Small School, Busy Career Center

The Career Management Center at Emory University's Goizueta Business School (No. 20 in BusinessWeek's Top 30 U.S. Rankings) is small but busy. With 200 full- and part-time students in the MBA program, the 11 employees in the department have traditionally struggled to attract recruiters to campus. However, the career management team has taken advantage of the robust job market and increased on-campus recruiting by 20% last year alone.

In the next few months, the career center hopes to continue to bring big-name companies to campus and deepen current relationships with on-campus recruiters from companies such as IBM (IBM ) and Coca-Cola (KO ). In 2005, the center helped 100% of entering second years find summer internship placement, while the graduating class saw median starting salaries of $85,000 (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/30/06, "Puffed up Paychecks").

Carol Asamoah, the outgoing director of the Career Management Center joined Goizueta's Career Management Center in 2002 and became director in 2004. She received her MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 2000. Carol will soon leave Emory to become the director of admissions for Ashesi University in the African country of Ghana. She will be replaced by Son Pham, who received his MBA from Goizueta Business School in 2000.

Asamoah and Pham recently spoke with BusinessWeek.com intern Lauren Lavelle. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation:

	Son Pham

Your MBA program only has around 200 students. As such a small program, how do you work to connect students with employers?
Pham: Based on the size of our program it doesn't make sense for companies like P&G (PG ), Microsoft (MSFT ), and Citigroup (C ) to come to campus but we still have relationships with them. We get our students' résumés in front of them through HR postings and résumé books.

Most of your students lean toward consulting and finance careers. What kinds of programs do you have to help these students focus their job searches?
Asamoah: We organize a week-long trip to New York City. Students visit with professionals on Wall Street and from companies like Lehman Brothers (LEH ), Goldman Sachs (GS ), and Morgan Stanley (MS ). They have a week-long exposure to careers in marketing and finance and can really get a feel for what the business is like. Also, they can make some great connections with employers while they are there.

In what innovative ways do you help students to network with employers?
Asamoah: Students have to be creative about it. Networking is not just about leveraging your relationships with alums. Students usually have pretty significant connections that they just don't think to leverage. We encourage them to...

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