Internships: B-Schools Get Creative

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"Mindset Shift" in Career Services

For some career-services officers, the internship crisis has presented an opportunity for them to change the way they run their offices. One example of this is the large whiteboard that stands in the career-services office of the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. Every afternoon Jeff Fischer, the school's career-services director, marks up the board, noting the number of calls his staff has made that week and the number of new internship and job opportunities they've created for students. His team has made almost 200 calls to new businesses they haven't worked with before, creating about 52 corporate internships for students. About half of the opportunities were unadvertised internships his staff found, while the other half were created by his team.

"We're running the office the way you would run a sales or consulting organization," says Fischer. "It's a complete mindset shift."

Deans at a number of top business schools also are stepping in to help, leveraging their connections as never before. Sharon Oster, dean of the Yale School of Management, has committed $100,000 to a special internship fund this year that will create between 10 and 12 in-house university internships for Yale MBA students. She's reaching out to the school's endowment office, the Yale Press, and the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, all of whom have said they are interested in helping her create jobs for MBAs. The internship postings will be listed on the school's job board shortly, she says.

"We want to figure out what kind of opportunities we can find at Yale that are the most attractive to students in terms of helping them develop their careers," Oster says. "I think that we will sell out, there is no question about that."

At Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, Dean George Daly is also scouting out university jobs for students. He estimates that about 25% of first-years are still looking for internships, so he's asked each of his associate deans to create a paid summer job for students, he says. One of these internships will be housed in his office, where he plans to ask a student to spend the summer compiling a report on how the business school can best go about creating an international programs office. He's also hoping to hire an intern who can look into what it would take to create an undergraduate business minor at the university.

"Our goal is that all of our students will have an internship," Daly said. "For some, it may be a consolation prize, but they have to deal with the reality they're facing."

Interning…at the B-School?

Another tough reality dawning on students is the possibility that they may not get paid for their summer internships. The Tepper School's Keeley is putting together a résumé book of students who are willing to take unpaid internships for the summer, which he plans to distribute to the school's alumni. The book will be distributed a month earlier than normal this year, and he hopes employers will be receptive, he says.

"Some of these companies have laid off so many people it would almost be, at best, embarrassing to bring in an intern," he says. "Their employees can say, 'You're bringing in interns and you laid me off?' These are huge issues these companies are dealing with."

At some schools, faculty members are hoping that they can lend students a helping hand. At Darden, a half-dozen faculty members have expressed interest in creating paid research assistant jobs for students. Jack Oakes, Darden's career-services director, says he expects students will take them up on their offers this year, especially because nearly 40% of the class was still looking for internships as of late March.

"In years past, some students have scoffed a little bit at the prospect of working at their own B-school," he says. "But now students are expressing interest in these types of internships."

Peter Boatwright, an associate professor of marketing at Tepper, recently posted an internship on the school's career-services job board, asking for an MBA student to assist him with a textbook on pricing he's writing this summer. While he is hopeful that he will get a response, he expects it will be a last resort for most students.

"I'm still not viewing my textbook internship as exactly what they would want," Boatwright says. "If they come to talk to me, I'll suggest that they might want to wait until they are pretty confident they are not getting an opportunity."

The Search Continues

Amanda Ott, 25, a first-year master in computational finance student at Tepper, says she is still holding out for the right job opportunity. She's been looking for a position in quantitative research or financial modeling at a financial firm since December, and has had about six interviews with companies all over the country.

"I was hoping that it wouldn't take this long," she says. "I knew this year would be a little bit harder to find something, so I'm just putting myself out there and trying to get some hits."

Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.

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