Inside Cox's Career Counseling

George Johnson has been assistant dean of MBA Career Management at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business for the past year. Before that, he was in charge of corporate relations for the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and he then served as director of corporate relations and development for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's College of Business. The New York City native has also worked for Pfizer (PFE ) , Johnson & Johnson (JNJ ), Deloitte Consulting, and Schlumberger (SLB ).

Ninety percent of Cox's 2005 graduates had jobs three months after graduating, and while businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area snatch up many Cox graduates, alumni can be found working all over the world. Johnson recently spoke with BusinessWeek Online project assistant Meredith Bodgas. Edited excerpts from their conversation follow:

How do you think the job market is looking?
We feel pretty positive about this year. We're early into the season, but the numbers that we're tracking aren't much different from last year's numbers, which were good.

Which industries will want to hire your MBAs this year?
The standard industries -- corporate finance, consumer packaged goods, commercial banking, and marketing -- will continue to hire our graduates. Consulting and real estate will come back this year because of market demands. We're also seeing a lot of interest from Goldman Sachs (GS ) [see BW Online, 3/24/05, "Making the Grade at Goldman"], Morgan Stanley (MSD ), and Merrill Lynch (MER ) [see BW Online, 6/21/05, "The Extra Things Merrill Wants"] in the private wealth management area, which is probably a function of the baby boomers moving toward retirement and wanting to manage their money efficiently.

Where do Cox students get hired?
Our students have held internships with or been hired full-time by 7-Eleven [see BW Online, 8/01/05, "More than Slurpees at 7-Eleven"], American Airlines (AMR ), Citigroup (C ) [see BW Online, 3/24/05, "Making the Connection at Citi"], Deloitte [see BW Online, 6/24/05, "A Broader Perspective at Deloitte"], Dell (DELL ), JP Morgan (JPM ), KPMG, Lehman Brothers (LEH ) , Mercer [see BW Online,8/31/05, "Making It in Mercer's 'Meritocracy'", PricewaterhouseCoopers, Raytheon (RTN ), Smith Barney, Texas Instruments (TXN ), and Walt Disney (DIS ), among many others.

Which companies come to campus?
Some companies will post listings and do information sessions on campus, but they won't come to recruit because they would prefer that we go to their headquarters. That's common for programs in big cities, where there are many schools in close proximity to one another. But many of the aforementioned companies, as well as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ) [see BW Online, 4/21/05, "Do Your Homework for HP", JC Penney (JCP ) , Coca-Cola (KO ), Nokia (NOK ), and the large fast food groups Brinker (EAT ) and Yum (YUM ), in addition to others, have done interviews on campus.

How do you attract new companies to campus?
We find out which companies are of interest to students and see if we have any alumni there. We contact the large companies here in Dallas-Fort Worth, but when there's great interest in companies elsewhere, we'll chase those down.

We visit New York and Philadelphia frequently to touch base with the financial communities there because roughly half of our students major in finance. We also make trips to Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. We work our corporate visiting program around student needs and our obligations to the local business community.

Which companies will be visiting for the first time?
Kimberly Clark (KMB ) and hotels.com (EXPE ) are new to us this year.

Do most students get placed at local companies?
Our alumni are the most geographically dispersed group out of all American MBA programs, and we're in the top 10 for the greatest dispersion of MBA graduates when compared to programs around the world.

It could be because our students have a propensity to travel or it might be a result of our global-leadership program, where some of our first-year MBAs go to South America, Europe, or the Far East after taking language and culture courses.

What innovative career services do you provide?
All students are required to go through our mentoring program. We match students mostly with senior-level executives from major companies in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that work in the student's field of interest. The mentors provide students with career advice and tools from an unbiased perspective. The mentors get a good look at our students, and the students get a good look at the businesses.

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