Internships: B-Schools Get Creative

At some schools, half of the first-year MBA students still don't have summer jobs. The solution? On-campus, and in some cases unpaid, positions

By Alison Damast

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Every Friday morning like clockwork, Ken Keeley, executive director of career services at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, runs a program on his computer that tracks job and internship placement figures for students. His end-of-the-week ritual has been especially gloomy this spring. Out of the 210 MBA students in the first-year class, only 55% had landed a summer internship by mid-April, leaving nearly half of the class scrambling to land internships before the end of the school year. It's a sharp change from last year, when 81% of students had secured summer jobs by this time, says Keeley.

"The biggest surprise to all of us in the industry has been how huge an impact the economy has had on internships," says Keeley. "We all knew it would hit graduate students hard, but I think we were caught off guard."

Sensing the growing desperation among students, career-services officers and deans at top schools are stepping up their efforts to help them find summer employment, coming up with creative alternatives. Some schools are creating a dozen or more paid internships for students within the university, in places like the dean's office or the endowment department. Administrators are encouraging professors to post openings for paid summer research assistants on school job boards. Meanwhile, career-services officers are aggressively pushing their staff to reach out to nonprofits and small to midsize companies that haven't recruited before at business schools, asking them to create new positions for students. A handful of schools are even launching pro-bono consulting summer projects, led by faculty.

The school year is wrapping up for MBA students, but for many first-year students there is no clear end in sight. Internship hiring is down significantly at many top business schools, with a sizable number of students still scrambling for a paid summer job. In a survey by the MBA Career Services Council, an association of business school career officers, 50% of schools said banking internships were down significantly this winter, while some 62% of schools expect internship opportunities to decrease. The situation has not gotten much rosier this spring and internship postings across most industries continue to be down, says Kip Harrell, director of the Career Services Council.

For Some, Panic Sets In

The dearth of opportunities poses a serious problem for MBA students, who typically depend on their summer internships to either help them land a full-time job or test out a new industry.

"I have some friends who are panicked. One of my classmates came crying to me last week," says Ritu Jain, a first-year student at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. Jain is president of Opportunity Consulting, a student-run consulting group that is trying to find summer internship opportunities for students with nonprofits in the Charlottesville area. For Jain and her friends, she says, "It is all this built-up emotion."

At Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management, where about 40% of the first-year class is still looking for internships, career-services director Joyce Rothenberg is trying out several new strategies. She organized a "how to hire an intern" workshop this winter for a number of national midsize companies that have not hired interns before, which has so far yielded six new paid internship postings. She's also helped launch a project called "The Brand Group," where marketing faculty and students will do branding consulting work for companies. The only catch? Students will receive credit for the internship, rather than a salary. Rothenberg says.

Even with all these new possibilities emerging, many students are still feeling nervous, she says. "Most of my job has been managing panic more than anything else," she says.

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