Roxanne, Kellogg is one of the larger business schools in the BW top 25, with a total enrollment of roughly 2,600 students (third-largest behind NYU and Chicago). The school has 1,200 full-time students and 1,400 part-timers. How does your office cope with such a vast sea of students? Do you service your part-time population in much the same way you do full-timers?

Well, we work with a much smaller segment of our part-time population because we sift our part-timers through a process we put in place through the Managers Program Office (the part-time program office). Our part-time students have to meet certain criteria in order to go through on-campus recruiting. In order to register with the Career Management Center, part-timers need to be graduating no later than August of the following year. And they have to either provide a release form from their employers if they have received tuition reimbursement or else prove that they are paying 100% of their own way. So, with those caveats, we probably add another 160 part-timers to our full-time student population who are eligible to take advantage of our services and on-campus recruitment. The remaining 1,000 part-time students are not eligible.

We provide for the part-time students the same services that we provide for the full-time day students. In fact, the summer is just as busy for me and my office as it is the rest of the school year because we spend most of June, and all of July and August, working with our eligible part-time students and one-years (Kellogg has a four-quarter program, nicknamed 4Q, that 80 students participate in). That means providing them with workshops, administering videotaped mock interviews, and doing counseling. Normally that programming happens over the course of the first nine months of the year for the full-time students.

How is Kellogg's Career Management Center structured? How many people are employed to ensure that the center is an efficient hive of job-placement activity?

We have 13 full-time staff people who run the Career Management Center. I also have a part-time counselor who works primarily with the 160-person part-time population. There are four of us -- including myself -- who do career advising. Then I have two other professional staff members. One manages our recruiting operations function -- all the employer contacts, recruiting schedules, and recruiting presentations; and the other runs our Career Resource Center, managing all of the center's online, CD-ROM, and paper resources.

It doesn't sound like there are a whole lot of people in your office available to serve the more than 1,200 Kellogg students.

We do it, though. The reality is that a lot of people in this school probably wind up getting involved in the career counseling business. It's not unusual for us to send a student to a faculty member or to an administrator who may have the industry knowledge the student needs to tap into. We also don't have restricted hours in terms of when students can pop into our offices to ask questions and seek our advice. On top of that, we, of course, also have allotted times when students can schedule appointments. But students know that they can knock on my door at 5 p.m. and I'll sit down with them if I have the time. I probably spend about 50% or more of my time counseling students, and that's important given our environment here because I can only accurately market the students to employers if I have access to them. If I don't, then I'm only operating with half of the information that I need to be effective in what I do.

What's your philosophy for the most effective way to place a graduate?

Our philosophy is that we're here to help provide the tools students need to find a job. Those tools are what they need today to find that summer internship position, as well as what they will need tomorrow to find that next job in their career. But the experience they have here, from an on-campus recruiting standpoint, will never happen again. And they know that. So, while they're here, they know what they need to look at in terms of what's important to them. For instance, they know they're going to have to know how to better prepare for interviews, and how to write credible cover letters and resumes. But that doesn't mean that they'll never need to talk to us again after they graduate. Hopefully we've communicated to the students that they can always knock on my door. Access is something that we pride ourselves on, and students have pretty much full access to us.

Has that philosophy changed over the course of your eight-year tenure at Kellogg?

It really hasn't. It's probably what has helped us be successful over the course my career here. It was developed at a point when Kellogg was a much smaller place. And we've tried to maintain that philosophy... It trickles down from the Dean throughout our entire Kellogg network. Any student can stop Dean Jacobs in the hallway to chat or set up an appointment with him if need be. Everybody makes sure that they are available. Saying no is a very hard thing for us to do.

How many companies recruited on the Kellogg campus in 1998?

Combined, it was something like 330. That's gone up a little bit every year, probably by about 5-10 companies a year. We were at about 320 companies last year.

How many opportunities in 1998 were available to students through job postings or correspondence?

In 1998, we had 3,119 job postings.

Is that demand forcing your office to change at all or expand its staff?

Not expand the staff any, but what it is forcing us to do is be more assertive in terms of having very realistic conversations with organizations, helping them be more thoughtful in the way they approach students. There is no one-size-fits-all formula. It depends on the kind of jobs companies offer, where they're located...a whole slew of things. In some instances, they might be better off posting something on our job board rather than coming to campus to do recruiting.

We now need to be much more up front with companies about their placement strategies and help them find other avenues to gain access to the students. Many smaller businesses, for example, would like to hire an MBA. So, this past year, we implemented an entrepreneurial information session with entrepreneurial firms on how to hire an MBA. It gave the entrepreneurial firms an opportunity to talk with other smaller firms that have hired MBAs and find out what the sticking points were with recruiting. The participating companies also had a chance to hear from a recent grad who took an entrepreneurial job about what he and the other entrepreneurial students he had chatted with found was important during the recruitment process.

We had about 30 companies participate in that, and I'm already receiving requests now from companies on both coasts and in Chicago about setting up a reservation for this year's event. So, it's coming up with ideas like the entrepreneur information session -- or brainstorming other, more focused forums for companies to market themselves to the students -- that my office is now being forced to do more of.

We also, for example, travel to the West Coast to visit 30 companies at a high-tech forum. We've been doing that with the University of Chicago for the last two years but will split apart this year because of schedule conflicts. It has worked quite well and we're going into Year Three. But the point is that the Hi-Tech Forum was based on increased interest and demand from our students who wanted to land jobs on the West Coast and my hearing that companies were interested in our students but didn't want to come to Chicago in January. We worked together to come up with the Hi-Tech Forum.

Do you encourage most of your students to get a summer internship?

Yes, we do. We tell the students that their need to get a summer internship is up to them. But since the majority -- about 90% -- of the students plan to be career changers, the internship really becomes an integral way to bridge what the students did before they came to school to what they hope to do next. Some students hit the nail on the head, are able to find an internship in I-banking, and make the transition from, say, sales to I-banking. Others, however, have to find an internship in finance, because they weren't able to make that total leap, and then, during their second year, see if they can get their foot in the I-banking door.

Does the internship play a more important role in certain industries?

No. It plays an important role in all industries. The landscape has changed in that regard. There was a time, 10 years ago, when you didn't have to have the summer internship. If, in 1988, it didn't happen, it wasn't the end of the world. In 1998 it's just really hard. In particular if you're a career changer, you need to find a way to make that transition. The internship has become an employer's expectation. In their mind, they might have a question mark after your name if they see you haven't had any summer internship experience.

For the students enrolled in our 4Q and part-time programs who can't do the internship, we suggest that they take advantage of Chicago and the great number of network opportunities available here across all industries. We strongly encourage 4Q students to talk with our alums in consulting, strategic planning, marketing, and finance, about their line of work and what's involved in it. We also will, for banking and consulting, bring in people from the industry to do workshops with students that will help them better prepare for their interviews. Those are a couple of ways that we supplement those 200-plus students who don't have that internship opportunity.

Does everyone who wants an internship get one?

Yes. As far as I know, 100% of our students who were looking for an internship got one. There are some international students who are sponsored and instead spent their summer traveling or going back to work for their former employer. But the majority of Kellogg students enrolled in the full-time program do go after the internship.

How do you counsel for the internship?

We do it through a series of workshops that start on Sept. 21 with an orientation to our office and are then delivered throughout the first quarter of school. After that, we do a self-assessment workshop with the students, getting them to look at themselves and matching their ability with where they want to work. Then, we begin meeting with each student individually. In October, we get into resume writing and helping students prepare cover letters. The other piece that we do in January from a skills-building point is an interview training workshop. That gets followed up by videotaped mock interviews. All in all, I'd say that probably 400 students take advantage of the interview workshop.

When does the recruiting process begin for first-years at Kellogg?

Company presentations begin in the fall, right when classes begin for both first- and second-years (Editor's note: Kellogg's '98/'99 semester begins on Sept. 24 and ends on Dec. 12). And the majority of companies will invite both first- and second-years to come to their information sessions. As a first-year student, you are going to be overwhelmed pretty quickly by the number of companies presenting. On average, there are probably something like eight presentations per night. So it's humanly impossible to go to all of them because, let's not forget, you have quite a bit of homework that needs to be done. But we also don't want students to go to all of the presentations. We'd rather they be more selective. If you've done some of the assessment stuff (which is not mandatory, but strongly encouraged), then it makes it easier.

What is the school's philosophy for interview schedules: Are most schedules open or closed?

Companies can do both open and closed schedules. But if, as an employer, you choose to have closed schedules, for every closed schedule you have to have an open schedule. We really do that for the students, and we don't want firms saying they're just going to do invitation-only interviewing. It's a fairness issue. Though there are some firms that do that off campus, most companies are all right with that policy. There are, however, three to six firms that are unhappy with it. But that interview scheduling policy has been in place since before I came aboard, so it's nothing new.

Given the surge of recruiters bombarding Kellogg, has the school's interview facility become too small to accommodate current demand?

Good question. Five years ago, we had 16 or 17 interview rooms available. But when Dean Jacobs decided that our building was going to get a face-lift (which was completed in 1996), he realized that we needed to add interview rooms. So we now have 27 interview rooms. One might think that that would be sufficient to accommodate all of our corporate partners, but it's just not enough! This year, for the first two to three weeks of recruiting, we're adding anywhere from 10-15 extra interview rooms, which we are borrowing from the Allen Center (Kellogg's executive education center). That way we'll have as many as 42 schedules running simultaneously on campus. We hope that stems the tide. (Editor's note: Recruitment for first-years begins in February and runs through the middle of March; for second-years, it begins during the middle of October and runs through the first week in December, with an additional two weeks in January.)

Last year we had, particularly for first-year recruiting, an inordinate amount of companies recruiting off campus. Students were unhappy with that. So this year we tried to find some resolution, and the Dean graciously offered the rooms in the Allen Center. I know there will always be companies interviewing off campus, but the added space will certainly give those companies more of an opportunity to recruit here on campus.

Do you encourage all of the firms to interview on campus?

We would prefer that they do, only because it's easier for the students. The reality is that some companies do like to interview off campus, and they like to do their recruitment in a specific way that our facility is not equipped to handle. In that case, we just want the companies to let us know that they'll be interviewing off campus so that we can let the students know. In order to better communicate to the students, we've created a calendar that relates all of the companies that will be doing on-campus interviews -- with dates, locations, and schedule deadlines. We have another that relates which companies will be interviewing off campus.

Does Kellogg automate any of its career placement function, such as putting together interview schedules?

We use a Web-based bidding system called Exeter. We're just beginning to get used to the system, and the career management piece is brand-new. The system allows you to, among other things, have access to a company contact database (which, for instance, lets you know who to write a follow-up thank-you note to after an interview), view job descriptions, and enter a company profile area. At this point there's not much else to the system, but it will grow as we report feedback on other functions we'd like them (Exeter) to perform.

How many interviews were administered on campus during the 1997-98 academic year?

For full-time jobs, there were 16,000 interviews. (Editor's note: During the 1996-97 academic year, 15,000 interviews occurred on the Kellogg campus.)

I understand that Dean Jacobs has been lobbying to put more focus on entrepreneurship. Given that fact, are you finding more students doing an independent job search?

I would say no. We're seeing a little bit more of an uptake in terms of the number of students doing an independent job search, but it's not a really strong swing. I'd say that maybe 70 first-year students did entrepreneurial summer internships this past year. But I don't think that will ever grow too large because it's hard for many students to go the entrepreneurial route under the amount of debt they're under after graduation. It takes somebody who is incredibly committed to it to do it...not just because of the amount of work involved but also because entrepreneurial companies are going to offer a lot of other sorts of compensation instead of a hefty paycheck. That's not to say that entrepreneurs won't receive a fairly good base salary, but it won't be considered lucrative by MBA standards.

How do you counsel for the independent job search? Do several of Kellogg's entrepreneurship professors play a vital role in helping independent-minded students make their decisions?

Two professors, Barry Merkin (clinical professor of entrepreneurship) and Steve Rogers (clinical professor of management and finance) do play a part in helping students. And we do provide workshops for students who are doing the job search on their own, and strongly encourage those students to feel free to check in with us on a much more frequent basis than our regular, job-seeking student population because doing an independent job search in an environment like ours is a very isolating experience. It feels like everybody either has a job or is going through the on-campus job search. That's not true, but the buzz is always louder around the on-campus job search and recruitment activities.

So, as a rule, we let the independent job seekers drive the process but encourage them to check in with us each month. And we let the students know that the independent job search is a very different process, that they're going to feel like the Lone Ranger at times. We don't hesitate to send them to talk with an alum, a professor, or an administrator who might be able to help them out. We certainly don't pretend to have all the answers in our office, but we like to see ourselves as information brokers trying to direct people to different resources.

Does nearly everyone interview on campus?

The majority of students do go through the on-campus job process. And I would say that a lot of students are going to dabble with it at some point. If you know that you want a job at an L.A. new-media firm, for example, then we'll help you with the independent job search by suggesting some people to contact or let you utilize our career library to narrow your job search on your own. Basically, there's something under this umbrella that you're going to use to help you reach your goals, whether it's the library or our counseling.

How many offers are students averaging for 1998?

We don't calculate that because our philosophy is that it only takes one offer for you to land your dream job. Philosophically, we feel that we'd rather students not collect offers. If you're focused and you know where you want to work, then getting one or two offers to decide between is great. That's not to say that there aren't any of those students who have 8-10 offers to reckon with, however. We don't penalize anybody for grabbing a substantial number of job offers, but we do sit down with students to tell them to prioritize their offers and let some of them slide because it's unfair to their peers who may be on the company's waitlist waiting for you to pass on their offer.

Incidentally, this year, we are going to move to a mandatory class attendance. The faculty and students decided that students were missing too many classes because of recruiting and other reasons. Will poor attendance negatively impact one's grades? It may in some cases. But discipline ultimately rests in the hands of each individual faculty member who has his or her own set of classroom guidelines.

In BW's 1996 ranking, corporate recruiters said that Kellogg grads had the best marketing skills and third-best general management skills (behind Harvard and Stanford). Does that mean that the majority of grads are going off to marketing and managerial jobs? Where are Kellogg graduates being placed by industry?

Two years ago grads were primarily going into consulting positions (about 36%-38% of the class). Today, we're at about 40%. So, it has gone up a little bit. I would say that the marketing piece is a carryover from the days when we were seen almost exclusively as a marketing school. Dean Jacobs, starting in the mid-'80s, has been trying to change Kellogg's reputation from a marketing school to a general management school. That takes time, and having more of the investment banks come here lately to recruit has helped. (Editor's note: A total of 53 investment banks recruit at Kellogg.) Also, once consulting took off a couple of years ago here, that helped to broaden the industry distribution.

This past year, 17% of the graduating class went into investment banking, while 10% of the class went into the high-tech field. The next biggest employment industry is what I call packaged goods (which includes foods, beverages, and household/personal-care companies), which gobbled about 8% of the graduating class. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies employed about 4% of the class, as did diversified financial services. Then 3% of the class went into the widely diversified manufacturing companies (like AlliedSignal, John Deere, etc.). To round it off, 2% went into venture capital, another 2% went into commercial banking, and 2% went into real estate. The remainder of the class went into the "other" category.

In which industry have you seen the largest growth?

There has not been a dramatic shift over the last 12 months: consulting, banking, and consumer goods all remain strong. I'm just not seeing a dramatic change, and that's O.K. by me. The dean and I both agree, however, that it would be nice to see a leveling off in consulting. I think, looking to the future, that we'll be seeing more and more students graduating into jobs with companies that make something. Today, 76% of the graduating class is going into a service industry. A lot of that is certainly driven by the prominence of consulting jobs our grads are grabbing.

Name the top 10 companies that hire the most graduates -- with hires. [Editor's note: Kellogg's 1997 top 10 recruiters were: McKinsey (33 full-time hires), A.T. Kearney (23), Boston Consulting Group (17), Andersen Consulting (16), Deloitte & Touche (15), Booz, Allen & Hamilton (13), CSC Index (12), Hewlett-Packard (12), Intel (10), and Lehman Brothers (10).]

For 1998, the top 10 employers were: McKinsey (37 full-time hires), Booz Allen (22), Boston Consulting Group (22), A.T. Kearney (20), Deloitte & Touche (16), Goldman Sachs (14), Andersen Consulting (13), Morgan Stanley (12), Coopers & Lybrand (11), and Bain Consulting, Ernst & Young, and Lehman Brothers all tied for the last spot with 10 hires.

Has that top 10 remained steady?

It doesn't change that much. Probably the most significant changes are that Hewlett-Packard and Intel hired quite a bit last year and not as many this year. (Editor's note: HP hired 12 Kellogg grads last year to full-time positions and picked up eight this year. Meanwhile, Intel hired 5 Kellogg grads this year, as opposed to 10 in 1997.) HP didn't hire as many people this year because they had some divisions that seemed to have hiring freezes on, as did Intel, I'm sure. CSC Index also didn't make it into the top 10 this year -- they hired 7 people this year and 12 last year. But they've also recently been absorbed by Computer Science as their parent.

Where does that select group go after you get out of the top 10 -- which for most schools, mainly encompasses investment banks and consulting firms?

Then, we start seeing more packaged-goods companies. For example, you'll see Procter & Gamble (which hired 8 students for full-time jobs), Clorox (7), General Mills (6), Microsoft (5), Guidant [a medical-devices company] (4), Lucent Technologies (4), Mattell (4), and McNeil (4). So it starts to get into the other industires, and a lot of them are marketing jobs.

Is their growth in that group? Are newcomers pushing their way through?

There definitely is. New faces include Minute Maid, which was aggressively trying to attract more people, and M&M/Mars snatched three interns. I would say the consumer goods and high-tech arenas are going to continue to be players, pushing their way in. They won't be hiring 10-20 students, but they'll still be a pretty good player on campus.

For many, the real reason to go to B-school is for the money waiting at the end of the MBA rainbow. The market, of course, has been very kind to MBAs over the last couple of years. What do the average base salary and total-compensation packages look like for 1998 Kellogg grads?

Our overall median base salary was about $85,000. (Kellogg's median 1997 base salary weighed in at $75,000.) I think that it is generally accepted that consulting firms set the tone for pay packages about two years ago. Now everybody is chasing up to their standard. Base salary for the Class of '98 ranged from $22,000 for someone going into an entrepreneurial job in the manufacturing sector to $150,000 for someone going into a venture-capital job. In general, the higher base salaries are in the financial-services areas like venture capital, perhaps investment management, and consulting. The average 1998 signing bonus was about $20,000, with a range of between $1,000 and $50,000. Meanwhile, my educated guess for the average guaranteed bonus was probably in the area of $15,000-$20,000, with a range of $2,000-$95,000. To come up with our "total compensation" figure, we combine base salary, signing bonus, and guaranteed bonus into one -- we do not include relocation, tuition reimbursement, or stock options. That said, our total compensation average is at about $120,000.

Are companies now being more creative with their compensation packages, peppering them with new incentives?

They are, out of necessity, because they're adding incentives into the packages of their own employees, not just the new MBAs that they're trying to bring into the fold. Stock options are becoming more frequent. But they're hard to value. More companies are doing incentive compensation for bonuses, where the bonus is based on performance rather than a predetermined dollar amount. I think there's also more flexibility now being realized surrounding tuition reimbursement. It does tend to be based on whether the student interned with their eventual employer during the summer between their first and second year of school, however.

In general, if you have what the company needs, then you command much more flexibility today with the way your package can be put together because the job market is so healthy. The market is definitely driving a lot of what we're seeing happen with pay packages. When the market takes a downturn, obviously that's going to have an impact on what we're seeing. There's going to be less flexibility, because employers won't have to grant it. Once the economy does enter a downturn, supply will definitely overwhelm demand.

Do you feel the job market will be able to support MBAs with golden job opportunities for another year? Or do you think the golden age of the MBA has come to an abrupt end.

It doesn't feel like it's going to end this year. The fact that all of our class spots are filled up makes me feel like we're not going to be facing any downturn this year. If we were, I'd be hearing from company representatives that they want to pull back their recruitment.

Are companies going after students earlier in the recruitment process to have a better crack at hiring top student prospects? Are companies going so far as to get students into their fold during the summer internship?

That's definitely happening. They would love to target students for jobs even before students enter Kellogg and start their classes. But that's not allowed here, so we hold them off. The whole job recruitment thing has accelerated pretty significantly from where it had been even five years ago. There's a much heavier emphasis on the internship and trying to convert students into hires. Some companies now go so far as to pay performance bonuses at the end of internship. That never used to happen.

Given all of this added flexibility that MBAs are enjoying, is your office now putting more emphasis on certain types of workshops or counseling such as salary negotiation or offer-assessment to help students grab sizable comp packages?

We've always done a negotiations workshop with Professor Karen Cates, who teaches a negotiations class. I would say that the only other thing that my office and I have done, from a self-education standpoint, is get more knowledgeable about different forms of compensation. Students asks us to help them with everything ranging from doing their taxes to coaching them on the best ways to negotiate a particular facet of a compensation package. What I've found is that as sophisticated as MBAs are, they haven't been to the higher reaches of their firms and are not very savvy about all of the nuances of compensation. So we coach to help them at this stage of their careers.

Offer assessment is really done through individual counseling. We'll sit down with a student who walks through the door to help them make a decision. We'll take them back to their self-assessment, particularly their value piece, to revisit what they found was most important to them in a job, the money, the stimulation, the people, the location, the flexibility, or whatever else. Sometimes the student has one offer they need to make a decision on, and we'll help them get to a point to see if they have to ask the company more questions to decide whether they really want the job, or whether they should decline the opportunity.

Let's change tack for a moment and talk a little bit about the corporate side of your job. Has more emphasis been put on marketing the school in your office?

I don't know if more emphasis has been placed on marketing the school, per se. We've always emphasized getting out in front of employers whether that means maintaining a relationship or developing a new one. You can look at both the employers and our students as being our customers or constituency groups. As I mentioned, we don't find the students jobs, but we give them the tools to find those jobs successfully on their own. We are a service provider, but we don't provide the ultimate service of going out and laying the job on a platter for you. The same thing goes for our corporate partners. We will help get students and companies together, but will not recommend a particular student to a company. The way I see it, rattling off several student names to a company might be helpful, but because I don't know every single student enrolled at Kellogg, I may be creating a bias against the qualified students that I do not know very well. So, in the interest of fairness, I take a hands-off approach.

How many companies do you visit on an annual basis?

I'm going to guess that we visit probably anywhere from 100 to 125 companies annually. Every time we take a trip, we try to visit with recruiters. For example, when I'm on the West Coast for the Hi-Tech Forum, I'll probably see 25 companies in a week. When a staff member of mine was in New York just this past week, she saw five companies a day, 13 companies in three days. We try to meet with recruiting people or alums wherever we go, taking up no more than an hour of their time to chat with them about how recruiting has gone at Kellogg for them and how we can help them do a better job. We'll also ask them what their frustrations are and offer some feedback -- based on student comments -- on some of the things we feel they can do better as an organization. If I'm sitting with a new company, then I'll give them some pointers on how they can get further involved with us. I'd say the split between old and new companies that I visit is probably 60-40.

How many new companies came to campus this year?

My best guess is something like 15. The two best-known firms that were first-time recruiters this past year are ING Barings and Humana (health care).

What companies don't currently recruit on campus that you consider priorities?

We'd love to have more investment management, venture-capital, and high-tech firms. But the reality is that VC firms are not going to be consistent recruiters because they're only going to hire when they have a need. And that usually occurs after they've raised money. But I'll always call a couple of VC firms throughout the year to let them know that we're out there and that they're on our radar screen. We rely a lot on alums to help us with that. But I guess I have not targeted any particular company as a priority to bring to campus in the recent past. Specific company demand varies from year to year according to the tastes of the class.

What about on the flip side? Which companies have recently stopped recruiting on campus?

Two that come to mind are Merck's manufacturing group and NCR, [both] because they just weren't getting the yield... When a company chooses not to come back to campus, if it's not because their business isn't doing well, it's usually because they're not getting the hiring yield they feel warrants the expense of coming to Kellogg to recruit...

What will you do, if anything, to rekindle those relationships?

With Merck there's less concern because we have relationships with the company's other divisions. And hopefully Merck's manufacturing division and NCR will post job offers with us. We actually encourage companies that are receiving low yields to substitute their campus recruiting visits with job postings. That gets their message out in a much less expensive and more effective way. Usually companies bring it up, and we'll suggest it.

Kellogg, founded in 1908, has the benefit of retaining a large alumni network, at approximately 38,000. Just how big a role do alumni play in the recruiting process?

They are an intergral part of our recruitment efforts, and they wear a multitude of hats. Many corporations try to use alums as their "campus managers or execs." In addition, companies tend to use their more recent alumni employees to play the "greeter" role, which eases the students' anxiety a bit. The other way alums get involved is through a student-run program that happens during orientation week. Right before classes begin, the school will work with entering second-year students to bring in alumni (who have graduated just three to four years ago) to talk to first-years about their careers and start to give them a little bit of an overview of their experiences in general while they were at Kellogg and how that experience has shaped their present careers.

There's also a very vibrant alumni board, comprised of about 40 to 50 grads, that comes to campus twice a year to discuss a wide range of issues. Some of their time is spent sitting in on two classes observing and learning, and then they meet on business matters the other half of the day. They're also taken to class by student hosts, which gives students the opportunity to talk to successful alumni about what they're doing.

In addition, our office utilizes alums in a number of different ways. I know a lot of alumni who I met during my stint in the corporate world or when I first got here, who I ask to come back and speak to the students. Some of our alums are in the executive-search business, so I'll have them come in to talk to students about how to utilize executive-search firms in their careers. Last night we ran a workshop on interviewing for Wall Street where we had an alum talk about recruiting at an investment bank. So we'll bring in alums to address functional or industry-specific recruiting issues. I've also had alumni come in and help with different workshops including doing the independent job search. So in many cases alums supplement what we teach.

The [impact of] alumni has grown over the course of my tenure here, and I think that they're more sophisticated now -- they have more of a feeling for giving back to the school. Enrolling in Kellogg begins a lifelong relationship, and we try to do a lot with students while they're here to foster that. Some alums feel they just haven't given enough while they were here, while other alums who do not have the financial wherewithal to make a donation because of their loans, try to give back in other ways, like participating in alumni interviewing. Kellogg is one of the few schools where every applicant has to have an admissions interview before they are fully considered by the school. That interview can happen on campus with me or one of my staff, or it can be administered by a certified alumni interviewer. I'd say that there are hundreds of alumni interviewers roaming the globe.

And through the alumni clubs, alums get very involved in planning events, bringing speakers in, and generating the rah-rah feeling at the alumni sites... They also touch base with faculty, hiring them for consulting projects. We're lucky, because our location in Chicago makes it easy for the alumni base to tap into the school.

Roxanne, you spoke of the "lifelong" relationship that the school establishes with its students... What if any service do you provide for alums?

We do quite a bit. Our office, from a counselor standpoint, leaves the door open for every student once they graduate. For quite some time, we've had a manager for alumni career development. He's been with us for seven to eight years, and he works out of his home on a part-time basis to do counseling over the phone with alums. As part of his job, he helps alums develop a job-search strategy, will do resume critiquing, helps alums with their cover-letter writing, and also develop and hone an alum's interview skills. In addition, he will do a job-search workshop held in Chicago twice a month.

It sounds like he's quite busy. Servicing 38,000 is a lot for one guy to handle!

Well, of course he doesn't work with all of our alumni, but I'd say he interacts with anywhere from 90 to 100 alumni every month over the phone -- that excludes any face-to-face workshops that he also does. And he's shown that he's more than able to handle the situation. When we're on the road, it's not unusual for us to do a job-search workshop for alumni in various cities. In fact, I did a job-search workshop while I was in San Francisco and New York this past recruiting year.

In addition, we post all of our jobs for alums on a Web site that alums can get into using their network identification. The job postings are updated daily, and, on an annual basis, we receive over 3,000 of those postings. We also put a listing of various resources on the Web which is available to alumni regardless of where they are. That way they don't have to spend an extraordinary amount of time searching the Web for the resources they need. (Editor's note: Kellogg's Web resource list includes links to other job posting areas, and other research-oriented sites that alums might find useful.)

Does the school charge a fee for servicing its alumni?

Everything is free. The dean really does feel that it's a lifelong relationship between the student and Kellogg. It's our belief that we shouldn't be charging alums for the types of things I just mentioned. The only thing we charge them for is for a paper copy of a job newsletter that is free on the Web.

How big a role do student clubs play in the recruitment process?

They play a fairly important role as well. The student group presidents have some knowledge of their specific club areas, which only adds to the expertise that we provide. The marketing club president, for example, isn't going to be an expert on all areas of marketing, but he's seen as a leader by his peers and can help bring some interesting speakers to campus... We encourage students to go to as many different points to learn as much as they can so that any decision they make is an informed one. Thus membership in student clubs can only help you in your quest to find that dream job.

Does your office work with student clubs to present school speakers?

Sure. We'll work with groups to present speakers and different programming. I, for instance, recently met with a recruiter from a consulting firm who asked a lot of questions about how to get involved with the school. One of the things I gave her was a list of contact people in the consulting student group so that she could get further involved and hopefully elevate her company's presence here. Getting involved with our student groups is just one of the many ways companies can really get to know our students and what they bring to the table.

What, if any new programming is the result of your office's cooperative efforts with student clubs?

The newest thing is the Entrepreneurs Career Forum. I decided to get the venture-capital and entrepreneurship clubs involved with that to get the student "buy-in": I didn't want to do all of the work! After all, the students are the ones getting the value. The other collaboration we've done is the Hi-Tech career fair. (Editor's note: The Entrepreneurs Career Forum started in April of 1998, while the Hi-Tech career fair started in December of 1996.)

As I understand it, 32% of Kellogg's full-time class is comprised of female students. That breaks out to about 380 full-time students. In your opinion, do those 380 women face a disadvantage on the job-search front because of their gender?

I don't think so. Our female students are just outstanding. I know everybody says that, but I don't differentiate between male and female students. They're all bright, they do well, they're all incredibly savvy on how to approach people about jobs and how to do the networking. I would say that the women tend to more quickly surface personal-life issues than men do, however. Overall, it's probably evenly distributed between male and female gender lines in terms of where the lifestyle issues come from. But I would say that women are more apt to bring them up earlier.

Does your office bring up the lifestyle issues with female students?

We have a lot of historical experience in my office. The youngest person here has five years of experience. So we're very comfortable talking with the students about family issues as well as career issues. That means discussing at length issues such as the job itself, the job's location, and the difficulties of having a trailing spouse. We always offer our assistance in meeting with both the student and his or her spouse if they want to come in and talk. It ought to be a joint position.

Does your office provide any specific female-oriented career programming, such as workshops on salary negotiation and assessment, or gender-specific counseling?

We haven't found much of a demand for that. The women don't differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack that way. There is a women's business association here that is incredibly active. It's probably the best organized club at Kellogg, and nearly every woman enrolled is a part of that. One of the bigger events that they do is a career fair in October called "Wines of the World," which is a combination wine tasting and career fair. There, 20 companies are able to meet with a bunch of students off campus to do networking, taste wine, and essentially get to know each other. In addition, the women's business club does a lot of female-specific workshops themselves, depending on what the group's needs are. They'll also bring in a number of high-profile women executives to speak on a wide range of topics.

Roxanne, I have heard some gripes from several Kellogg students regarding the placement office's lackluster performance in placing international students wishing to work in the U.S. and U.S. citizens wishing to work abroad. What is the office doing to improve upon that situation?

The reality is different than the perception. We do a fair amount and have sort of stepped up the amount of contact that we've had with the international student population. For instance, I now have somebody in my office who is the primary international student contact. We're all involved in the international placement process, but she has the greatest depth in terms of what's happening in that arena.

The truth is that many companies are reluctant to hire international students because of the H-1B visa process. Moreover, the Class of 1999 has students representing 40 different countries... It's humanly impossible for us to have a contact in all of those countries. There may be overlap with 30 of those countries, but there may be 10 new countries coming aboard that we haven't really begun to develop a niche in. So that situation makes it a bit of a challenge to be well recognized abroad. We've made some efforts in working closely with student groups, however -- particularly the international student group. We've been working with them to market the school abroad and then market themselves to companies. Again, if we have five students from Brazil and two of them want to work in consulting, one wants to get an investment banking job, and between the other two, one wants to work in consumer marketing and the other wants a marketing job... Well, we have to expend a tremendous amount of time and energy just on those people. So, particularly in the last two years, the students and the school have decided that the school should focus on marketing itself abroad, and let the students work on their own personal situations. We've all figured that the students get more bang for their buck by not making my office tailor everything we do for a particular number of students.

Also, as a general rule, investment banking and consulting firms tend to have a little bit more flexibility with international students than some of the other industries out there, like high-tech and brand management.

According to data collected by BW in 1997, Kellogg's full-time international student contingent worked out to be about 22% of the class, or 262 students. To ensure a positive relationship, do you feel that you have to manage their expectations on the job placement process?

For international students, I think it's understanding how the job search is done in another country that is the biggest hurdle they face. The best thing an international student can do is first realize that the job-search process is different in the U.S. than their home country, and then start to figure out what the rules of the new game are. That's a very significant piece of the puzzle, because everything from how you put your resume together and interview to how you handshake and make eye contact really comes into play. So you really need to know how the job search is done if you want to stay in the U.S. And that means branching out of and talking with domestic students, professors, and alums to figure that out. Essentially you have to sell the interviewer on why it makes more sense to hire you over someone else who's a qualified domestic applicant.

The H1-B visa scares a lot of companies, which is another hurdle internationals face. It's not that it's that expensive a process -- it's that it's a pain in the neck. If I make you an offer, I have to do a job posting and be able to prove to the government that I tried to find somebody from the U.S. who is as qualified as my international hire. If I've proven that I can't find anybody, then I can hire you. It's not that difficult to do that, but it takes time to go through that process, which can hurt if you're a smaller firm.

Have you found that Kellogg's international students this year are fairly happy?

We haven't heard as much grumbling over the last two years. I think some of that is due to our foreign student body having more realistic expectations and us communicating those expectations better. My office meets once a year on a formal basis with the admissions office to talk about the students who were challenges for my office to place. That allows us to better understand what the admissions office saw in a particular student and gauge how we can better help that type of student in the future. We also have many sidebar meetings to help educate one another about each other's process and what the right message for each of us is to be sending out to the students.

How difficult is it for an international student to get a job on Wall Street?

I don't think it's that hard for them to get a job on Wall Street. In a couple of years it might become a little harder, but when that happens, it won't be international-specific. That was what was articulated yesterday to the part-timers during the "Interviewing for Wall Street" workshop (for 4-Q and part-timers)

Eight years of service must have involved you in some pretty unusual situations. What's one of the more memorable advising experiences you've had helping a student land a job?

One of the hardest things I've had to handle on this job occurred the first time I had to work with a student who had a gap on his resume for health reasons. It was hard to get the student to talk to me about what had happened and how he was going to allay the fears of an employer. That was a hard one because I've never had to handle that before. We worked it out, though. I suggested that he be up front with prospective employers, let them raise the issue, and just tell them that he'd had an illness, but that he'd been working steadily for years. Just leave it at that. He was under no obligation to disclose what his illness was. In the end, he found a great job. He also found that honesty is the best policy and that full disclosure is not necessary. You need be honest and truthful, but you don't need to bare your soul.

Thanks, Roxanne, for filling me in on the Kellogg placement process.