Whilst not necessarily 'intellectual' the bits I like about consulting, and why I joined the career, is finding out about how things work. Essentially this is the data gathering stage of an assignment, so something you do a lot of when a junior consultant / business analyst. Investigating what a client does, what it's real purpose is, and being able to communicate it is actually a common need across management consulting, and IT (charlatan?) consulting, although the level of detail needed for IT can be mindboggling. This tied with the variety of being able to look at different industries and moving to different clients were the positives to me.The intellectual challenge part might be in the techniques of how to pull this info out of the client, but really it is more often determing the 'solution' and actually getting it in and working that are the challenging parts. If a solution was easy the client would have done it themselves.Don't fall into the trap of thinking the something has to be 'intellecually challenging' to be enjoyable. You might like a project for the people you work with, the affect on your salary / bonus, or even the location. Conversely an intellectually challenging project might be soo bloody hard you feel despondant, and end up questioning if there is any point as the client was actually in a good place in the circumstances!
