One of the highlights of my MSc.

When I started my MSc in Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Queen Mary University of London, I knew I wanted my degree to end with something real and not just another assignment graded and forgotten, but a piece of work that actually mattered to someone outside a lecture hall. I didn't expect that "someone" would be a diagnostics spin-out from Imperial College London working on a test that could change how women access HPV screening. 

Why I Said Yes to ViWipe 

ViWipe is developing a paper-based, non-invasive HPV self-test that uses menstrual blood instead of a clinical swab. When I first read the brief for the consulting project, I remember thinking this isn't a case study, this is a company that needs answers. That distinction changed how seriously I took every single deliverable. Every question we tackled had a real person behind it, a woman who might one day rely on this test instead of skipping a screening she found invasive or inaccessible.  That's what made the work feel different. I wasn't producing an answer for a grade, I was producing something that could shape whether ViWipe's diagnostic reached the people who needed it, and how soon. 

Learning to Work Like a Consultant, Not a Student 

The biggest shift for me wasn't academic, it was psychological. In a normal module, your marker wants to see that you understood the theory. My client wanted to know if our recommendations would hold up. Regulatory figures like MHRA registration fees or NIA cohort deadlines don't stay still for the length of a project. More than once, something I'd researched weeks earlier had already shifted by the time we got to writing the final report, and I learned the hard way that in real consulting, "verified last month" isn't the same as "verified now." 

That discipline showed up everywhere in the final report and the presentation we delivered. We had to be honest about the gaps too, where our market research leaned too heavily on ViWipe's internal documents, where our stakeholder interview base was thinner than we'd have liked, where the currency figures needed tidying up. Flagging your own project's weaknesses to the client who commissioned it is a strange kind of professionalism no lecture ever quite prepares you for, but it's exactly what made the work credible. 

More Than Slides: Being Part of the Mission 

What made this project different from a typical consulting brief was that I didn't just analyse ViWipe from the outside, I became part of its operational world too. Alongside the core consulting deliverables, I took on PPIE recruitment by reaching out to clinicians and industry professionals, coordinating interviews, and liaising directly with the client on who to bring into the room. Building that candidate list and following up with people taught me more about stakeholder relationships than any textbook chapter on the topic ever could. There's a real difference between writing "conduct stakeholder engagement" as a recommendation and doing it, representing a company you don't work for full-time but still need to represent well. 

Would I Recommend It? 

Completely, but with the same honesty I tried to bring to the project itself. This isn't a project where you get to hide behind theory. The clients hold your work to the same standard they'd hold any professional consultant to, which means you get scrutinised, corrected, and occasionally humbled. But you also get to see your name attached to work that might genuinely shape how a life-saving diagnostic reaches the people who need it. 

If you want a project that stays comfortable, this isn't it. If you want one that changes how you think about evidence, rigor, and what it actually means to be useful to a client — say yes.