Tom, first off, how do you see your job? From what I've read, it seems that your primary function is to advise corporations on the design of individualized recruiting strategies and provide students with job-search support. Is this a departure from the past, when placement officers were more likely to focus on finding their students jobs?

Yes, it is. I wouldn't say it's an abrupt departure, but more of an evolution. When we switched our title from "placement" to "career services" -- that change predates me -- it was a sign that the role of the office changed in some subtle but ultimately profound ways. Today, we see our mission as helping students develop lifelong career management skills. We want to partner with students by sharing as much information as we can with them.

It's not appropriate for me to tell students where they should go off to work after graduation. Instead, we want them to make their own decisions. To do that, we start them off by having them do a self-assessment. Then we teach them about the priorities involved in the job search, and later, how to perform the proper research prior to interviewing. We teach them how to best market their skill sets to a possible employer and ultimately help them lead the kind of lifestyle that they're looking for.

The role we play with companies has changed as well. It used to feel like companies would arrive on campus, do interviewing, and depart. Now we really see it as a 12-month partnership. We see ourselves as helping them develop the appropriate recruiting strategies -- that's especially important in today's strong hiring environment. There are far more opportunities out there today than our students can handle. Companies now have to spend more time finding the appropriate ways to catch our students' attention -- we're helping them do that. We have about 720 students in each class, so it's especially important that a company find the right subgroups in the class for it to successfully market itself. I like all of the counseling that we perform on the student side of the fence and having an office on campus. But my job necessitates that I have one foot in the corporate world as well. That allows me to have a unique window into some of the most interesting companies in the world and provide as many quality opportunities for CBS students as possible.

What specifically does this 12-month partnership with companies entail on your part?

My style is my own. I spend a lot of time with companies, from the micro to the senior levels. During the recruiting season, I'm here at 7 a.m., shaking hands with company representatives who come here to recruit. It sounds simple and small, but talking to a recruiter over coffee about how his or her company is changing is invaluable because it allows me the ability to find out what the company is really looking for. Naturally, that also helps me coach my students. It is my responsibility to meet the players [recruiters]. And a lot of them are alumni who are trying to help me do my job better. They are also human resources reps and a number of other key contacts who I must meet and stay in touch with.

There are also the functional aspects of my job that I must fulfill. They include: talking with companies about their job postings, the different alternatives companies have for devising interview schedules, and the best ways firms can publicize their opportunities. I'll typically make an appointment to visit a company to talk about different recruiting strategies and get a feel for where a firm is going. I also go downtown [to Wall Street] once a year to visit firms. It's a very hands-on, people business. That's the fun part of my job! And the great thing is that quite a few of these corporate recruiters jump from firm to firm. So the previous relationships I've developed with corporate reps who have moved on to new companies makes it easier for me to bring new players into Columbia's recruiting fold. That's helpful for expanding our recruitment network.

Dean Meyer Feldberg is keenly interested in recruiting. I talk to him frequently about company relationships, and he's maintained them at the CEO level. It's not unusual for Meyer to be sitting with several major executives, say from DLJ (Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette), and for him to call me up and say, "Tom, come down and say hello."

The Alumni Office also meets with the CBS alumni at firms that currently hire our students. In addition, faculty have invited practitioners into the classroom as lecturers. And there are a number of adjunct faculty here who work for some of our core recruiters. For example, an individual from J.P. Morgan teaches here frequently. So you can see this broad and developing relationship we have with the firms that physically impacts recruiting.

How much time do you feel you spend on the company side of things?

My day in the life really changes so much depending on the season of the year. During the summer, I probably spend two-thirds of my time working with companies. But during the school year, it's probably half that because I spend so much more time with my students. The way my office is structured, I tend to be the company relationship manager, and I have career staff who meet with students exclusively. All of us counsel students and meet with companies, and that's helpful because we can relay that to the students and talk about the key drivers of offers. It's really important to know both sides of the fence.

How big is Columbia Business School's Career Services Office?

I have 13 1/2 people working in the office -- one person only works here from June to December, so I only count her as a half of person. My staff handle everything -- from counseling to student and corporate support...you name it. It's a leanly staffed office, considering that CBS is such a large school. (Editor's Note: In 1997, there were 1,269 students enrolled in Columbia's full-time MBA program.) That's one of the reasons that we see our role as teaching students how to do their own research as opposed to spoon-feeding them. My philosophy is: I don't take credit for our students' successes, nor do I accept responsibility when they're not doing the kinds of things they need to be doing to grab jobs.

Of the total staff here, I've got five officers whose chief responsibility is to work with the students, counseling them and offering workshops. Then I have two others who work primarily with companies. We also have seven retired senior executives working in our Executives in Residence Program -- which is unique to Columbia. As part of that program, the retired execs spend two to three days a week here doing career counseling. Students make appointments with them, and they give career advice from the practitioner's point of view. To provide the most benefit to students, we've made sure that the execs in residence have come from a variety of industries: One is a partner at DLJ, another is a retired vice-chair of Chemical Bank, another is a woman who started her own investment bank, another was CEO of Connie Lee, another was president of Philip Morris International, and another was vice-chair of Booz Allen. So they cover the watershed from an industry standpoint and help the broad student population. The program is great for us because my strategy has been to work with people with business experience who can help our students. For example, Robert Lear [founder of the Executives in Residence Program], CEO of F&M Schaefer [the beer company] at least 10 to 15 years ago, is the kind of person you want to go to when you have multiple offers to sort it all out. You want to ask him what he did when he was starting out.

When we do orientation, we introduce our executives in residence to the entire incoming class, and usually at the end of the session we have students coming up and saying, "Wow, I didn't know we had that resource!" Other schools have executives-in-residence programs, but I believe that their execs' appointments last for only one year. We have executive participants who have been here for the last eight to nine years. Of course, you have to make that extra effort to make sure that their advice is still relevant, but that longevity is valuable.

How early does CBS's career services program begin?

Right from the beginning. You have to understand that the summer internship recruiting season starts in the end of January. That means that students have to start firming up their resumes and writing their cover letters to firms by Thanksgiving. We also see companies now coming on campus to interest students in their opportunities during the very first day of classes! We try to limit that to second-year students so first-years don't get overwhelmed. But, by the third week of classes, first-years are there too, listening to company presentations.

So, during orientation, we talk about what's going to be happening to them [first-years] over the next couple of years. After that initial introductory hello, we start giving them workshops on everything, including: how to prepare a resume, how to write a cover letter, how to do an Internet job search, and how to do networking interviews. We also offer videotaped practice interviews, individual mock interviews, a session on the independent job search for off-campus opportunities, and much more -- these are all informal 1 1/2 hour sessions. In addition, we invite guest speakers in from various industries to talk about how to succeed in a job search in their particular industry. For instance, we've had representatives from Booz Allen talk about how to do a case interview for consulting. Who better do talk about that than the folks who administer it? Let me also reiterate that Booz Allen's role, in this case, is not recruiting for its own needs. Rather, they've just agreed to help our students out. We also have some search firms come in and aid our students every once in a while.

There's just an enormous amount of programming here...too much. Students can't possibly take advantage of all of it. When I talk to new MBAs, I try to explain to them how important time management is. You really need to pick between two important things and decide which one is the one that's essential. We have a significant advantage because of our New York location. We have a very wide selection of professionals with great experiences who are happy to talk to our students. In this tight labor market, they're particularly interested in coming to campus.

How much feedback do you get from employers?

We receive both formal and informal feedback. In all of my conversations with recruiters I am getting some form of feedback. The feedback is comprised of how our students are doing and how our office is doing. Are companies seeing in our candidates what they want? Are they the right kind of fit? Are our students prepared for the interview? Based on the informal feedback I receive, I act accordingly. And I also pass all of that feedback on to the admissions office so that they can admit the kind of students that companies are looking for.

Formally, we survey every on-campus recruiter, asking them how their experience was. We also hold a recruiters' day where about 100 companies come to discuss recruiting at Columbia as well as some of the challenges and strengths surrounding CBS.

What are some of the challenges of recruiting at Columbia?

The key challenge is that our main facility, Uris Hall, is too small. But we're opening a new facility in January, which will give us more space to work in. It will add a significant number of classrooms. We'll be sharing the building with the law school, which, because our recruiting calendars do not overlap, will give us five more interview rooms to use. Although that's not a whole lot of new rooms, every little bit helps. And after we move into the new building in January of 1999, we'll renovate Uris Hall, which we hope will give us additional space. We need that extra space because the number of firms visiting us is growing and also the concentration of firms recruiting in terms of the calendar is increasing. Most companies are now coming to recruit our students on campus in a smaller and smaller window -- during the first few days of on-campus recruiting. There are only 17 rooms in Uris Hall, and we realize that the current situation leaves a lot to be desired.

To compensate for the lack of space, you must encourage quite a bit of off-site interviewing.

Well, there are significant disadvantages of not being able to interview on campus. For one, we [career services] are not right there at the site to assist should the need arise. But we are trying to work more closely with firms recruiting outside of our building to make sure that they're not conflicting with the recruiting schedules of companies that are recruiting on campus. A lot of our recruiters just interview in their offices downtown, which is another great feature of our New York City location. If I can't accommodate companies, they'll simply invite students downtown to interview in their offices. That's not ideal, but we're trying to welcome all of our companies.

Another challenge for us is managing the offer process. I know that my students would like to have more time to decide about whether to accept an offer. Meanwhile, companies want to get an answer immediately. So there's a conflict there. We're pushing back the deadline date to leave offers open until January 29. Several other B-schools have signed on to that as well.

How many firms recruited on campus for full-time jobs at Columbia in 1998?

We count it as 400, which includes some firms that do not recruit in this building. An example is Booz Allen. They want to see so many students that they go to a hotel. I consider them an on-campus recruiter, though, because we work with them on setting up their interviewing and scheduling.

How about first-year opportunities? How many companies came to recruit first-years for summer internships in 1998?

I'm actually not sure how many companies came to recruit my first-years in 1998. I can tell you, however, that more firms did on-campus this year than the 189 who came to recruit on campus in 1997.

How many offers are students getting?

We don't usually release that number because I don't think it's a good measure of success. If I see a student with six offers, I usually call them into my office and ask them what's wrong. The ideal situation is to get an internship, get a full-time job offer at the end of the summer, and accept it. That way you're done with the recruiting process and can focus on your studies for the rest of the year. A person who has a lot of job offers is usually unfocused and can negatively affect our relationship with a company. So we try and steer students away from that sort of situation.

Do most CBS students get summer internships?

I think everybody did this year. For the past several years, it has been almost everybody. There's a couple of students who decided to go to school over the summer because they didn't get that perfect internship in the right industry. A feature of Columbia is that we have a January program that's goes straight through for 16 months and does not allow participants to do an internship. So January students start in January, study through the summer, and do their last two semesters with the rest of the class in tandem. That allows students who choose not to participate in a summer internship to participate in an accelerated MBA program.

The number of students performing summer internships has increased, however, because more firms are now using them as recruiting tools for full-time jobs -- that has definitely grown. Firms have just decided that the summer internship is the best hiring technique: It allows them to see a candidate for four to six weeks, while the students gets to see the firm during his or her summer. It really develops the relationship. So, in that respect, I think the internship has grown in importance.

Do you sit down and talk with companies about this internship hiring strategy?

Absolutely. It's great for firms to accept interns, take a look at them and their development over the course of the summer, and then hire them into a full-time position after graduation. It probably leads to greater retention. But there's more to it because the interns come back to campus, are very effective ambassadors to first-years, and help with the entire recruiting process.

Columbia, given its location, is top-heavy in finance and investment banking recruiters. How much more importance does that place on the summer internship?

One thing that I've learned on this job is that the functional areas within banks are actually very different and have different patterns. It's tough to get a full-time offer in sales and trading if you've never done it before and didn't do any internship. On the other hand, if you're interested in private client services, there's a higher probability of getting a full-time position without the internship. Asset management positions and other facets of investment banking are easier to grab without an internship as well.

The people who do the hiring say that it's not so much that the internship is used for skill building per se, but rather to show the interns what the lifestyle is like. The trading floor, for example, is such an incredibly frenzied environment that you really should get a feel for what it's like beforehand. A company can't guarantee that it is recruiting an MBA student who will be happy in those functional areas otherwise.

Tom, you briefly described the increasing concentration of companies coming to recruit at Columbia during a specific time of year. Has that demand forced your office to establish some sort of interview scheduling policy to manage the process?

No, not really. We have both closed and open interview schedules on campus. We don't require firms to do open schedules if they don't want to. Some schools insist that companies do some open schedules if they want to do some closed interview scheduling. We don't, however, because we feel that if you force a company's hand, that they'll just go through the motions to abide by the school's policy. I feel really strongly about that. If a student bids on an open schedule here, it's because a company wants to have the open schedule. That student has as good a chance of getting onto that schedule as anyone of his or her peers.

Has that laissez-faire philosophy left some students out in the cold -- and disenchanted?

Not at all, the students are very enthused. We find that most companies will see just about everybody. Again, an advantage of being located in New York is that if a company's schedule is full, and we see a terrific candidate, then the company can have that student come down to their offices on Wall Street. At Columbia, there's not a big focus placed on campus recruiting. We encourage students to interview on campus, but I don't see that as the end-all-be-all. It's a huge advantage for companies to call up our students and have them come visit downtown.

How many interviews did CBS host in 1998?

10,500. We were booked solid. We won't be able to increase that until we get more interview rooms. And there's an unknown number of interviews that happen with our core companies downtown that we just can't keep track of.

What percentage of CBS students would you say interview off campus?

Again, I don't want to draw a sharp delineation here. Let's say Kraft interviews on campus and then decides to see one more person off campus. How do you classify that?

O.K., how about approaching it from the other direction. How many students generally get jobs from on-campus interviewing?

I'd say about 60%, and that's been pretty consistent. I think that's great because it shows that there's some diversity going on here: Students are using campus resources and doing it on their own. We make sure that the 40% of the class that interviews off campus has the tools necessary to be successful in their job search. Today, for example, we're delivering a workshop on the "Not So Independent Job Search," where we'll walk through all of the resources available here, how to access alumni in niche industries, and how to conduct an Internet job search. On the company side, we'll aggressively pursue job postings. When companies say they're interested in our students, we ask them to send us a job posting and then have our students contact them on their own. We have a couple thousand of those job postings a year.

In fact, I have a full-timer here in the Career Services Office who is an outreach manager, and does nothing but work with companies. She's done things like a benchmarking of industry salaries and relayed her findings to companies to educate them on the state of recruiting at Columbia. She also does some strategizing with companies, presenting issues to them such as whether they want to stress their hiring needs early or late in the recruiting year, or whether they plan to have a senior or junior HR representative present their case on campus. Or, for example, if a particular firm is looking to hire somebody with specific language skills, she'll do a tailored resume search to find out which of our students fits the bill and get the most appropriate resumes out to the company in the same day. Those are the types of things that develop lasting corporate relationships.

So we'll try to bring as many companies as we can to campus, and if they're not coming here for interviewing or presentation purposes, then we'll see if they're willing to participate in student club events. If I meet somebody interesting, I'll introduce them to a club president -- maybe it's the Internet Business Group. And students will say, "Why don't you come to one of our club meetings." That way the company reps can talk directly to our students about their job opportunities, set up their own interviews right there, and get the ball rolling.

Columbia is crawling with companies, but they're entering the campus at different points. We try to encourage companies working on interesting deals to talk to our professors to integrate what they're doing into our students' learning. That again allows for network exchange. Along the way, students get interested in their firms, build relationships, and get offers. I see the role of this office as assisting any company interested in Columbia students in finding some way to get them in front of our product.

Tom, you brought up the student club involvement in the placement process. Just how important is their participation?

In the big schools, I think it's really important to do a tailored strategy and find the appropriate students for a company. If you broadcast a job opportunity to everybody in the schools then it's probably a waste. The best way to go is through the 60 student clubs here. The I-banking club, for instance, ran a very elaborate set of presentations throughout the year that ran parallel to what I was doing. The Internet Business group had a great conference day with a couple of panel discussions, the Venture Capital group did a symposium, and the Real Estate group also did something. The beauty of that process is that the clubs invited only those companies that they found interesting. That makes our job a lot easier. Also, if students plan the event, they get many of their peers to attend, and everything usually runs smoothly. Whereas, if I run an event...for all I know, it might turn out to be during a specific day when there's a big assignment due. I may not know.

For BW's 1996 B-school ranking, CBS grads scored high marks from recruiters in marketing and finance. Is that where most grads are being placed functionally?

Over half of our students go into financial services. That's been true for the last few years. For consulting, the number is creeping upward to 22% [last year 18% of the student body went into consulting, and in 1996, 19% went that route]. Of financial services, over 35% of the class is going into I-banking, and if you add investment management to that, it's over 40%. We're happy to have that strength and want to consolidate and strengthen that relationship as much as we can. Let me remind you that these are preliminary numbers that we're still putting together, so we could see a small amount of fluctuation.

But it's also important for us to diversify the opportunities available to our students. We did a visit to Silicon Valley last January where 60 students visited several high-tech firms and attended an event hosted by Oracle. We think we can do very well with media and entertainment. That whole new-media industry in Silicon Alley [in the Soho district of New York City] is growing for us...Several of our alumni have started up and are recruiting. Electronics, high-tech, pharmaceuticals, real estate/finance, and publishing and entertainment are the other big categories that our students enter. We have a small number of students going into automotives and a handful into energy as well.

In which industry have you seen the largest growth?

High-tech has really grown. Looking at the preliminary numbers from this year, it'll probably remain fairly flat. But from the year before, we probably went up 25%. For recruiting activity, we're seeing more aggressiveness coming from Microsoft, Intel, and IBM. That doesn't mean that they were successful at getting everyone that they wanted. But you definitely hear more students talking about high tech when you walk around campus.

Tom, who are the top 10 hirers of CBS grads for 1998?

Booz Allen (23 full-time hires, 24 interns), Goldman Sachs (25, 19), Merrill Lynch (20, 23), Lehman Brothers (20, 18), Morgan Stanley (18, 19), Citibank (20, 11), A.T. Kearney (15, 12), McKinsey (16, 11), Chase (13, 11), and Deloitte & Touche (13, 7).

That select list is made up totally of I-banks and consulting firms -- the traditional big boys of MBA recruitment. What kinds of companies pop up if you branch out a bit further?

Pfizer, IBM, Colgate-Palmolive, Kraft, and Intel, for example. Microsoft has recruited here, but it's a preliminary challenge to get the students to move to Washington State -- that also holds true for Silicon Valley firms in general. We don't want to be a regional school, and we admit people from all over the world, but I think that most of the school's placement tends to be quite regional.

Where are students going geographically? Are most staying in New York City after graduation?

Well over half of the student body is being place in the tri-state area. We also have a significant population being placed abroad -- it's about 12% to 13%. That's underreported, though, because there are a number of people who get placed, immediately participate in six-month training periods in the U.S., and then go abroad.

Which companies have been the biggest hirers over the past couple of years?

The Goldmans, Merrill Lynchs, Lehmans, Booz Allens, and Citibanks have always been at the top.

What's the main reason for that success?

Our relationship is helpful in that respect. We also have strong faculty, a good program reputation...that all builds on itself and naturally solidifies company-school relationships. When you have people who have been at a company for 5 to 10 years, they have a loyalty to Columbia and end up hiring from their alma mater.

Which companies are you targeting for future recruitment opportunities that don't currently recruit on campus?

We're reaching out to more media companies, and though we tend to have good relationships with Silicon Alley firms, we'd like to get closer. We're handling that in a couple of ways. We had a media and entertainment career fair for the first time this year [where roughly 20 companies were represented], and I also hired a woman named Regina Resnick, a former partner at Bozell Worldwide, to help us with our media and financial-services contacts. She essentially helps us to better advertise our students to Internet startups in Silicon Alley. She's marketed our students to everybody from a couple of small startups to major media companies like NBC. And we were really pleased that, because of our efforts, were able to build relationships with Walt Disney and Twentieth Century Fox in the media and entertainment industry this past year.

Columbia also has a solid relationship with the venture-capital community, and that goes back to some of our more distinguished alums on the board of overseers who have invested heavily in Silicon Alley companies. That has been a helpful connection. Portfolio companies need MBAs, and that's turned out to be an advantage for us because we now have a side door into the high-tech world.

Whenever you're trying to expand a recruiter base in an area like that, the challenge is that there are so many companies and their hiring needs are so variable. They tend to be short-term, and they don't plan ahead. They tend to say, "We need something tomorrow." What does a student do who's really interested in a startup but gets an offer from a bank in January. He or she is not going to hear back from the startup until May, and the bank probably wants an answer much sooner. So the dilemma is whether to turn down the banking job and take on the challenge of looking for a job towards the end of the school year. That takes confidence on the student's part.

What counseling does your office provide to build students' confidence for situations you've just described. I'd imagine more resources are being poured into offer assessment and salary negotiation workshops...

It's not so much salary negotiation and offer assessment that we feel gives our students a clarity of purpose. It's the self-assessment: That helps to define what's right for each student and gets us going in the right direction when we sit down to do career strategizing with the student. We're finding ourselves doing more and more of that. I, for instance, started a business after I graduated from business school. So I feel I can be helpful when counseling students interested in starting their own business or working for a small startup. My business was not moored in the high-tech industry, however, so I'm finding myself having to learn and understand what the high-tech route might be like to be of service to our students. That's also true for real estate, particularly REITs.

Despite our success bringing companies to recruit at Columbia, we are obviously always looking to increase our students' opportunities. One company target includes Andersen Strategic Services. But these days for us the chore isn't so much attracting the companies here, but managing their expectations. There's such a strong corporate appetite at Columbia, and the bigger challenge for us is meeting the expectations of those companies that are making offers and not getting any acceptances.

Right, obviously not every company can be kept happy in today's hypercompetitive hiring environment. Some companies must conclude after a rocky recruiting year that their recruiting dollar might be better spent elsewhere. Which companies have stopped recruiting at Columbia over the past year or two?

At Columbia, it tends to be the Midwest manufacturing companies that are having the biggest challenge. So, we're spending more time managing the companies' expectations

Just how are you doing that?

We end up sitting down with them and giving them salary, job-offer, and trend statistics to educate them about the realities of recruitment at Columbia. We also work with companies to publicize their opportunities. We, for example, might sit down to talk to company X about their plans to throw a big food-and-drink presentation for the whole class. Why? Because we're concerned that there might be low attendance. Our solution? Issue invites to have interested students RSVP for the recruiting event. That way the company can gauge interest and plan accordingly.

That's one way that we manage expectations: We tactfully inform companies about the different scenarios they might encounter and suggest the best alternative. Don't get me wrong, though: If eight people show up to a company's recruiting event, and they're the right eight people, then we consider the company to have been successful in their on-campus recruiting. We just want to avoid that disconnect between what companies expect and what actually occurs. We try to widely disseminate the placement report so that companies have a chance to see the evolving demographic of placement and salaries. Some of the manufacturing companies, for example, aren't keeping up with the salary packages students are receiving from consulting and investment banking firms. That can really hurt them on the recruiting front. So we're trying to facilitate an understanding of the state of the job-placement situation.

Tom, the big question for many prospective MBA applicants is whether the degree is worth it. For the great majority, that worth is equated in dollar terms and the amount of time it takes to recoup two years' worth of investment and forgone income. What kind of base salaries, bonuses, and total compensation packages are Columbia students walking away with in 1998?

The big jump on Wall Street happened in the fall of '96, when there was a 40% increase in pay packages -- that includes base salary, sign-on bonus, and guaranteed yearend bonus. I'm not quite ready to release our salary figures for this year yet...I can tell you that our students' 1998 salaries will be an increase from years past, but the percentage increase won't be as big as last year. (Editor's note: Columbia's official base salary average for 1998 rang in at $89,000.) The bonus has been a big factor in our students' salary increase.

Let me say, though, that I think there's an overemphasis being placed on salaries. Salaries should not be the reason an individual decides to go to get his or her MBA degree. You should go to the appropriate program for you -- the program that offers you the best preparation for the career you want to pursue and is located in a geographic area that suits your needs. Salaries, it should be remembered, are largely tied to the type of industries a school caters to as well as the school's location. High salaries are more likely to go to students going to school in high-cost cities. I don't think that makes Columbia a better program, that's just part of the landscape here. There are several schools, for example, that offer top-flight nonprofit programs and, as a result, their students earn lower salaries. That does not diminish the superb quality of those programs, however. Bottom line: When prospective students come in, I try to deemphasize salary packages because that shouldn't be the driver of their decision.

What new pieces of the total compensation package have you noticed?

First and foremost, companies are issuing more stock options. There's profit-sharing in the hedge funds and those kinds of companies where you get some part of the profits. But not a huge percentage of the class gets that. Tuition reimbursement -- where a student works for a company for their summer internship and then agrees to return to that company after graduation and gets their second-year tuition paid for -- really increased last year and stayed about the same this year. A lot of consulting firms are doing that. In addition, venture-capital packages can have a profit-sharing package in them that some of our students are taking advantage of. International packages are always a bit different. For example, if you work at a New York bank, you're not going to get a house...that's more likely to happen if you work at a bank, say, in Hong Kong. Those international packages, from what I can tell, contain nothing new: housing, cars, relocation, etc.

You mentioned that alumni are a vital piece of the recruitment process at Columbia. Just how large a role do they play in extending relationships with their companies or coming to campus to advise on interviewing techniques?

They play a huge role and are our best allies. I am consistently amazed and proud that they are willing to give so much time to current students. I've had students say that they've cold-called alumni and had an open ear on the other line. That's incredibly powerful. In addition to serving on panels, they're people I can bounce my ideas off of. They'll also come on campus for social events and network with students.

One of the allures of going to B-school is the lifelong bond forged between the institution and its students. Does the school provide any career services to its alumni in return for their help during the recruitment process?

Yes. We post a number of job postings for midcareer people in a newsletter called the Search Bulletin. And this summer we're actually going to produce those postings on the Web. We're also going to provide an alumni directory on the Web this summer so that students can contact them more easily. In addition, the New York alumni club has a career committee that will coach alumni in their job search. We facilitate that through the office of alumni relations. My office sees some young alums, but I'm not an expert with people who have been out of B-school for 10 years. They are better guided by our alumni club.

Do alumni have to pay to take advantage of the services you just described?

You have to subscribe to receive the newsletter. But that will be free once we move it onto the Web. To date, the newsletter is the only thing alumni have to pay for. We're currently interviewing some career coaches and resume preparers to refer our alumni to, and they'll negotiate their own fees. We're gonna try to refer alums only to the people who we think are of the highest quality. Most of them have graduate degrees in psychology or counseling, but they've made vocational or career counseling their business. And New York's a good place to find them.

International students -- historically the hardest to place -- make up 28% of the CBS student body. What do you do to make sure that they have a fair chance of landing a job? Do you have to manage their expectations?

Yes and no...managing their expectations understates the international nature of our students. A significant number of our domestic students have worked abroad in the international arena. There's also a strong bias by our admissions office to accept applicants who have a good amount of international experience. I work closely with the admissions office, and one of the things we tell Admissions when they're traveling around the world to sell the school is: Don't tell international students that they'll get great job offers in the U.S. They clearly articulate that there are visa and immigration issues to contend with.

Generally, our international students do very well. I was speaking with the head of the Eastern European club, and he got a job in Moscow. He intimated that he and his peers were finding themselves heavily recruited and juggling offers. The feedback that I get from recruiters is that they love our students because they're willing to move around. They're not averse to embarking on a career that brings a lot of traveling with it. And Dean Feldberg is really pushing to globalize our MBA program. So, our strategy has been to bring people in who have that international experience. Then we work with them once they enroll. For example, we teach languages here at the Chazen Institute to help students brush up on their linguistic skills. (Editor's note: The Chazen Institute was founded in 1991 to spearhead the school's international business focus. According to the school, it "initiates and supports programs ranging from curriculum revision, student study tours and the Chazen MBA Exchange Program to symposia and conferences for the academic and business communities.)The end result is that companies are typically asking us whether we have any more international students to fill their positions.

How have you been able to place your international student contingent?

First and foremost, we have a huge advantage being in New York City. It's an international city, and most company reps pass through it at least once a year for their business travel. We have aggressively encouraged companies passing through to stop off at CBS. I think the other factor is that our admissions office is accepting students with the right type of skill set. In addition to the skill set is the right kind of mindset. Companies need people who are globalized and move around. We're working on globalizing the curriculum, trying to fill companies' global posts.

Do international students have as many job and internship opportunities as their American counterparts?

Oh, yes. And I'm not sure of all of the reasons. Firms seem to just want more U.S.-trained MBAs who are international. Other schools are saying that their students want to stay in the U.S. But we're trying to say that a global career is truly global. A student might land a job that lands them in New York for two years, London for the next two, and Buenos Aires for the next two. The location of the initial job is not the end-all-be-all. Companies will work with the visa issue. And I don't know any bank that won't interview or hire international students. There are, indeed, some firms that will not even interview international students (Hewlett-Packard, for example), and that's fine. We publicize that clearly for the students, and I don't try to talk those companies out of their exclusionary recruitment policy.

Does CBS attend any forums or consortiums to widen the prospects for students -- especially internationals?

We don't partner with any schools to do any consortiums, job, or career fairs. If there is a job fair going on, however, and somebody sends us publicity, we'll post that for students. But we don't sponsor any specific job fairs. Our participation is pretty passive, and the forums that interest our students mostly tend to be international. But students, by and large, will forgo attending the EMDS job fair in Brussels, for example, because many of the companies there are already recruiting here on campus. I'd say, though, that the forums are part of the 40% of what we do here that is not on-campus recruiting.

We do, however, do conferences where student clubs will host a specific group of industry professionals. The VC club, for example, did a symposium on principal investing that was educational in nature -- it was not primarily designed as a placement event. Instead, it was one way for students to learn about the realities surrounding venture capital. And the recruiting part becomes a natural offshoot of the learning process. The Real Estate club, the Internet club, and the Columbia Women In Business (CWIB) club also hosted conferences. We also did two job fairs, one for media in New York City and the other for high-tech on the West Coast.

Who gets the ball rolling for planning and participating in a job forum or conference -- the students or the administration?

That's hard to say. We continually gauge what our students' wants are. Last year, for instance, club officers came into our office and said that they really wished they could learn more about what was going on in Silicon Valley. They suggested that it might be best if students interested in high-tech jobs could take a trip out there. So we provided support and gave them some contact names of some of our alumni in Silicon Valley who might be able to help them. Well, that evolved, and ultimately we ended up sending people from career services and the dean along with students to the Valley. That event grew from a small group of students coming to us with their idea, evolving into a pretty big group event.

Sometimes it's our idea that we float by students to gauge their interest. The Emerging Market Seminar that we did two years ago is one example of a recruiting event that came out of this office. But no matter whose idea it is, there is almost always some administrative office involved to help shape it.

Tom, CBS has the distinction of having the highest percentage of female students enrolled in BW's top 25. In 1997, women made up 37% of the CBS student body (the range is 22% to 37%). Quite a breakthrough for an industry that is lagging far behind medicine and law (both at about 50%) when it comes to gender enrollment. What's going on here? Do you feel there are less women enrolling in B-school because of a discrepancy in pay packages?

That's a really good question. I don't know of any discrepancy in pay packages. Our stats don't show that. I can answer that question in two ways: One as the director of career services, and two as a member of the Columbia University community. As a member of the CBS community, I can tell you that it feels very integrated here among the genders. We've had a couple of female student-body presidents, and there was no special notice or hoopla about that. I can't explain why, but I just think that the culture of integration has evolved. Once you get a critical mass, everybody just gets used to it.

From a career services standpoint, we have some very active groups, including the Columbia Women In Business (CWIB), and some programming that discusses women issues throughout the students' two-year stay. The C-200 program, for example, was started in 1993 by a group of female professionals who were interested in seeing the ranks of successful business women grow around the world. The conference is held at Columbia annually and allows female students to sit in on panels and workshops to learn about gender-related issues in the professional setting.

In addition, Columbia's alumni is comprised of a lot of females. That's a great networking opportunity, and a great way for students to develop role models, like Carol Simmons [an Executive In Residence who was one of the first women to work at Salomon Brothers and later started her own investment bank], who advises students. I've also found that there has started to become a little bit of a tradition among our core companies for hiring our female students. One of the I-banks that recruits here said once that they love to hire women from CBS for their sales and trading positions. They're actively trying to get more women to go into that field.

Do you provide specific workshops or counseling for female students?

No, we deliver no gender-specific workshops. There are more similarities than differences in counseling males and females. I find that men frequently come into our office talking about spending more time with their kids and about the problems that consulting and traveling so much presents. So that work-family balance isn't just a woman issue. It may come up more with women, but it certainly isn't confined to them.

What do you think makes the Columbia Career Services Center different from that of other schools' placement services?

I hope MBAs don't become commodities; I like that there's a certain kind of character that belongs to CBS. I believe the Career Services Office is very much a part of the school and its character. First, we're very market-oriented. Dean Feldberg wants me to understand our company recruiters and their needs. But we're not in the business of spoon-feeding students. We give it to them straight. To be blunt, Dean Feldberg likes self-starters. I don't hire career counselors -- I hire businesspeople who can impart their experiential knowledge. And it's a reflection of our city location that we have a lot going on that's not directly tied to on-campus recruiting. We encourage companies to interview students at their offices, and that offers students a different feeling and helps our students become more independent. The job search here is more like looking for that second job out of B-school.

And that's going to wrap it up. Thanks Tom, for your in-depth description of both the career services your office provides as well as the career-related events that occur at Columbia over the course of the academic year.