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 posistions 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 August when they arrive. We spend two and a half days with them and take them through the whole career management process. We then continue with weekly programs.

How else do students help one another?
This year we formed career work groups in the fall, where students meet in groups of 10 in their functional area. It's more like a support group. They share ideas and contacts, practice interviewing, and critique each other's résumé (see BW Online, 5/27/05, "Tips for Last-Minute Job Shoppers")

We will also have independent job-search groups this spring, which are similar to the fall career work groups. They are divided according to functional or geographical interest, and students help each other formulate plans for the job search.

Which recruiters come to your campus, and what industries do they represent?
I would say we have all of the industries covered. Probably the bulk of our recruiting is in finance, marketing, and consulting.

Are there any industries or specific recruiters you are working to attract?
We're working hard to get more investment management firms here, which include the Fidelitys and Wellingtons of the world. We're trying to attract more, because we have the Parker Center for Investment Research, which is a research and hedge fund -- of up to maybe $10 million now -- that students help manage.

We also have the Center for Global Sustainable Enterprise, so we try to attract companies that have concerns about the environment and social responsibility. We will have a career fair this spring in conjunction with the center.

How do you service the students who want to work abroad?
I would say most students understand, especially if they want to work for the larger companies, that most of those companies first want to hire them in the U.S. before they send them overseas.

More and more companies are deciding expatriates are really expensive, and many companies have begun hiring nationals in other countries. But each year, we do have a number of treks to different countries, including Britain and Brazil. This year, we will have a student trek to Asia.

What do you wish students would do before coming to your office every fall?
They should begin having conversations with individuals who have MBAs in the fields they want -- or think they want -- to enter. They come here in August, and by January they're interviewing for internships. The internship is a big influence on where you're going to end up full time.

Therefore, if you get an internship in the field you want to enter, you have more credibility during the second year at job interviews. If they decide to do an internship and it's not what they end up finding satisfying, and they want to make a quick switch, they can still do it, But it's a little more difficult, so it's important to figure it out before the internship.

It's not surprising that 39% of the class of 2005 went into investment banking and other financial services, but 28% went into manufacturing. What opportunities are there for MBA students in manufacturing?
Much of that accounts for marketing in consumer packaged goods companies like Colgate (CL ) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ ). And then, of course, you have companies like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), chemical energy companies like Exxon (XOM ), and electronics and hardware like Intel (INTC ), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY ), and IBM (IBM ). Some of it is finance and/or business development.

What are some common mistakes job seekers make, and how can they avoid them?
Students who don't do as well as others usually lack focus, so they are not coming across with enough passion about the field. They're not convincing or persuasive. And the way to avoid that is by having behavioral examples, so that you're ready to respond when someone asks you about challenges you've overcome. Before you go into an interview, you need to have about three examples for every skill you think is needed for your career of choice.