Careers Q&A Sample
Wake Forest Reaches Out
Babcock's career services director talks about how the school is trying to attract a wider range of employers
Andy Dreyfuss has been the director of the Career Management Center at the Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest University for the past three years.
With a staff of just six people, Dreyfuss and his team help B-school students at Babcock get on the right career paths. For the graduating class of 2006, the average base salary was $79,800, with 74% of students receiving offers at graduation, and 86% accepting offers three months after. Babcock is home to about 200 full-time students and another 300 evening and executive students at two campuses in Winston-Salem and Charlotte, N.C.
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| Andy Dreyfuss
Wake Forest University |
What's unique about Babcock's career-management center, Dreyfuss says, is a very successful, required career-management class, where he teaches all first-year students how to assess themselves and their many options. Before delving into real academics, they explore different career paths in marketing, finance, and operations consulting to see which is right for them. They close with how to negotiate and land the internship they want (see BW.com, 3/26/06,
"Creativity Comes to B-School").
Before coming to Wake Forest, Dreyfuss was a director of planning analysis at Coca-Cola (
KO) in Atlanta. He also managed the Fountain Operations MBA intern program for the beverage king and recruited at MBA programs such as
Emory, Wake Forest,
UCLA,
Virginia, and
Duke.
He recently spoke with BusinessWeek.com reporter
Janie Ho about career services at Wake Forest. Here are edited excepts from the conversation:
What are some of the top companies that have been coming to Babcock?We do well in financial services, consulting, banking, and consumer product goods companies. We have Bank of America (
BAC), Wachovia (
WB), General Electric (
GE), IBM Consulting (
IBM), and Lowe's Company (
LOW), the home-improvement company. For accounting, we have Ernst & Young. We also have Philip Morris (
MO) and Reynolds American (
RAI).
What new companies or sectors do you hope to attract to campus, and how will you market Babcock to them?We would like to see several more consulting firms on campus, more major Fortune 500 firms in Atlanta and Washington. We're working on getting companies like The Home Depot (
HD), Georgia-Pacific, and UPS (
UPS) on campus. And if not on campus, at least develop stronger relationships with companies such as Booz Allen, A.T. Kearney, and Deloitte & Touche. We need to do more with consultants.
At the high end, there's a labor shortage of really top-notch students. So our marketing approach would be, "Look, we might not be the largest program. We're not going to graduate 800 students, but we have very strong students here. Let us get creative, let us send you five to 10 résumés. You don't have to get on a plane. We'll do videoconferencing. We've done stuff over the phone. We've sent students to companies." They don't have to worry about having to...
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