What My Internship Taught Me About Consulting

Before starting my MBA, I had already had some exposure to consulting-style work through pro bono projects. I enjoyed working with organizations, understanding their problems, and developing recommendations. But this summer, during my internship at stradajī, I experienced something different: I was able to work almost like a consultant inside a real business.

stradaji is a technology consulting company, but my role was focused mainly on marketing and business development. The interesting part was that the company did not have a separate marketing team. This meant that instead of joining an existing function and completing assigned marketing tasks, I worked directly with the founders and helped them answer broader questions about the business.

In many ways, they became my internal clients.

My work started with research. I looked at competitors, analyzed how other consulting companies communicate their services, and tried to understand how stradaji could differentiate itself. From there, I developed recommendations around positioning, messaging, website structure, case studies, social media, and sales materials. One of the central ideas was to make the company’s technology expertise easier to understand from a business perspective and position stradaji around helping clients make confident technology decisions.

What made the experience especially valuable was that I was not only asked to execute ideas. I had to form an opinion, explain why I recommended something, present it to the founders, receive their feedback, and revise my approach. Sometimes they agreed with my recommendation, and sometimes they challenged it. That process felt very similar to the consulting work I had experienced through pro bono projects, but with much more ownership and much closer access to decision-makers.

I also had the opportunity to see some of my recommendations move from research into actual business tools. For example, the website work developed into a structure connecting the company’s positioning, five solution areas, client cases, thought leadership, and calls to action. My work also expanded into AI-enabled sales development, where I helped think through how research, lead qualification, personalization, and outreach could work together.

One of my biggest lessons was that consulting is not only about having the answer. It is about asking the right questions, creating structure when the problem is unclear, supporting recommendations with evidence, and communicating them in a way that helps someone make a decision.

For me, this internship also created an interesting connection between my past and my future. My previous career was mostly in marketing and brand management, and my next goal is consulting. At stradaji, I realized that these two paths are not as separate as I once thought. My marketing experience gave me a way to understand customers, positioning, and communication, while the internship pushed me to use those skills in a more strategic and advisory way.

I started the summer as an MBA student with a marketing background. I finished it with a much clearer understanding of what I enjoy most: working with decision-makers, bringing structure to ambiguous problems, and turning research into recommendations that a business can actually use.