MBA Insider: Careers Q&A August 26, 2008, 5:14PM EST

How Minnesota B-School Handles Career Placement

The interim director of the Carlson School of Management's career center talks about ways the university helps MBAs find jobs

Ann Lowry
University of Minnesota

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Ann Lowry is the interim director of the Graduate Business Career Center at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, taking on the role in mid-2008. She is also the director of leadership development and career coaching. She had previously been a consultant at Carlson for six years, as well as serving as chairwoman of the communication studies department at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul for 19 years. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned a PhD from the University of Minnesota in strategic management and communication studies.

In her new role, Lowry says she is working to create a stronger emphasis on teamwork and leadership building. One of the strengths of Carlson's MBA program is Carlson School Enterprises, whose students can choose from five different business fields and create projects for outside companies, which allows the students to work hands-on in their fields.

Lowry also says that Carlson's location in the Twin Cities, home to nearly a score of Fortune 500 companies, is advantageous for students seeking to get a foot in the business door. While the economy has affected many other job sectors, employment among recent Carlson graduates has remained about the same as last year, if not slightly better.

Lowry spoke with BusinessWeek's Andrea Castillo about career placement services at Carlson and preparing MBA students to enter the job market. An edited transcript of their interview follows.

What services are available for students at the career center to help them get started on their job search?

We have a lot of services available to students. There are the services related to career coaching, so there's help with résumé writing and résumé review, and we have many different workshops for interviewing. We do mock interviews with students, and we have workshops on everything from dining etiquette to responding to impromptu questions in an interview or making your position statement clear to negotiating a job offer. So we have a lot of different workshops that students can take. They have pretty much unlimited access to coaches to come in anytime to do career counseling.

We also have CareerLeader, where students can go online and do an assessment of what their career interests are. And we're putting more focus on leadership development, as well as on teaming and collaboration initiatives. We've got a person in our area whose job specifically involves leadership development and team collaboration. All the students in the MBA programs work in teams, so there's a lot of focus on collaboration and learning on how to be a team person. That's the coaching side of it.

On the other side of it, of course, we have all the resources for students. An online system lets students upload résumés and have their résumés reviewed by recruiters and employers. We have an alumni database—that's one of the things about the University of Minnesota and Carlson School, specifically—we have a huge alumni network. Alumni are very involved in working with students, as they get ready to finish their MBAs, to help with job hunting, job finding—that sort of thing.

Students do internships after their first year. We've started to work with them in their first year securing an internship for the next summer, and our internship success placement rate is very high. We also have what are called Carlson School Enterprises. Students can pick from five different enterprises: the funds enterprise, the consulting enterprise, the brand enterprise, the venture enterprise, and the new MILI, which is the medical industry leadership enterprise. These enterprises are sort of like a class, but students are doing real projects for real customers and real clients. It's excellent experience for them.