MBA Insider: Careers Q&A August 21, 2008, 9:33AM EST

Career Placement at Vanderbilt

Joyce Rothenberg, director of Owen's Career Management Center, talks about virtual recruiting, international MBA networking, and much more

Joyce Rothenberg
Vanderbilt University

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Vanderbilt's Owen School of Management sees roughly half its graduates move into functional finance careers, while the rest mainly enter the consulting and marketing industries. To get them there, the school's Career Management Center covers a lot of ground, guiding students through selecting and personalizing a career path and doing targeted outreach to companies that don't recruit on campus.

Joyce Rothenberg became director of the Career Management Center two years ago, after two decades spent working first as an independent research consultant, and then in corporate strategy and marketing. A business school graduate herself (Darden '85), Rothenberg had always imagined she'd end up teaching at a business school. Several years back, she inquired at Owen about teaching market research or strategy classes. Instead she was hired for a research project, and after growing in her role, and spending a lot of time learning from and interacting with students, she applied for an open position as head of the center.

In her two years as director, she has found new ways to organize and direct the career-search process for Owen students. Later this year, the center will roll out a new model that organizes what she sees as the essential skills for an MBA job search—résumé preparation, job-search strategy, and interviewing—into logical modules. Recently, she spoke to BusinessWeek's Francesca Levy about what gives Vanderbilt students a career edge.

What does the Career Management Center do for Vanderbilt students?

We work on several dimensions with the students. One is helping them develop their own career strategy: figuring out where their interests lie, what work they're passionate about, and assessing their skills for that work. Then there's the job strategy piece. We think through career maps with them, and we do individual coaching. It's kind of a continuum. You have to start by looking at your own interests and passions and capabilities, and then match yourself up against it. Is it realistic and reasonable? And can an MBA degree, with the right summer internship, get you there? If not, what's an interim goal you can work for, and what's Step 2? It involves a lot of coaching. We do workshops around résumé writing, interviewing, correspondence, and things like how to do a case interview. But it's really more about the one-on-one attention.

What is the career counselor-to-student ratio?

There are roughly 100 students per counselor, including the first- and second-year students. The higher demand is in the first year. Those students are doing an awful lot of self-examination, so the workload is higher. In the second year they're trying to narrow down their job search, or they're sorting through multiple offers. We also use outside career coaches for peak demand periods. First we do the résumé, and then we sign up career coaches to do résumé checks.

It seems as though there's an emphasis at Vanderbilt on targeting very specific areas of industry. How does the Career Management Center use this specialization?

Our role is to support the school's strategy. For example, we added the health-care MBA a few years back. The addition has meant the Career Management Center has done employer development in the health-care space. We've spent a lot of resources, in terms of hours, calls, visiting, and getting to know health-care employers. And we've had to build those relationships almost from scratch. A lot of insurance companies and health-care services companies weren't strong MBA hirers, so we've had to teach them.

How have you done that?

We've done a lot of face-to-face calls, and had a lot of conversations. We've strategized with them. I've put together a how-to guide to internships for health-care employers.