A Mad Scramble for Internships

Summer jobs this year are few and far between. That’s sparking a
flurry of new thinking by administrators and students alike

No one is interested in classes. Everyone is focused
on recruiting. That’s how first-year MBA student Sarah
Jane Gunter, 31, describes the scene at Wharton
Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s
a picture students could paint at just about any B-school in February, as they
begin on-campus interviewing for summer internships: Competition is fierce.

By Mica Schneider in New York Business Week

For good reason: This year’s outlook for internship hiring is bleaker than usual —
worse even than last year’s. On-campus recruiting is down 30% to 35% at the
University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, while the Broad School at
Michigan State University, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, and
many others are noting slower years. Because of the weak economy, says
Randall Williams, MBA career services director at the University of California,
Irvine’s B-school, "we’ve seen students who did everything right be up against
fewer job opportunities."

You don’t need a graduate degree to determine why fewer companies are coming
to campus: They have fewer positions to fill after a 2001 marred by layoffs. Due to
restructuring, Procter & Gamble will hire 50 to 60 MBA interns this year, vs. the
75 or so it recruited in 2001, says Doug Dedeker, who’s in charge of P&G’s
commercial recruiting for North America. During the past eight months, many
consulting firms have scaled back their hiring of MBAs. At B-schools such as
Rochester’s Simon School, where about one-third of the students choose jobs in
consulting, that causes significant concern.

EXPERIENCE HELPS. "We’ve got 33% of a class that has to find something else to
do," says Lisa McGurn, assistant dean for career management at Simon.
Investment banking firms — another choice destination for numerically inclined
MBAs — have scaled back as well.

MBAs with prior experience have an edge. Bryan Staff, 26, a first-year MBA at
Simon, completed nine first-round interviews at investment banks on Jan. 10. He
received two internship offers and accepted a summer position with Bear Sterns. "I
think I was in an O.K. position because I worked in the industry before I went to
Simon," he explains. "The larger banks are looking for people with experience."

Says Regina Resnick, assistant dean for MBA career services at Columbia
University’s School of Business: "Students who have prior work experience, plus
academics that build on that, will have an easier time selling themselves. If
students are choosing to forge a new [career] path, it will be more challenging."

"RETREAT? HELL, YES." Unfortunately, 70% to 80% of students start business
school with the intention of switching careers, school admissions and
career-services directors say. Those figures ought to change this year, as more
students beat a retreat back to their old industries. There’s also the perception
that career-changers who don’t find an internship could have trouble landing a job
when they graduate a year from now.

"None of my classmates can even conceive not doing an internship this summer,"
says George Mathews, a first-year MBA at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and
an MBA Journal writer for BusinessWeek Online. "Students believe that [not
getting an internship] will indicate some type of deficiency on their part, despite
the economy, and possibly complicate their future prospects."

Companies that do plan to hire interns are choosing carefully. "We’re targeting
top-tier programs," says Daniel Lewis, manager of staffing and recruiting for
Goodyear Tire & Rubber in Akron, Ohio. "When you want to get the best
[employees], you have to go where the best [MBAs] hang out. And that’s the top
programs." The good news: Lewis says Goodyear will probably hire about 15
interns this summer — a leap from the two it took on in the past.

SOUP INCENTIVE. Smaller B-schools say some of their most active recruiters have
abandoned them for larger schools. "All of a sudden, Harvard and Wharton
students are interested in" companies they wouldn’t have considered a couple of
years ago, says Helen Dashney, director of the career center at Michigan State’s
Broad School. Leonard Morrison, director of the center for career development at
Babson College, notes that "in many cases, recruiters come to campus because
our students are hungry, and they deliver. In this market, though, some firms are
saying that if they’re getting equally hungry candidates from other schools, they’ll
look at them."

Still, even Harvard Business School’s first-year MBAs won’t have an easy time
finding work this summer. One first-year MBA, who asks not to be named, says
the school’s online job board includes fewer than 400 listings for the 900 first-year
students at Harvard.

The obvious solution for large and small schools alike is to roll out the red carpet
for recruiters. Rochester’s Simon School offers them complementary limousine
service from the airport, free breakfast and lunch, "comfort kits" in his and hers
styles, and sometimes home-made soup. Kellogg has been flying its new dean,
Dipak Jain, to cities such as Atlanta and New York to meet recruiters and
encourage them to visit his campus. "We never did this before," says Roxanne
Hori, assistant dean of career services at Kellogg. But then, hardly ever in the past
has "the market done a nosedive like this," she adds.

"THINKING AHEAD." Not everything is doom and gloom on campus. Despite low
numbers of recruiters now, directors of career services say they’re still optimistic
that first-year MBAs will land internships. Boston College’s Carroll School of
Management has 19 internship postings, up a tiny bit from 16 in 2001, for its 115
first-year MBAs.

"Companies that have downsized recognize that they still have a need and are
thinking ahead about using interns," says Jeanne Garvey, director of graduate
management career services at the Carroll School. And even though companies
will offer fewer jobs to students at Kellogg, Hori says that her students do have
one advantage: "They’ve already jumped a hurdle: They competed against 6,000
people to get into Kellogg."

First-year MBAs aren’t calling mayday yet, either. "No one has thrown in the
towel," says Todd Cobin, 28, a student at University of North Carolina’s
Kenan-Flagler Business School. If Cobin’s Plan A — to find a job in marketing —
doesn’t work out, he’s figuring out a Plan B. Plus, students who don’t find
internships this summer still have options. Last year at the University of
Maryland’s Smith School of Business, about 10% of first years, especially
international students, didn’t complete internships. Instead, they studied at
universities abroad or returned to their home countries.

BORN TOO LATE? Columbia Business School’s career-services office offers
perhaps the best indication of the current market. Instead of instructing students
in such things as how to value options and discretionary pay when they consider
multiple job offers, as the school did just two years ago, it’s offering seminars in
how to uncover hidden jobs in a tight market.

And when first-years feel sorry for themselves for not having enrolled — or been
born — just a couple of years earlier, they can always find comfort in the fact that
they have one more year to enjoy the comforts of academia before they have to
find a full-time job. Says Cobin: "We’re thankful that we’re not second-years."

By Mica Schneider in New York

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2002/bs2002027_2247.htm