We like to first of all get in front of them as soon as possible. We play a key role in the orientation programs of entering first-years. Mostly we want to introduce ourselves and lay out the services we have available here for the students to take advantage of. We also send a clear message that the job search is pretty much the students' responsibility, encouraging them to take charge and educate themselves on what and where the job opportunities are. We provide a whole repertoire of services and assistance on how the students can best represent themselves. We also help students locate some of the opportunities for exposure that they can take advantage of. The theme, though, is that they need to be in the driver's seat.

BW's 1996 B-school project found that UT's Career Placement Office was the fifth worst among the top 25 in terms of connecting recruiters with students, which, as I understand it, is quite a piece of the placement pie. Has your office, over the past two years, been working to rectify or improve that situation?

Well, those findings certainly got our attention, no doubt about that. I would of course be remiss if I didn't say they weren't particularly well justified, however. At any rate, once those findings were published, it created a general perception surrounding our program. And we've made huge strides to overcome that perception over the past two years by increasing our staff size for the employer services area in the career services office. We have an account representative format, where four staff are assigned to particular companies to hold their hands through the entire recruitment process, from A to Z. So, companies that recruit here now have an account rep that will see that their needs are efficiently met.

As a result, the employer feedback has been very positive. We do employer surveys after they've been on campus with us and those, too, have been positive. How they're treated and the services they're provided has been a really big success. Prior to the account rep format, we had a team approach where the employer could talk to anyone and get their needs met. But employers felt that our service was erratic: sometimes their needs were being met and sometimes they weren't. The account rep format personalizes the process to a much greater degree.

Ramesh Rao was appointed as UT's dean about a year and three months ago. Has he done anything significant on the career services front?

We don't report to the dean's office, so it's a little difficult to answer that question. What Dean Rao has done, however, is instill a level of personal responsibility which is consistent with our message to the students.

With respect to the current hiring frenzy, how many companies in 1998 recruited at Texas for full-time jobs this past year (UT reported having 375 companies recruiting its second-years in 1997)?

We're still tabulating those numbers because of the challenge that we have with our computer system, but it looks to me like we had about 440 companies on campus recruiting our second-years in 1998. Based on the kind of recruiting activity we had this spring, we were easily running 50 interview rooms a day -- that includes recruiting for both our MBAs as well as our BBAs.

How many companies recruited on campus for summer internships (UT reported that it had 200 companies recruit for internships in 1997)?

I'd say there were 218 companies that recruited for MBA internships.

How many job opportunities were available by correspondence in 1998 (UT reported having a total of 1,069 job postings in 1997)?

Our job postings rang in at 1,596.

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

We definitely have grown in size over the last couple of years. There are now 24 full-time people in my office who service both our MBA and BBA students. For master's-level students, there's an associate director working with a team of three counselors. Then there are two front-area staffers that handle the front desk. So there's basically six full-time people available to work with our graduate students. Then, there's a similar structure for the undergraduate side. All the rest of the staff are there supporting everything that this office does. For example, Employer Services supports all of the on-campus recruiting and related activities that employers conduct when they come to town. They also handle the job postings and other correspondence opportunities that surface over the course of the academic year.

This office is essentially structured in such a way where there are three service areas: employer, undergraduate, and graduate services. Each of those areas has an associate director and a full-time staff. In addition, we have a librarian who runs the two career libraries here -- one for graduates and the other for undergraduates. Then, there's a computer support team, and a couple of other people who are support staff and handle office operations and procedures.

How many people employed by UT's Career Management Services Office are actual career counselors?

There's 3 1/2 full-time counselors for grad students and 4 1/2 counselors for our undergraduate population.

And how do you fit into the career management structure that you just described? Do you manage the entire scene?

I'm the executive director, helping to coordinate the whole show. Primarily, however, my job is to work on the corporate side of things. But I do stay involved with the student leadership. We're fee-based -- my office's entire operations budget is generated through student fees. So, I work with students year-round to iron out our operations issues, decide how we can most effectively allocate our resources, and determine whether we need to raise fees. So I continually work with the student leadership (which comprises about 10 grad students and 15 BBA students, named "executive officers," who are part of the Graduate Business Council) on operational issues and recruiting issues... about what companies students would like to see recruit here, and how we can manage the career services operation more efficiently.

Sharon, you mentioned that you spend most of your time working with corporations. Do you put in any time counseling students?

No too much anymore. I did when I first got here in 1984, though. There were only five people at that time, so I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades.

So you have sort of evolved with the office over the last decade and a half. What has changed? Can you explain how different life is for you in the director's chair today as opposed to 14 years ago?

Well, we used to be a relatively low priority in the university's eyes. With only five people here, we always had too many things to do. It was catch-as-catch-can, and we were always in reactive mode. Over the past several years, however, we've been given tremendous support from our corporate partners and students. The whole idea of career services has come full circle.

We really now try to stay out in front of anticipated needs, like calling employers to make sure that they are aware of different events that are coming up, and reminding them of other issues. It's a real priority for me to be the best career services office in the nation. And part of that desire, I'm sure, is a response to the challenge that BW laid out in 1996. The tremendous financial support that we've received has also allowed us to build brand-new facilities that I would be willing to say rival any in the nation.

When were these new facilities established and what exactly do they include?

In February of this year, we opened a brand-new interview center named the Ford Career Center... Its construction was made possible by a sizable gift given to us by the Ford Motor Co., by individual corporate donations, and through student fees. The interview center is over 10,000 square feet, consists of 43 interview rooms as well as an employer lounge, private phone booths, and a large reception area for students. In addition, we also have 13 overflow interview rooms, so I can easily accommodate 50 schedules every day. Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on how you look at it -- we have pretty much the month of October booked solid with company recruiters. We'll be needing anywhere from 65 to 75 rooms virtually every day. That's going to be a real trick... so I told my staff to get ready to work outside on the grass for a couple of days!

But getting back to the new interview center, each interview room has thermostat control, phone and modem hookups, ergonomic furniture, and indirect lighting. We did a lot of employer focus groups so that even the paint on the wall is soothing (for inquiring minds, those "soothing" colors include 13 different shades of almond and beige)! In addition, the employer lounge area has six phone booths, so that if an employer chooses not to have a phone in their room -- sometimes it can become distracting -- they have another way to get in touch with whoever it is they want to talk to.

Lastly, the new facility has interactive video capability called Viewnet. So Citibank, for instance, can stay in New York and interview students here live through interactive video if they want to. Not a lot of people are using that right now, but it has been a nice complement to what we offer. Most international students are more apt to use it with multinational firms. It's more efficient for everybody and has created more opportunity for both students and companies. I'd say that probably 10 companies use it a semester, and that probably impacts about 50-70 students.

The new interview facility should also help students go after their summer internships under improved circumstances. Sharon, in your opinion, how important are summer internships in today's marketplace?

Oh, I think it has definitely gained in importance, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that most people going to B-school are making changes in their careers. The internship provides a great win-win situation: It lets companies get a good look at students and determine whether they are interested in pursuing them as full-time hires, and it gives students the chance to assess whether the job and industry that they're working in is what they want to do for a career. So it helps students gain a focus.

The internship's popularity and importance also has a lot to do with the economy because employers now have to become better and more efficient in their recruiting. Recruiters are having to be more accountable for their recruiting dollars today, and the internship gives them the opportunity they need to determine whether to really pursue a particular student or group of students. [As long as the economy is healthy], they can offer more internships, and as a result, they've created more opportunity and more demand.

Do most UT MBA students get a summer internship?

Most do, though some have to work harder than others. But truly, if a student really wants one, if they work a little bit, they're generally able to find one. I'd say that more than 90% of the student body that is actively looking for an internship gets one.

How do you counsel for the internship?

Most of the career counseling for MBAs occurs during the first year. Afterwards, most of them are in pretty good shape, so career counseling for second-years drops a bit. First-year counseling is done strategically. It's based on exploration and self-assessment, and is critical to their future success in finding a satisfying career when they exit the program. For second-years, we take a more focused approach, honing in on issues such as job qualifications and job location that students are looking to meet and discuss with possible future employers.

Does your office have open counseling hours to help first-years gain that clarity?

Oh, yes, we have an open-door policy, and our counselors post their schedules outside their doors every Thursday to give students an idea of what their week looks like. That way, students can coordinate their schedules and sign up to see them over the course of the next week. In addition to that, our counselors spend time in the library and tend to do a lot of "curbside" counseling there, where students will approach them with "quick" questions.

Does demand for counseling tend to get bottlenecked around certain times of the year?

It's real cyclical. At the beginning of the semester, for example, second-years want to come back and describe their internship to us and gain the focus, while first-years want to get established and get themselves squared away with an understanding of how to begin the job-search process.

During that and other more busy times of the year, we hire temporaries to help with the front-desk areas, with the employer services area, and we typically hire some temps to help out at the career libraries for a spell. We also keep extended office hours. We try to have staff available to employers into the evening hours (7-8:15 a.m.), when they're doing their corporate receptions, and open early (7:15 a.m.) during the recruiting season.

When does recruiting start at UT for both first- and second-years?

They run on the same schedule. Unlike some schools, we don't designate between first- and second-years. Employers will be coming in October looking for first-year students on top of the second-years that they're after. That's common, and we don't try to hold them off. On-campus interviews will start on Sept. 21, but the whole process of getting resumes collected started yesterday (Aug. 26) -- the first day of classes. So there's a lot of pressure on first-years to get their resumes in shape so that they can get involved early in the recruitment process if they want to. So, interviews start on Sept. 21, and will run through the first Friday of December, which is Dec. 4. It then picks up again during the second semester, restarting on Feb. 8 (the first day of classes is Jan. 19) and runs through Apr. 9. Around that time, we'll again start collecting resumes so that employers can screen them.

Sharon, you mention letting employers screen through students for interview spots. What is the school's philosophy for interview schedules -- are most schedules open or closed?

Actually we leave that up to employer preference. We don't mandate that they do it one way or the other. We offer employers three methodologies: They have a bidding option, where the student has an opportunity to show their degrees of interest in a company by bidding a number of preallotted points on an interview -- the highest bidders win interview spots; an open schedule option, where it's first come, first serve; and a prescreen option, where employers screen students to invite only those people they feel are most qualified to fill their positions. Overwhelmingly -- probably 90% of all interviews done on campus -- are conducted on a prescreen basis.

UT has the reputation of being a technology school nestled in the Silicon Hills. Has your office fed into that perception by automating anything that you do, in terms of managing the interview process, for example?

Sure, we've been automated for a good long time. We are using a program called Resume Expert. But most of the vendors, we've found, fall short. So right now, we may consider developing our own system. The system we currently use allows students to register with our office electronically via a diskette, and builds a student resume as well as a student and company database.

Also, the prescreening is all done electronically. So, for instance, a student interested in a financial analyst position at American Airlines can let the system know to send the company his or her resume. When the deadline comes for that interview schedule, we'll print off the whole list of students selected to participate. That saves a lot of time. I can remember when we'd have piles of resumes on our desks that we have to go through... Boy, could I tell you stories. Students would be in a line out the door trying to hand in their resumes or ask for extensions, but I couldn't accept them because I had to run to the Federal Express box and make sure that I didn't miss the pickup!

What are the shortcomings of Resume Expert?

Well, the biggest problem is that it's not Web-based. It's run out of a centralized CPU, so students only have access to it in the business building. As a result, the limitations are significant enough that we're considering possibly developing our own program.

How many MBA interviews were administered on-campus this past year?

About 14,800, which includes all of our graduate-level interviews.

In addition to UT's reputation as a high-tech school, it also has a swiftly growing entrepreneurship reputation. Does that mean that more students are choosing to go the independent route for their job search?

That's a real interesting phenomenon. There are a lot of students that express that entrepreneurship interest, and throughout their time in the MBA program, they do look into that and pursue it. But, when it's all said and done, our stats show that the vast majority of students get jobs with major employers. A lot of that has to do with lifestyle and family issues, and security. My hunch is that students do pursue it and have a general interest in it, but they come back to the point where they need to make sure that they'll be making a steady income and aren't working 200 hours a week. They take the attitude, I think, of: "Now that I'm aware of it, maybe in five to 10 years I'll make a move to start my own business."

Does your office offer counseling for the independent job search?

Oh, sure.

How do you handle it?

Well, first and foremost, we let the students know that the independent job search means taking a little bit more of a direct approach. They have to be networking with alums globally, and in town. They have to get exposure and do a good deal of investigation. It's a lot more of a serious job search, and that's typically how they're counseled. You can't sit back and pick and choose between the hundreds of companies that come through our office. Because going the independent route is such an intense process, our counselors also try to determine whether the students have the drive to succeed in it. If they don't think that they do, then they'll be up front about it.

Does UT have a support group or other programming that is helpful to students pursuing the independent job search?

We do career panels in the fall semester that are done by subject and interest -- there's one that we call an entrepreneurial panel. The panel is comprised of employers (some whom are alums, while others have no affiliation with the school) who have started their own businesses or who work for small companies and are part of a unique niche. Mostly what they say is that you have to be really serious about it and be committed to spending a tremendous amount of time on it.

Has UT's golden boy, Michael Dell (who never actually graduated from UT), come by to participate in the entrepreneurial panel?

Michael Dell has come in as a keynote speaker. He still has a very entrepreneurial attitude so he can talk to that very well. But he can also speak to the "corporate mentality" involved in running a business, making sure that corporate objectives are met. Dell is a great partner of the B-school, and in fact, this year, Dell provided laptops to fill our laptop requirement.

As far as support groups are concerned, the Entrepreneurial Student Organization is a cohesive group that does a lot of interesting and unique things and provides a lot of services. For example, they provide a regular newsletter with an entrepreneurial bent, that has a good portion of it dedicated to job listings that they rustle up. They also provide a number of networking opportunities for their membership as well as have a number of entrepreneurs host some of their sponsored events.

Does nearly everyone interview on campus?

I would say that easily 85% of our MBA students interview through our office, and about 65% of that group that interviewed on campus found their job directly through our office, through the on-campus recruiting services. Then, about 10% found jobs through our job-listing services. The remainder were successful finding jobs through their own job contacts -- that's a very significant percentage. It's kind of funny, I'm not sure if we're pleased with that or not. The independent job search is a very big, philosophical issue for us, and we're here to complement it and provide a lot of opportunity. We do not, however, want students to ever rely on us. We want to teach skills that are lifelong. But it's a very nice complement. We seem to have a good recruiter mix coming through our office and seem to be able to meet a lot of their needs.

How many offers are students averaging for 1998? Is the number falling because the career services office is stressing to MBAs the benefits of an increased focus, or conversely, is it rising because of the healthy job market MBAs have been enjoying?

You could argue both points. Employers have really become accountable for their recruiting successes. They take great pains to be sure that they are being as efficient as possible. They will do a lot of prerecruiting activities, for example, to get exposure. So when they end up with 13 names on their interview schedules, they know that those 13 people are high opportunity candidates. So employers are also trying to be more specific about who it is that they recruit.

I personally think the job-offer stat is meaningless, though. For this class it came out to be about 2.5. But my philosophy is that students with a lot of job offers translates in there being a lot of unhappy companies out there, because inevitably the student can only go to one firm, and that means that the rest of the bunch has ineffectively used its recruiting dollar. Furthermore, they want to know what they could have done differently and how they could have been more competitive. Generally speaking a company will give a campus two years, and if their situation doesn't improve, then they won't come back -- it's just not economically feasible. So averaging more than 2.5 offers means that you're looking at inefficiency.

In BW's 1996 rankings, Texas was among the most-added by company recruiters who put UT grads in the Top 10 for having great operations skills. Do those skills correlate with where students go after graduation?

Operations is definitely growing for us. We've had very good success in that area for the last couple of years, and the students interested in that are going into a variety of industries. It's hard to categorize where our operations grads are going by industry though, because consulting firms and high-tech companies love them for their fit. UT grads are able to work in a company's manufacturing, business planning, and/or marketing divisions. Or they can act as a liaison between all three of those divisions. The energy sector, we're also finding, loves them as well. That's really how they're recruited into these companies: They become project managers to be the glue between the different divisions of a company, bring it all together, and maximize success.

Our biggest industry categories for where our graduates are going after school would be consulting, high tech, and energy.

The Silicon Hills, as the surrounding area is called, is quickly developing quite an IT base that I would imagine many UT grads tap into for employment after graduation. Technology companies, however, have a tendency to be much more erratic and impulsive in their hiring. How has you office dealt with that tricky situation?

Fortunately for most of the employers that we work with in the high-tech category, those fluctuations that you are referring to usually hit their manufacturing personnel much more than their business functions. UT MBAs are generally recruited into middle management levels of marketing, finance, and operations. Also, the IT firms that we work with are pretty responsible about how they manage their projections. They seem to have a very good feel for what they can bear. We haven't seen too many instances of companies laying off students.

There are, however, a lot of smaller technology companies that come here all summer long and that don't have the ability to forecast what their hiring needs are. That's a whole new facet of our business -- "just in time hiring." Those companies probably started proliferating here about five to 10 years ago. When we get their surprise hiring requests, we'll immediately go to the students, faculty, and student clubs to find out what the potential is for filling the company's need. That's the routine now. If UT doesn't follow up quickly enough, we know that the company will just put in calls to Stanford and Wharton, and we'll lose out. So we really try to have a quick turnaround response time on that front.

Sharon, I've heard complaints that UT's placement is largely regional, that only a handful of New England-based companies recruit at UT -- which can be tough on students interested in trading and investment banking. Is that true? Where are students being placed geographically?

The vast majority of our entering MBAs -- at least 60% -- are from out of state. We survey them when they first come in, and they often say that they'd like to return to the region of the U.S. that they came from. But when we resurvey them upon graduation, you know what they say? "It's kind of nice here in Texas. I might just stay in the Southwest." The weather's nice, the cost of living is relatively low, and the economy has been kind to the local job market -- both Samsung and Intel have been major resources for our students to tap into. In addition, IBM recently closed its Boca Raton office and moved here.

When we break down the numbers, we find that 24% of the Class of 1998 went back up East. We may not enjoy quite the same level of investment banking and financial-services recruiters as other schools, but students definitely have options in those areas. About 10% of the class went into I-banking this past year. Students have exposure to different locations and lifestyles here that they don't have to go back to New York City for. Approximately 68% of the class got placed west of the Mississippi -- that includes hot spots like California, Arizona, Illinois, and Washington State. Then about 8% of our students went international (most of that 8% is, however, made up of UT's international students).

Is UT enjoying a greater diversity of recruiters now than ever before?

Yes. We used to be a regional school, no doubt about it. Recruiting a broader geographical base of students and requiring more work experience have helped us branch out. There have also been some really strong curricular initiatives here that have enticed employers from all over the nation. For example, we have a great trading room that most of our investment banking recruiters sit on the board of trustees for. They are intimately involved and have raised our profile considerably. We also have some great faculty in the marketing ranks that have upped the school's stock.

What types of things has your office done on the corporate side of the fence to attract a broader array of companies?

We leverage what we have here to entice companies to come to campus. You can bank on the fact that, for instance, I talk about the Trading Center when it seems like an employer might be interested. Myself and a couple of my associate directors are out on the road, in the summer in particular, calling on companies. And we're always pitching the unique qualities that students have here combined with some of the unique attributes surrounding our academic offerings.

How many companies would you say you and your staff visit annually?

Well, I probably take a different approach than most of my peers. I don't do a lot of one-on-one employer meetings -- I don't think that's effective. Instead, I try to do more critical-mass-oriented conferences or consortia. If you look at it that way, you can get your point across to hundreds of companies that much quicker. I don't do many individualized company trips because we're a state school and we have to be very thrifty with our recruiting fund. The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management is one example of trying to leverage ourselves in front of many recruiters. (Editor's note: The CGSM is an 11-school alliance that provides scholarships for qualified African-American and Hispanic-American B-school students.)

How many new companies came to campus this year?

Thirty-one, of which 29 were seeking master's-level students. Some of the new companies include: Cisco Systems, Nesbitt Burns Securities, Qualcomm, Tyson Foods, and Sunrise Medical.

How did you convert that? What types of things does your office do to bring new companies into the fold?

We have an ambassador program that I've run every year for five to six years, where typically I select students out of the first- and second-year MBA classes that I feel would have an interest in calling on companies over the holidays and be committed. Once I find a core group of about 30-40, and determine where they're going to be over the holidays, then I start parsing through companies that we haven't seen yet. I make the first entree to companies over the phone, that UT students will be in their area, and could I send an ambassador out to them for about 20 minutes so they can relate what we have to offer. It's a really novel approach to have because students are our best marketing tool. They go out and make presentations to companies about what UT has to offer and about the whole college committing itself to making the companies successful recruiters. The new 31 companies that recruited on campus this year for the first time have all had ambassadors call on them. So I think they've had a tremendous effect.

What companies do not currently recruit at UT that you are targeting for the near future?

Microsoft does student practicums with us and works with some faculty members on student consulting projects, but they don't necessarily recruit. So, that's one that we're working on. Nike is another. We're also working on Bain Consulting -- they currently recruit here for undergrads but not for master's students. That's a whole other market for us; there are a number of companies that recruit here only for our BBA students that we need to convert for the graduate side.

Which companies have recently stopped recruiting on campus?

Chase Manhattan out of New York because they just weren't being competitive. With the economy acting the way it has been and students having the amount of options that they do, they just weren't able to be successful here. Clorox out of San Francisco is another company that discontinued their on-campus recruiting. Oh, and Leo Burnett recently signed off as well.

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

I always follow up with them and try to redirect them to our undergraduate population. Generally speaking, if a company wasn't successful recruiting our MBA population, it was because they weren't being competitive with their salary packages. Or sometimes it's a location issue. So, what I try to do is redirect them to our undergraduate ranks. And many times, that works. In fact, that worked with Leo Burnett. It has been my experience that Chase Manhattan and most of the commercial banks that weren't terribly successful recruiting our MBAs will go to the undergrads and see what they can find there. That allows us to have partnerships and maintain the great relationship rather than to have lost it completely.

Name the top 10 companies that hired the most graduates in 1998 -- with hires [Editor's note: UT's 1997 top 10 came in as follows: Ernst & Young Consulting (18), Intel (11), Procter & Gamble (10), Deloitte & Touche Consulting (9), Exxon (7), Ford (7), IBM Consulting (7), A.T. Kearney (6), Citibank (6), SAP America (5), Morgan Stanley (5), and Nationsbank (5)].

First, I must tell you that the numbers that we have are voluntarily reported by our students. So it's quite possible that the number of hires could be on the low side. That said, our biggest recruiter was A.T. Kearney (17 full-time hires), then came Coopers & Lybrand Consulting (15), Deloitte & Touche (14), Intel (14), Dell (10), Enron (10), Andersen Consulting (9), Procter & Gamble (8), Frito Lay (8), and Hewlett-Packard (8).

Where does that select group go after you move outside of the top 10?

From there it continues into the banks and consulting firms, and then you get into consumer goods and a few more high-tech firms, like IBM, Motorola, and AMD.

Well, everybody is aware of the golden age of prosperity MBAs have enjoyed. Is that continuing? What does the average base salary that UT grads are taking home look like for 1998?

Overall, average base salary looks to be holding at about $71,000, with annual bonuses coming in at an average of $13,500, and signing bonuses coming in at an average of $14,000. What's notable is that 77% of the class reported being offered signing bonuses. That's a significant jump. Annual bonuses have jumped up quite a bit, too, in terms of dollar amount. Last year it was around $10,000. And there's a huge range for signing bonuses, they stretch from $5,000 to $30,000.

Where are the $5,000 and $30,000 bonuses being found?

The lower dollar amounts seem to be with petroleum companies, some commercial banks, or a category that we list here as "computer services" -- which is not the same as a high-tech firm. The higher dollar bonuses are obviously coming in with consulting and investment banking. They're also real estate-related... attached to venture capital developers, for instance. So those are the two extremes.

How do you calculate total compensation packages? What is included in them?

We actually don't publish any total compensation numbers because it's almost impossible to do. Instead, we include a category for standard deviation. In addition, to publishing the mean salary, we'll also publish the standard deviation for every industry category. So, for example, in the petroleum/energy sector, the mean salary is $70,000 with a standard deviation of $10,400. That would suggest that students were being offered comp packages that were between $59,600 and $80,400. That's how we've chosen to represent the salary data this year. The whole other curveball that has been introduced is stock options; they're very hard to value. So, for us, total compensation is a very hard thing to calculate.

Have stock options become more prevalent, given the school's high-tech identity?

They have been, and we feel that they just increase companies' competitive advantage. Generally speaking, high-tech firms offer salaries that are competitive, and rather than offering big signing bonuses, these smaller companies are offering big stock option packages.

How do you counsel students to negotiate their stock option packages?

It's still pretty typical to package that with salary and total compensation counseling. There's a whole assessment process of lifestyle, what your values are, and how they stack up against the total package. Does the company's value base match with yours? Can you find a good balance in what you're trying to achieve? And is the compensation competitive with other career options that you may have? And, in addition to that, what has the company done to effectively recruit you? Even the personal follow-up can make a difference in how the student feels about a company.

How do you counsel for or provide workshops on negotiating salary packages?

For the workshops, we lay out a general formula and let the students know that these are all of the things they should be thinking about. We talk a lot about personal and professional values, and a balance between family and professional life. Each person is an individual and has different ways of looking at these things, so generally speaking, workshops have to be followed up with individualized counseling.

There are tools and instruments that can be used to help students further hone in on what they're looking for. The tools and techniques go beyond self-assessment, and have more to do with value identification. There is, for example, a book called Discovering Your Careers in Business, written by two Harvard business school professors named Timothy Butler and James Waldrop, that is quite popular. The value assessment can be administered through their Web site (www.careerdiscovery.com), where students can measure their creativity with their quantitative interests, how much they're looking for others to influence them, and a whole set of value assessment. This is a tool that more and more of the schools are using in helping students recognize what it truly is that they value, and as a result, find the job that matches their value base.

Sharon, you've been involved in UT's career services division for the past 14 years -- that makes you a veteran. Can you explain why MBA placement has been so bountiful of late?

There's been a lot of discussion about global business, and only in the last couple of years has that truly come about. The advance of the Internet and E-commerce has raised the bar for almost every business and company. Now, they're in a scramble to find really talented people who can take them into the next century and be leaders in their own industry. This, I think, has prompted a very healthy economic environment for MBA talent.

The situation has, in my mind, become almost surreal. Do you see an end in sight to this golden age?

As history will repeat itself, the business cycles will begin to trend down, and I think we're already looking at the possibility on the horizon. As usual, elections on the state level and a Presidential election not too far down the line always tend to affect the business environment. I think the job market is going to trend down in the next year.

It will be interesting to see how that affects enrollment. Typically when a business cycle goes down, B-school enrollment goes up because the writing is on the wall that companies are on the verge of tightening their belts. Soon, attrition takes its toll, and advancements don't come as quickly. So, I think enrollment and applications will increase. But what will happen in terms of career placement is that it will really level off quite a bit, and the marketplace won't be as aggressive for MBAs. MBAs will have to start looking around and working harder to uncover the opportunities that are coming so easily to them now. The market will still be there, though -- it's just a matter of it being a little more discreet. I also think that we can expect to see language skills becoming an important factor for corporate opportunity because as the world gets smaller, it becomes increasingly helpful to speak several languages and sort of grease those international transactions.

Well, I guess we should stop projecting and return to the here-and-now. Are companies trying hire their UT interns as the summer comes to a close?

Absolutely. I would say that 60% of the students that just completed their internships come back to school with a job offer in their pocket, and many firms give them until the holidays to make a decision. If companies want to be competitive for strong MBA talent, they need to be prepared to make offers to summer interns by the end of the summer or very soon thereafter, by mid-September. That's just part of the reality to today's hiring environment.

Can you describe some of the other creative features companies are including in their total compensation offers?

Tuition reimbursement for a student's last year in B-school is becoming more prevalent. Also we're seeing a few firms woo spouses in trying to get the MBA into the fold. For example, if a firm has decided that it definitely wants to hire a particular student, maybe during the summer, they'll accommodate spousal visits on the company expense, or bring the spouse to the company location to get him or her more relaxed. Also, when the student returns to school, we're finding that there are a couple of firms that are inviting spouses to receptions and presentations. Sometimes they offer some employment assistance to spouses as well. I'm not under the impression that this is happening a lot, but I think the top-notch candidates that companies are going after are taking advantage of it. I gotta say, though, we may see more of it as companies try to find new ways to be competitive.

Sharon, campus career offices used to be called placement offices. Yet over the past five or so years, they've been renamed career services offices. What does the name change really mean?

You're right. Those name changes occurred about five years ago, and they had to do with the fact that the "placement" label was sort of misrepresenting us: Our office is a services resource and facilitator. There were certain impressions being created with the word "placement," that when individuals left an employer making X amount of dollars, there would literally be placement services at their disposal to double their salary.

Well, in the real world, there are placement services that, for a fee, will send their clients on interviews and do a lot of the footwork for them. It's a fee-based arrangement where both parties understand that the firm will really help them. Generally speaking, most schools don't see their offices performing that role at all. Rather, we see the students as being responsible for managing and directing their own job search and taking charge of their own destiny when it comes to their careers. So, that's why the shift has occurred, to get out from under from the perception that our office would spoon-feed the students. We want to be a service provider, teaching them to fish so that they can eat for the rest of their lives.

Also, setting expectations at the orientation for first-years is really key to having a great relationship with your MBA students throughout their tenure here. We let them know what they can and cannot expect from us. It's sort of a verbal contract.

Sharon, you briefly described how your office has evolved over the time that you've been its head. How, specifically, has your role changed as the school's director of career management services? What are you doing differently today as opposed to, say, five years ago?

As I said, our services have expanded dramatically. What we used to do was just be an on-campus interview machine. We would just throw the information at students, get them signed up on schedules, and run it through day in and day out. We had little time to work with students in counseling situations. We didn't have the time or the staff, we just ran the business of facilitating interviews.

Today, our office staff has quadrupled in size, which has allowed us to expand our services exponentially and help students along from the very first exposure they have to our office during orientation. We can now help answer the questions: Why an MBA? What do I hope to get out of my two years at UT? How do I attain my career goal? The worst thing is to have alumni come back to this office disenchanted and dissatisfied trying to figure out what they want to do a year or two after they graduate. We want happy, well-employed alumni who have good attitudes and are good partners for the business school.

Speaking of alumni, again referring to BW's 1996 rankings study, we found that UT's 9,350-person alumni network to be the fourth-weakest (based on the percentage of alums who donate money annually to their alma maters) in the top 25. How big a role do alumni play in UT's recruiting process?

In the recruiting process, we do utilize alumni a great deal. Our office doesn't really foster the formal alumni relationships -- we don't really manage that aspect of the business school. However, we do maintain our own network of alumni and try to keep up with a good number of them so that those that are interested in coming back to campus can. We encourage that. They can play an extremely important role in helping us deliver our services and helping us educate current MBA students about the opportunities and realities out there. They can also take an active role in assisting their own employers recruit at UT. They know the lay of the land and faculty when they were students here and can help grow those relationships with their employer. So, I'd say that they're really key to helping their employer become a successful recruiter.

I should also say that there have been changes made as to how alumni are treated here since BW's 1996 article, but I don't know the outcome.

What if any service do you provide for alums? What do you give back to the alumni for playing such an integral role in the recruitment process?

We do provide services, but it's difficult because we're not really well equipped to provide long-distance services to alums -- not much of our resources are on the Web right now. We would hope to have almost everything we can offer to students and alums on the Web this academic year. If alums are in the local Austin area, however, we can be particularly helpful. If not, then we're very limited in what we can assist them with.

What types of services does your office provide for local alums?

They can come in and talk to our career advisers about their job-search strategy, or come into the office to clean up their resume, do mock interviews, or participate in the on-campus recruiting program. They're also welcome to sit in on any of the career-services oriented workshops that we offer to the students. Lastly, they can take advantage of the weekly job postings available here -- we'll E-mail the job postings to alums who don't live in the area.

Do you charge a fee for alumni to take advantage of your postgraduate services?

There's a nominal fee -- around $50 per semester -- for alums to take advantage of everything we offer.

Switching tacks, taking a look at the current makeup of students, do you feel that women MBA students at UT face added placement hurdles based upon their gender?

I'm not sure that they do. I think there are some professions that, because of their very nature, perhaps make it a little more difficult for women to enter into and see long-term success in. Primarily I'm referring to consulting and investment banking. Women are recruited into these industries, but attaining long-term success in those industries is difficult.

Does your office do any gender-specific career counseling?

No, not specifically. The associate director for MBA services here is a female, and then we have two male advisers. We do try to be sensitive to various issues that might affect subsets of students. There's a Graduate Business Women's network here that we work with. And we can also identify the appropriate corporate representatives that will come in and speak to any student organization that feels like there's an issue related to them that needs to be talked about. So far, I think that's been a fairly effective way in helping women become aware of certain issues, and of the realities of certain jobs and industries. They essentially have to make their own value assessment again. We try to provide them with as much realism as possible. And that's all complemented by our direct contact with companies.

Oftentimes, when we have female speakers come in, they speak to broader issues. I think that women have been embraced in the professional ranks, but that there are still some challenges. Generally though, I think we've seen women continue to be successful, and companies are starting to address issues. I've seen a lot of progress in the last eight years, in terms of how many opportunities have opened themselves up to women, and how they're being able to manage them, and succeed.

How about on the international student front? International students have always faced more job-search challenges than their U.S. counterparts. How do you help foreign students attain their dream jobs?

I really think that we've had a great success story here. Five or six years ago, we automated our on-campus recruiting, and used a lot of employer input to customize the service -- we had an employer advisory board overseeing the entire project. The result of our efforts was that the computer had to screen resumes for four basic criteria: Since we also provide services to BBAs, we screen for degree level, major, graduation date, and the fourth is work authorization. Employers were adamant about having the four criteria as part of the routine computerized services. Then, once they got the resumes, companies would screen through them to ultimately decide who they wanted to interview.

Well, once we put the system to work, we realized that it pretty much shut out international students. We hadn't even considered that possibility, and before we knew it, we had a revolt on our hands (Editor's note: UT has about a 25% international student body, which translates into roughly 125 students.) Our associate director who runs the graduate career services out of this office quickly pulled together a focus group of international students, sent out an E-mail, and invited any and all of our international students to sit down for the focus group.

The focus group appointment arrives, and the associate director is sitting behind a one-way window, watching the international students become increasingly angry and frustrated. Finally, it got to the point where they were yelling, "if the CSO really cared, they would be here!" So, she walked into the room, turned the conversation into a constructive one, and was able to turn around and form an international student task force comprised of eight to 10 volunteer students from places like Latin America, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan.

They initially felt that our office was trying to shut them out, but we put them to work, and had them talk with every employer that recruits at UT to determine what opportunities were available for international students, what the appropriate hiring channels were, and how our office could help them be successful. As a result, they were able to come away with some wonderful resources. And through the task force's liaison work, our relationship has turned around. We now employ a 20-hour-per-week TA person who is the task force's chairman, which now has evolved to work with both employers that recruit here, as well as those that do not, to help identify and promote opportunities for international students. So it has been a very positive thing. That turn of events also allowed us to justify creating a new position: an international counselor who works exclusively with our foreign students.

I have actually presented our case study to a lot of my peers as a model to help them in their struggle of placing their high international enrollments. It's a challenge, granted, but there are ways to work successfully with the international MBA student population.

What added hurdles do you feel international students face that make their placement a greater challenge?

Well first off, they don't have the luxury of having hundreds of employers making themselves available to be talked to or of being interviewed every day, September and October. International students have to work much harder to create those opportunities for themselves. In many ways, they embark on a personalized independent job search, whereas U.S. students can waltz into their career services office and have hundreds of companies at their disposal. That's the most obvious discrepancy.

How many of UT's international students do you find want to stay in the U.S. after graduation?

The majority say on their exit survey that they want to go back to their home country. Obviously, though, it varies from year to year. Asians, for the most part, do not want to go back home. But, generally speaking, I've found that most of our international students want to go back home and contribute to their home economies. I think they see a lot of opportunity from whence they came. I'd say about 40% of our international population expresses an interest in staying in the U.S.

Are the students interested in working stateside generally successful?

They really are. And that's largely because of the efforts the task force has taken to create a phenomenal alumni network base. That's been an absolutely essential component in helping international students secure U.S. employment. They network through UT's international alumni who are working both in the U.S. and throughout the world. Many times our international alums are working for a U.S.-based company in its Sao Paulo division, for example. So they'll get students into the fold through their company's U.S. headquarters and go from there.

Sharon, before we end, I'd like to tap into your vast, 14-year reserve of career services-related experience and ask you what particular moment stands out to you as one of the more memorable you've encountered on the counseling front -- be it for students or for corporations. Got a memorable yarn to spin?

You know, there really is one that sticks out in my mind. It was a fall semester, a new class had just presented itself to us, and this girl walked into my office in hiking boots, hair down to her waist, wearing no makeup, and just a very earthy type. Obviously, she was an outdoorsy type. So she relates to me that she has just entered into the MBA program and wants to become an investment banker. I asked here what she knew about I-banking, and she said, "nothing." I asked her for her resume. She shows me it, whereupon I find that she had lived in Israeli, hiked across the Tibetan mountains, and had been in archaeological digs in Katmandu and other remote parts of the world. As far as I could tell, she had never set foot in a business environment.

So, we met on a fairly regular basis over the course of the year to try and get her prepared for internship interviewing. I mean, we went a long way -- she didn't even own a skirt or shave her legs when she arrived at my doorstep. Needless to say, she was one of the most challenging clients I've ever had. I literally had to work on her hygiene, and took her to department stores to buy appropriate interview clothing, get her a haircut, and take her to the makeup counter.

I can remember the whole office when she walked in to interview for an internship opportunity in a business suit -- her hair was at her shoulders, she wore makeup... we all applauded, and she started crying. The upshot of that story is that she was successful in landing a good internship -- though it was not in I-banking. She realized that I-banking just didn't match her values or her personality, and didn't allow her the freedom or latitude that she was used to enjoying in her life. In the end, when she graduated, she ended up as an internal auditor at a major company.

Sharon, thanks very much for all of your insights today.