.
This time limitation is augmented by the fact that you're also balancing school work, extra activities, and other responsibilities. Unlike professional consultants who can give completely dedicated attention to projects, you have to mix consulting work with other responsibilities with the same expectation.
How to cope with it: Break large projects into small, manageable pieces with clear deadlines. Start each project by creating a detailed plan working backwards from the final presentation date. Allow some buffer time for delays. Be able to distinguish between those tasks that require careful analysis and those tasks that require sufficient information to support recommendations - not everything is of equal importance.
Challenge 5: Expressing Complex Thoughts Clearly and Persuasively
Secondary-level teens have an amazing ability to grasp complex ideas; yet they lack the ability to present their discovery in a way that is clear and actionable for busy executives. Being a good consultant is often a matter of how effectively one can pull together detailed analysis into clear, actionable recommendations.
The challenge is most demanding because presenting to organizations usually entails convincing skeptical audiences to give up the old or spend significant resources on new paths. Your recommendations are technically right, but unless you can present them in a manner that convinces, they will not be accepted.
How to do it: Get a hold of the "executive summary" mindset - present your most important conclusions upfront and then provide supporting facts. Tell stories with facts rather than just reciting numbers. Translate numbers into stories that allow clients to understand what the facts mean for their business. For example, rather than saying "customer satisfaction scores declined 12%, " say "customers are becoming increasingly frustrated with long wait times, and that's a market-share play for competitors to scoop up."
Challenge 6: Working Effectively with Diverse Teams
High school students on consulting projects must also work with others from other schools, backgrounds, and work styles, both a blessing and a curse. Team conflicts can arise around division of labor, who gets to be in charge, or varying expectations of quality and timeliness. These dynamics become even more complicated in virtual settings where team participants never meet in person.
Effective consulting demands effective teamwork as projects usually involve a combination of specialized expertise and viewpoints. It is challenging to establish effective teams when team members have varying levels of experience, communication styles, and availability factors.
How? Define clear roles and responsibilities at the outset of the project so the team knows how they fit into the larger picture. Set up communication processes that are open to all the team members, such as frequent check-ins and transparent escalation processes for conflict resolution. When conflict does arise, put project goals above personal desires and use evidence-based decision-making processes.
Challenge 7: Balancing Analysis with Action-Oriented Recommendations
High school students become stuck in endless analysis with no recommendations to act on. The learning environment encourages extensive research and thorough understanding but client consulting necessitates firm recommendations. The challenge is how to determine when you have sufficient information to make sound recommendations and when further analysis would make a notable impact to your findings.
This is particularly difficult for students who are worried about being wrong or incomplete in their analysis. However, clients would prefer to have suboptimal advice that they can implement immediately than optimal analysis that arrives too late to impact their situation.
How to do it: Set specific time limits for analysis phases and stick to them even if you may think that more research would be useful. Attempt to get the bare essentials of information that you need in order to make good recommendations rather than trying to get all the information available. Repeat to yourself repeatedly, "What does my client need to decide, and what is most important to that decision?"
Challenge 8: Succeeding in Shifting Business Environments
The business environment is also evolving on a daily basis with emerging technologies, laws, and market forces defining the client requirements. High school students doing consulting assignments can discover that their initial analysis is outdated at the time of making recommendations. Economic circumstances change, competitors introduce new offerings, or regulatory changes redefine the business environment altogether.
This shifting terrain requires adaptability and ongoing revision of analysis as more evidence is found by consultants. But ongoing course-changing can prevent projects from ever being finished. You must be able to sort out significant changes that require new strategies and insignificant developments that have no effect on fundamental recommendations.
How to handle it: Develop mechanisms for monitoring related changes in your client's environment throughout the project. Set up Google alerts on key competitors and review industry magazines. Develop recommendation structures that are robust to minor environmental changes. Instead of proposing solutions that are valid only under a specific situation, design strategies that excel under various situations.
Challenge 9: Managing Personal Stress and Work Quality
Consulting assignments are very stressful, especially for high school students who might be under tremendous pressure for the first time. Deadline pressure, working on difficult clients, solving complicated issues, and high expectations generate stress levels that will prove difficult for most students to manage. Stress has a negative effect on work performance and individual health if left unmanaged.
The challenge is also compounded by the fact that consulting work simply never seems to end. There is always more analysis to be conducted, more stakeholders to be interviewed, or better solutions to be designed. Students end up working long hours and yet still have other academic and personal demands, leading to burnout and impaired performance.
How to manage it: Create distinct boundaries between consulting work and everything else. Define particular work hours and adhere to them, resisting the urge to work all the time. Create stress-reducing techniques that suit you, such as exercise, meditation, or chatting with friends and loved ones. Recognize that some stress is inevitable and potentially enhances performance, but chronic stress erodes both health and work quality.
Challenge 10: Learning from Failure and Iterating Quickly
Not all consulting projects will be successful, and failure is harder for high school students to handle than it is for seasoned consultants who have learned to see failure as a chance to learn. Rejected proposals, failed recommendations, or poor implementations can be intimidating, especially to students who have been used to success from school.
The biggest challenge is how to fail inexpensively and rapidly rather than investing massive effort in plans that would fail. That requires getting comfortable with ambiguity and experimenting first before investing in ideas. You also need to learn to unhook personal value from project achievement, understanding that failure does not speak to your intelligence or capability.
How to do it: Tackle each project with a hypothesis-testing rather than attempting to discover the single right answer mentality. Develop minimum viable recommendations that you pilot test with customers in weeks before you commit resources to full implementation plans. Have formal processes for recording lessons learned on successful and failed projects. Consider failures as data points and not as personal failures.
If you are a high school student pushing yourself to stand out in college applications, RISE Research offers a unique opportunity to work one-on-one with mentors from top universities around the world.
Through personalized guidance and independent research projects that can lead to prestigious publications, RISE Research helps you build a standout academic profile and develop skills that set you apart. With flexible program dates and global accessibility, ambitious students can apply year-round. To learn more about eligibility, costs, and how to get started, visit RISE Research’s official website and take your college preparation to the next level!
Read More
