We'll Always Have Ithaca

Karin Ash has served as director of the Career Management Center at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University for four years. Ash knows the school in and out. In 1999, she received her PhD from Cornell in educational psychology with a concentration in organizational behavior. She has worked at Cornell for about 20 years.

Ash was the director of University Career Services for three years and also worked as the director of career services of Cornell's School of Industrial & Labor Relations for 14 years. Before Cornell, Ash racked up 12 years of career management and counseling experience at Elmira College, California State University in Fresno, and the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Ash said Cornell is planning to continue a job search program called "Just About Jobs," organized in 2002 to help MBAs find positions at smaller companies when the job market had become stale. Still, even though the demand for MBAs has rebounded, the program proved to be popular among students wanting to enter smaller companies or even high tech startups on the West Coast that don't usually send recruiters to campus (see BW Online, 12/30/06, "A Heady Job Market for MBAs").

Ash recently spoke with BusinessWeek's Helena Oh. Here is an edited excerpt of their conversation:

How will "Just About Jobs" be different this year?
This year, we're calling it "Just About Jobs: A Day in the Bay," and we're taking students out to the West Coast for interviews. My guess is that around 30 or 40 students will go. Right now, we're experiencing a good hiring market, but even if it's just 20 students, it's O.K. We'll probably do something different every year.

How do you help career changers?
Student clubs and faculty members help train students by function in addition to the career development program we put on weekly. We hold these "passport programs" in the fall, and right now we have six: managerial finance, investment banking, sales and trading, marketing, consulting, and financial research for investment management.

We begin helping students early in...

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