Dan, for BW's 1996 rankings, the most recent tally to date (the next B-school ranking will hit newsstands in October, 1998), corporate recruiters rated Duke among the top five most improved (No. 5), and 95% of the class of 1996 boasted job offers at graduation. In addition, recruiters ranked Fuqua grads in the top 10 for their skills in operations (No. 8). Has the school been able to maintain that pace?

Yes, in fact, if anything, it has probably accelerated. We've actually been analyzing this, and have found it amazing that applications have soared again, now up to 3,600 for 300 slots. I think part of that is attributable to the school becoming better known, and our good placement rate has added to our reputation.

What types of services have you instituted to grab such a high satisfaction rating from recruiters?

Folks like myself who have spent their careers on both sides of the desk -- both as a school recruiter and a corporate recruiter -- have a unique perspective, and I think that has helped in the way that we treat our customers. Having been in the corporate side of things for a while, recruiting on campus during the recruiting season, I have an appreciation for what it's like to be a recruiter on the road. We set high standards, but we also have real good customer service.

What types of things, for example, does Fuqua do that complement this customer service aspect of your job?

Sometimes it's the little things. We survey the 330 companies that recruit here for full-time jobs and summer internships to gauge satisfaction and what needs work. After we receive the company feedback, we'll meet as a staff monthly to discuss and implement changes. For instance, after hearing back from a number of companies, we put in a water cooler in the interviewing area. You might say, "big deal," but that makes a difference. We also installed a free Coke machine, and we put in cell phones that recruiters can check out during the day. We also have afternoon homemade cookie bakes. I know that all sounds small and insignificant, but these are the little things that people appreciate if they're here interviewing 9-10 hours a day. If, as a recruiter, you've been at four other schools, you have the ability to do some comparative shopping.

On the student side, we take a tough-love stance. We've implemented several strong policies and procedures to make the recruiting process more efficient. For example, when I first arrived, we had a 10% no-show rate on our interview schedules, which just doesn't work. Now, if a student misses an interview, they have to write a letter of apology to the company that they skipped out on before they can interview through the career services office again. If they're a no-show a second time, then they're done -- they no longer have access to the on-campus recruiting resources provided by Fuqua. Having instituted that policy, we went from a 10% no-show rate to 5% for over 6,000 interviews. In that instance, we were like a good parent to our students: We set standards and enforced them.

The same thing is true for renegs -- where a student might bolt to another company after he or she has already accepted a job at another firm. That is a kiss of death from a recruiting standard because we have very little leverage with second-year students besides offering our services, extensions, and help. If it's a first-year that renegs, then we literally cut them out of the recruiting process because we could easily lose that company -- the issue is just that sensitive. So, the Fuqua career services office does two things: One is set policy, and the other is offer services.

Dan, interviews are a very large part of the recruiting process. Is Fuqua's interview policy oriented toward closed or open interview scheduling?

We tend to go half-and-half, where companies prescreen for half of their schedules and leave the other half open to everyone. The major exceptions are strategy consulting firms -- like McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Booz Allen -- which take more students from closed interviewing.

Both processes have their pros and cons: Closed interviewing is more focused, and the screened students sometimes show a school in a much better light. The trade-off, however, is that it excludes a number of students. Meanwhile, the open interviewing is all-inclusive but does not necessarily showcase the school's best students. Is that a major sticking point with Fuqua students?

Our feeling here is that our "depth of bench" is so strong now in the quality of student that whether students interview with companies via closed or open schedules, they're going to show well. Our numbers would prove this, and almost across the board, the hiring of grads through closed and open lists has been equal. As a former recruiter, I've got to say that hiring MBAs is not a pure science. You can spot the students who have the good grades, work experience, and background and probably find someone or several people that you like, but you can't spot as easily the students who have the motivation, and that's where open schedules comes into play. Somebody who really comes in there to say "You're my No. 1 company" and who you know will you give you their 100% -- how do you measure that beforehand?

What specific advice do you bestow on grads regarding the interview? Have the services you provide regarding interviewing increased over the past couple of years?

To start, we have a unique program called the Career Fellows Program that we instituted three years ago that has since been copied by other schools. The program is comprised of 22 second-year students who are selected to help counsel first-years on nearly everything regarding the interview process. The participating second-years go through a rigorous selection process to become a fellow: Last year we had over 100 students apply to get to the 22.

The Career Fellows Program came about because we found that it was almost impossible for our three placement people here who sit down with students to give personalized service to everyone. But the students who have learned the recruiting game well by the time they become second-years do have that intimacy with the process and can be of great help to the first-years. What that means is that they do things like the first critique of student resumes, mock interviews in front of videotape, and a critique of cover letters. And we try to match up first- and second-year students with similar backgrounds. For example, a first-year interested in i-banking will sign up with a person who had a summer internship in investment banking.

On the preparation side, we feel the program gives first-year students a decided edge because second-years have gone through the rigors already and can bring back some pretty savvy information to first-years on what it's going to be like to be interviewed by a trader from Goldman Sachs or a case interviewer from McKinsey Consulting. So those 22 second-years really become an extension of career services, and they free up my staff to do more in-depth counseling for people who need more help with their resumes, or want to talk about their job-search strategy. The Career Fellows Program in not mandatory, but it's so well received that last year it received the highest rating on the MBA Assn.'s yearend survey for programs that both first- and second-year students felt offered them the most value.

How many staff run Fuqua's career services office?

We have three professionals, called counselors, and six office staff who handle the cold calls and many of the administrative duties. I have an associate and assistant director, and my associate director is responsible for nurturing the incoming class over their two-year stay. That philosophy has worked well for us because that allows us to get to know the students a lot better. So when companies call the staff about our students, we know all of them well.

How early does the placement process begin at Fuqua?

We're moving it earlier and earlier, to compensate for the increasingly earlier time frames that companies now have in mind to do their presentations and interviewing. This year, we're going to kick off our efforts during the first week of orientation. That really throws most students for a loop because they generally think that they're going to have a couple of months to get acclimated with the school setting. But that's just not the case. They soon realize that the pace is so quick that they can't afford to sit back. Our first meeting during orientation sort of wakes them up.

We've found that there's a very high interest in self-assessment and how students' backgrounds, personalities, and interests fit with potential MBA careers. Once classes start, students get so overwhelmed with doing classwork.So we'll do that self-assessment during orientation. A good 85% of the incoming class participate in the self-assessment exercises, and that's partly because about 75% of the students attending B-school are looking to change careers.

Are Fuqua's placement efforts largely technology-driven, enabling services to be delivered more efficiently in this accelerated environment?

Everything is now almost entirely automated. We have old-fashioned bulletin boards we use for job postings, but for the most part, everything else is now on the Internet. We have a daily "required reading board" which has everything about pertinent announcements -- such as changes in a company's presentations, changes in campus recruiting schedules, and special announcements. But though we now use more technology to deliver services, we still do a tremendous amount of old-fashioned one-on-one counseling. We feel that's very important because when students need to talk through individual-specific situations or have a question that requires a fair amount of thought and debate, they should be able to talk to us. So, technology has been a means of freeing up time for us to do things like one-on-one counseling.

I think communication is really how we gauge success here. For example, getting out pertinent information to students clubs and devising a weekly newsletter (before the Internet became a reality) helped create a vital communication link between us and the students. That has put us more in tune with each other. We also put together a first- and second-year student advisory board to give us feedback on how we're doing and what we could do better. Comprised of 20 students from each class who are elected by their peers, the advisory board gives us direct access to the students' perspective. And a lot of improvements that we've implemented have come directly from the advisory board, such as the no-show policy.

From the sound of things, the students themselves play a big part in shaping Fuqua's placement process.

Absolutely. We make it a point to work together with students. We work closely with the 11 functional clubs here (finance, consulting, entrepreneurship, marketing etc.). We meet with club presidents and tell them exactly what their charge is: to inform first-years in their specific club....And the clubs have been our biggest ally, in terms of educating our incoming students because nearly 90% of the students body is involved in at least one club.

So, to get first-years started, we do the self-assessment workshops, and then we'll do an industry overview day during the second week of classes, where we take a whole afternoon and have students rotate through half-hour sessions on major career fields. Then, during the first two months of the first semester, we have symposia hosted by each major functional club to further educate first-years on their specific field's career options.

In addition, we have speakers come in regularly to talk with students. The marketing club will, for example, bring in a VP from Procter & Gamble or Colgate to talk about brand management. Or the finance club will bring in a Goldman Sachs vice-president to talk about sales and trading. This year, we plan to have several alumni speakers come in to campus to talk about entrepreneurship, and their experiences starting their own businesses and raising venture capital.

Have such measures translated into Fuqua grads garnering more job offers?

That's hard to judge because part of the success top schools are enjoying is attributable to the healthy economy. I knew when I first came here in 1993 that Fuqua was underrepresented as far as companies were concerned. To free up our time to do more marketing and recruiting of our own, we had to implement some of the programs we just talked about. We literally hit the road and started calling on hundreds of employers to let them know about the quality of our program. Then, as the marketplace improved, we were positioned to bring a greater variety of recruiters to campus.

We also surveyed students when I first arrived here, and we essentially said: "tell us the top companies that you would like to see here." We came up with a list of 58 companies that weren't recruiting at Fuqua at the time, which included some premier companies like Booz Allen, BCG, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel. Today, that list of 58 has gone down to two. And through our marketing efforts, we've been able to increase the number of companies recruiting at Fuqua from 166 to over 330 in four years. (Editor's note: From 1994 to 1996, Fuqua experienced a 56% increase in the number of companies recruiting on campus. Some 353 companies made recruiting visits in 1996, compared with just 226 in 1994. And the number of companies making their first recruiting visits to Fuqua more than doubled since 1994, rising to 88 from 39.)

Indeed, that's no small feat. What, in your opinion, are the different factors contributing to the school's rise in corporate prominence?

My philosophy comes from a marketing perspective. When we went out to bring in companies, we realized that it was essential to know what our customers wanted to buy and then to deliver that product to them. That meant -- and still means -- keeping our customers happy when they come to campus, and maintaining good communications with our clients, the students.

Getting back to question at hand, if our students don't measure up with Kellogg and Wharton grads, then companies will no longer continue to hire at Fuqua. It's just that simple. We constantly survey students and companies to find out what we can and can't do, and try to manage expectations.

Dan, can you give me an example of when you've had to manage student or company expectations?

For example, on the company side, our recruiters wanted us to provide them each with phones -- we have 22 interview rooms with only three phones. We said: Unfortunately, we can't wire and install each interview room with a phone. But to improve on the situation, we installed six cell phones that recruiters can now check out during their day of interviewing.

On the student side, we've spoken with some international students who have wanted to have access to as many U.S. companies as our domestic students. When we meet with them and do separate workshops, we explain to them the added obstacles that they face, and that they are not the same as their U.S. counterparts. Some companies just don't want to sponsor international students because they don't want to go through the visa process.

We're good, but we can't force a company to interview if their policy it not to sponsor employees. Instead we point out that there are major international recruiting consortiums that we participate in to help bolster our international students' opportunities. They go to events in Miami, Orlando, and New York where there are companies looking exclusively for international students. (Editor's note: Approximately 50 companies recruit for international students in Orlando, while an additional 40 recruit in Miami.) We're not trying to make excuses, but were saying that if you work hard, you're going to get a job. The playing field isn't always level, and we try to show that we're looking at all of the different avenues to get you that job, regardless. So, by managing expectations, now we have our international students where they're ready to work and not just sit back and rely on the career services office.

Dan, I've heard you say several times today that your placement philosophy is rooted in marketing. You've been able to substantially increase the number of recruiters coming to Fuqua. Does that mean that you're on the road quite a bit marketing Fuqua to potential customers?

In the early days, I probably spent two-thirds of my time visiting companies and letting them know about who we are. Lately, however, I've been able to cut back a bit -- although we did do a blitz this year where we went out and visited 95 companies. But a lot of my visits today are more customer service-oriented as opposed to trying to attract more companies. The customer service we do builds on the rapport that we've already developed with companies. We ask how we did with them this year (i.e. how did Fuqua grads do in the company) and what we can do to increase our numbers with them. And a number of times, we know that we're going to have to do some damage control.

No school can please 100% of its recruiting body -- markets change, concentrations grow hot and cold, and some schools even change their orientation. Has the makeup of companies recruiting at Fuqua changed drastically?

Sure, things have evolved over four years, and some companies lose their appeal with students -- that taps back into managing expectations. For example, during my first year, our No. 1 recruiter was an airline, and then, when new companies came aboard, the airline expected to maintain its stature as our No. 1 employer. But because its salary limitations weren't quite as attractive, their number of hires went down.

You've mentioned the tremendous growth in companies that Fuqua has experienced. What about on the opposite side of the spectrum: How many companies have stopped recruiting?

Over four years, probably about 50. First Chicago, for example, is a nice bank, but I just couldn't get people to go to Chicago. Darden Restaurant Group (owner of the Olive Garden restaurant chain) and Staples are other companies that have discontinued their relationship with us. We've also seen a bunch of smaller companies come and go....but, I haven't lost many star companies.

Do you regret all of them leaving, or does that just happen in the natural course of things?

Some of them I do regret losing, but the market eventually dictates that. And there are a couple of companies that left that were willing to come back. American Express, for example, did fine on the internship side but not as well hiring second years. As a general rule, a company will give you a couple of years to prove out whether you're a good school for them. For AmEx, we just didn't meet their needs. So, they dropped us last year. I called them this year, asking them to reconsider us, or at least post job listings that our students can have a crack at on their own. And they actually hired a couple of interns this year. If that continues, my guess is that we'll get them back to campus pretty soon.

On that note, which companies are you currently working on bringing to campus?

There's really only a couple. General Mills is one, and they hire, but don't come to campus. They're one of the premier marketing companies and one of the last holdouts. Goldman Sachs' corporate finance division is still a holdout as well. To overcome that, we take our students to New York City, although we're probably going to drop that next year because we've been so successful bringing most of those New York firms to Durham for on-campus recruiting.

We historically have just not been viewed as a major financial-industry feeder school. To overcome that, our theory was: Let's make it easy for Wall Street to see our students and compare them with grads from other top schools. So, for the last few years, we've gone up to the Big Apple for a "Week On Wall Street." This year, we, in conjunction with the finance club, took 96 first-years interested in I-banking to New York during Christmas Break. During the first four days, there were nine company presentations, and then the fifth day was used for interviewing (of which 100% of the interview schedules were closed).

What about if we dwell on your accomplishments for a minute. Which companies are you most excited about having brought to Fuqua?

A bunch. If you look at our top 40 list of recruiters, there's a number of them that didn't even recruit here four years ago. For example, Booz Allen is now our No. 3 recruiter, Johnson & Johnson is now our No. 5 recruiter, and Hewlett-Packard and Intel have been in our top 10. Those companies weren't even coming here to seek out our grads four years ago.

What are the top 10 companies now recruiting at Fuqua?

For this year, it would be Coopers & Lybrand (13 interns, 13 hires), Deloitte & Touche (10 interns, 12 hires), Booz Allen (13 interns, 8 hires), Andersen Consulting (6 interns, 13 hires), Johnson & Johnson (8 interns, 6 hires), Procter & Gamble (7interns, 8 hires), Goldman Sachs (10 interns, 4 hires), Morgan Stanley (7 interns, 6 hires), and Merrill Lynch (6 interns, 6 hires). General Motors and IBM also hire quite a bit of Fuqua students.

Fuqua is known academically for having a strong finance program. Is that where most of Fuqua's grads are being placed?

We also have a very strong marketing department here, and that perception has just caught on. For us, it's consulting first, I-banking second, and marketing third. Probably about 30% of the class is going into consulting, 23% into I-banking, 20% into marketing, and 17% going into finance for corporations. The remaining 10% of the class go into operations, health care, and strategic planning/general management. Operations has also grown handsomely recently, but it's a fairly small area in the school -- numbers-wise I'd say probably only 15-20 students are placed in operations positions a year.

Have those industries remained in the top three positions since you arrived at Fuqua, or has there been some fluctuation?

Actually, they've changed. Consulting has moved up since I first got here. Corporate finance, where students are going into treasury and financial analyst jobs, has always been strong. But it ebbs and flows a bit.

Which concentrations are seeing the most new recruitment activity?

High tech has really grown, despite our distance from Silicon Valley, Austin (Tex.), and Cambridge (Mass.). To compensate, we've sent second-year students out to Silicon Valley for the last four years to be a part of the West Coast Recruiting Consortium. We send about 40 students out there for two days of nonstop networking, schmoozing, and interviewing. (Editor's note: Tuck, MIT -- which recently dropped out, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, and Darden also participate.)

It's always interesting sending grads out to the West Coast because the rules of the game change considerably when you're dealing with smaller technology startups. Many times, you'll have call-backs to a company's corporate headquarters the next day -- and so students have to plan for a couple extra days' stay. Things move faster, and you have to be a lot more flexible. The highest number of companies that have attended the West Coast Consortium is 40, last year. This year, it was down to 27. I think that's because many of those companies are now recruiting at business school campuses. I know that the West Coast Recruiting Consortium is responsible for bringing Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems, and Bay Networks to Fuqua.

Does Fuqua's youth -- the program was founded in 1970 (second-youngest, behind Yale's, in BW's Top 25 grouping), and comparatively small alumni base -- at approximately 5,400 grads -- hinder job or summer internship opportunities for grads?

I don't think it has hindered job placement as much anymore. We've caught up. That has hindered our success from a fund-raising standpoint. It's a lot easier for a school like a Wharton or Harvard, that go back to the 1930s and '40s, because they have the alums in the CEO level to give them a boost. From a job standpoint and a career standpoint, we're pretty happy with where we are at right now. I think we have a lot more clout.

Once you get on the company radar screen, then it becomes a lot easier. In any of the industry sectors, we knew that once we got the top one or two firms to come to Fuqua, that it would be a domino effect. We knew that one of the questions new firms would be asking us was: "Who else recruits at Duke?" And if I went to BCG or Booz Allen and I could say that McKinsey comes to recruit our students, then they would jump on the bandwagon. That name recognition is very important in this business.

Five years ago, the common comment companies would make is that "we only recruit at the top MBA programs," and then they would name the top five B-schools, like Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg, and Columbia. At that point I asked the question: "What are you looking for, and what would attract you to Fuqua?" Remember, we were just starting to come out of the recession (1993), and my thinking was, if the economy improves, companies are going to add schools to their recruitment portfolio. So, I called on companies, presented our case, and asked how we could start doing business with them. "If you have any late needs or immediate openings, how can I put my students in front of you?"

For example, I was visiting Colgate a couple years back, and I said to their recruiter that our marketing students were as good as those coming out of the top five schools. And then I went even further, and said that I'd fly him down to Durham to meet with our students, and if he wasn't satisfied, I'd pay for his round trip plane ticket.... Now, we're one of Colgate's core schools.

You mentioned that everything on the recruitment side of things is moving a lot faster. Companies are moving their interview schedules to earlier dates and are trying to get students to sign on with them right out of their internships. That kind of increased pressure must change the way you deliver offer-negotiation counseling and other related services.

Everything, cycle-wise, has indeed moved up earlier in the year. Our students come back now from their internships, many with offers, and do not do any negotiation or evaluation of their job offers -- which now happens in October instead of December. I think every school is concerned with the acceleration of offers and deadlines. Career services officers, as a group, have been trying to slow it down.

Have career services directors, collectively, implemented any standard to combat this troubling situation?

We haven't yet. Most schools are now handling the situation individually. Right now, there is a lot of E-mailing going back and forth between schools comparing policies.

What is Fuqua's?

We've always had guidelines, but we need more of a policy now. We want companies to give students an offer deadline no earlier than December because we want students to have the opportunity to visit with other companies coming to campus. That wouldn't prevent a student from signing on before December, but we're trying to hold companies at bay. There's a pretty strong move afoot to keep offers open until January 31st.

How many job offers are Fuqua grads grabbing?

We recently released a national survey (taken at 10 top U.S. B-schools -- it has been released biannually for the past 11 years) and found that the number of job offers is decreasing because students are now more focused on where they want to go after graduation. Students are coming back to school for their second year, with good internships in their hip pockets, and are saying that they just want to see the three or four companies that they really like, rather than trying to meet with 15 companies that might give them nice offers. So, part of it is what the placement office has been saying: Only pursue those companies that you really are interested in. The trend among top schools is that more students are becoming far more focused in their job search, interviewing with less companies during their second year, and garnering less offers. That said, our students are grabbing 2.85 offers this year. As a point of comparison, in 1995 students were grabbing a bit over three offers a piece.

When all is said and done, how many of this year's grads are being placed?

For second-years, we're at 97%, and that's much higher than we've ever been at this particular juncture of time. And I think that's an industry-wide phenomenon for the upper-echelon schools. I'm always skeptical about any school that has placed 100% of its grads, however. In my 24 years I have never hit 100%. Some people choose not to pursue jobs or are in the midst of deciding where to go.

Are salaries on the rise as well? I think that's where most prospective MBA students see the value of the degree. They want to be shown the money. What's going on at Fuqua?

There's been a big jump this year. What has happened is that over the last couple of years, consulting firms have been driving the train as far as salaries are concerned, and the gap has widened between what consulting firms are offering and what the rest of the world is offering. And recently, the rest of the world said, "We've got to shorten that gap." As a result, we've seen a lot of manufacturing companies go into the mid-$70,000 range in base salary. We've also seen I-banks make a big jump. On top of that, there has been a huge number of companies who are now offering hefty sign-on bonuses. When we did the national survey in 1994, 28% of the sample group got a sign-on bonus. This year, 80% of the sample group got a sign-on bonus, while 83% of the Fuqua class got one. So you can now see the leveling of the company playing field.

What is the average base salary for Fuqua's Class of '98?

For us, it will be around $78,000, while sign-on bonus will average $17,000. Total compensation packages are harder to gauge because they are company-specific. High-tech companies, for example, are offering stock options because their base salaries aren't quite as high as other industries. The attraction there is if you go to a Microsoft, Dell, or Intel, where the stock is zooming, you put yourself in a nice position. You're going to see more companies, like those in manufacturing, start offering stock options. And second-year tuition reimbursement, up until now, has been another mainstay benefit in consulting, on top of their increased base and sign-on bonus. Now, other companies from different industries are beginning to do that. Investment banking is also adding to its guaranteed, yearend bonuses.

Does that mean that more counseling is now necessary to address salary negotiation?

A lot of students want to know how to evaluate their job offers. They want to know how to compare salary vs. job content. Dollars are one thing, but many students are starting to evaluate other things as well. For example in this year's national survey, students ranked job responsibility, company culture, long-term career opportunities, industry type, lifestyle, and people met on the job above compensation. Furthermore, 50% of the 10 schools surveyed in the 1998 national survey said that they would not take the highest offer, opting instead to go to the job that was most interesting to them.

Does everybody get a summer internship who wants one? On average, what percentage of the student body garners an internship?

For us this year, for the first time, 100% of the class has a summer internship.

Is the internship something you encourage every student to take advantage of?

Absolutely. One of the reasons it's so important is because of that 75% of the class who are making a career change. The people who are coming back to B-school are doing so to to get out of the career they're in and to get into something new. In that context, the internship is equivalent to getting your ticket punched and getting experience in that new career. Students work harder on their internship search than second-years do for their job search. That's partly because twice as many recruiters interview second-years as for first-years -- with less opportunities, the competition becomes more intense -- and partly because the internship is such a central component for a career transition.

Where are students going, location-wise, for their jobs after graduation? Does the school's Durham location depress student salaries?

Our No. 1 city is still New York, and our No. 2 city is Atlanta. So salaries, on average, are lower than those for students at other city schools (like Columbia, NYU, Kellogg, Harvard). With more of our students going to the big city, however, we're seeing salaries increase.

In 1997, Fuqua's minority student body percentage was the highest in BW's top 25, at 20%. Does the school provide special counseling for minority students?

No, not really. We don't have special programs for minority students. What we do have on the front end on the admissions side is an aggressive outreach program -- such as an annual minority workshop, where we invite 80 minority students to Fuqua for a weekend.

My sense is that most corporations are actively pursuing women and minorities and trying to right the ship on their own. I don't think that behavior is the result of an equal employment opportunity federal mandate. I think that it's more a result of the world of business becoming far more diverse. If companies are going to work with clients and other companies that are minority- and women-owned, then they better look like the rest of the world. Of course there are some industries that are tougher to integrate than others, like I-banking and consulting, for example, which aren't as conducive to women as marketing and other facets of finance are.

You mentioned that nearly 75% of the Fuqua class is looking to change careers. How much importance does that place on having prior work experience?

It's pretty important. We're almost at 99% with prior work experience, and the admissions office has raised the bar requiring candidates to have a minimum of three years of work experience. (Editor's note: Fuqua's Class of 2000 came in with an average of four years of prior work experience.)

Is that prior work experience looked at closely by recruiters?

Yes, especially because 75% of today's students are making a career change. If I'm an accountant who worked as a CPA for a couple of years prior to B-school, and I want to get into I-banking -- a field that I have no prior experience in -- my accounting background is related, and recruiters will evaluate that. They'll ask questions about my accomplishments in that field, and not focus as much on the experience itself.

What, in your opinion, is the most valuable service your office provides to Fuqua MBA students?

I suppose it's all the programs we put on during the first few months during the first year. Once students are here, they know that five months down the road, they're going to have to interview for summer internships. So I think the programs, workshops, club activities, and training programs to help them sort it all out and teach them how to get there, how to remain competitive with their peers and others, is quite valuable.

What services specifically have you been most successful with?

Case interviewing has been a great success. We didn't know how to play the game in the consulting arena until recently. We realized that case interviewing can make or break an interview. So, three years ago, we embarked on a program to improve case interviewing. We provide mock cases, with alumni participation -- we actually had a retired McKinsey partner come to school as an executive in residence to do the training.

Dan, during your years at Fuqua, what's one of the wilder situations you've found yourself in providing advice to students?

Hmmm. We had a German student who was here a couple years back, who had two offers. And before I go any further, let me just say that we tell students not to play companies off of each other.... but sometimes it happens naturally. This student had an offer to be the assistant to the CEO of a major luxury-car manufacturer in Germany, and another to be a consultant with a leading European strategy consulting firm. What happened is that this fellow became so hot, that the companies got into a bidding war over him. He got a nice offer from the auto company, but the offer from the consulting firm was higher. So, he went back to the auto company to tell them he'd take another offer. And soon after hearing the news, they threw in a new $70,000 car for every year he was going to be with them. So, he went back to the consulting firm to tell them he had been swayed by the car company, and then the consulting firm threw in a signing bonus of $55,000. And, he keeps on going back and forth like that, coming to me for advice. I kept on saying that he should take an offer without inflating it any further, because I felt I had to pull him back a bit and not let him get too ahead of himself so that he didn't burn any bridges.

And the upshot?

He ended up going to the consulting firm and now owns his own island.... well not just quite yet, but soon enough. So you ask: Is the MBA worth the money? These days, the market is screaming: Yes!

Dan, thanks much for your insights today.