Small School, Busy Career Center

The Career Management Center at Emory University's Goizueta Business School (No. 20 in BusinessWeek's Top 30 U.S. Rankings) is small but busy. With 200 full- and part-time students in the MBA program, the 11 employees in the department have traditionally struggled to attract recruiters to campus. However, the career management team has taken advantage of the robust job market and increased on-campus recruiting by 20% last year alone.

In the next few months, the career center hopes to continue to bring big-name companies to campus and deepen current relationships with on-campus recruiters from companies such as IBM (IBM ) and Coca-Cola (KO ). In 2005, the center helped 100% of entering second years find summer internship placement, while the graduating class saw median starting salaries of $85,000 (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/30/06, "Puffed up Paychecks").

Carol Asamoah, the outgoing director of the Career Management Center joined Goizueta's Career Management Center in 2002 and became director in 2004. She received her MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 2000. Carol will soon leave Emory to become the director of admissions for Ashesi University in the African country of Ghana. She will be replaced by Son Pham, who received his MBA from Goizueta Business School in 2000.

Asamoah and Pham recently spoke with BusinessWeek.com intern Lauren Lavelle. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation:

	Son Pham

Your MBA program only has around 200 students. As such a small program, how do you work to connect students with employers?
Pham: Based on the size of our program it doesn't make sense for companies like P&G (PG ), Microsoft (MSFT ), and Citigroup (C ) to come to campus but we still have relationships with them. We get our students' résumés in front of them through HR postings and résumé books.

Most of your students lean toward consulting and finance careers. What kinds of programs do you have to help these students focus their job searches?
Asamoah: We organize a week-long trip to New York City. Students visit with professionals on Wall Street and from companies like Lehman Brothers (LEH ), Goldman Sachs (GS ), and Morgan Stanley (MS ). They have a week-long exposure to careers in marketing and finance and can really get a feel for what the business is like. Also, they can make some great connections with employers while they are there.

In what innovative ways do you help students to network with employers?
Asamoah: Students have to be creative about it. Networking is not just about leveraging your relationships with alums. Students usually have pretty significant connections that they just don't think to leverage. We encourage them to look at their personal network, to talk to faculty because the professors are generally very well-connected and look forward to helping students who take a sincere interest in learning more about a particular career path.

How do you help students who are interested in going into nontraditional fields?
Asamoah: We start by asking students to think about why they want to be involved in that particular field and have them generate some thoughts and questions. Then, we invite business professionals who are involved in niche fields to come to the school and coach the students and explain the necessary steps to entering that particular field. The business professionals also help students network with employers in their area of interest.

What's the best advice you offer to students when they're choosing a career?
Pham: We encourage students to have a back-up plan, because 30% to 40% of our students switch career focus midstream and then fall behind in the coursework. If students could come into the program with two to three options, it would make their lives a lot easier and the transition much smoother.

Has recent academic attention to the imbalance of women and minorities in B-schools affected the way these groups are recruited at Goizueta?
Pham: We have seen a marked rise in the past few years of recruiters specifically seeking out women and minority candidates. Firms are taking a look at their organizational structure and seeing where the gaps are, and then identifying not only women but minority needs as well (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/14/06, "A B-school Boot Camp for Minorities").

How does the career center respond to the specific recruiting of women?
Asamoah: We help recruiters by matching their needs to our students' qualifications, just as we would for any student. We have also worked with Goizueta Women in Business, the female professional MBA Club on campus, to connect them with alums and to address concerns they may have in pursuing different career options.

What are the top challenges that you face in the upcoming year?
Asamoah: The biggest challenge is just staying abreast of the changing needs and changing interests that students have. One year, you might have students who are more interested in the entrepreneurial route, and then the next year, everyone wants to be an investment banker.

Right now, more and more students are interested in niche areas like health care, entrepreneurship, real estate, and media and entertainment (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/4/06, "They Love it Here, and Here, and Here").

How do you address the growing interest in media and entertainment?
Asamoah: We try to stay ahead of the curve by making sure that we are flexible and can adapt to change. Since the focus is starting to shift a little bit from finance to entertainment and technology, we will probably organize a trip to the West Coast and the Bay Area to give students a feel for how those industries work.

How would you grade career centers in preparing students for the real world?
Asamoah: Many management centers focus on getting students internships and full-time jobs, but not necessarily preparing them with the skills that will allow them to secure future jobs by themselves. I think that more emphasis needs to be placed on teaching students how to network and how to conduct a job search themselves. These are skills that will last them the rest of their professional careers.

As the job market picks up and an influx of recruiters come to your campus, what is one of your main goals for the next year?
Pham: We want to deepen our relationship with our current employers and recruiters by providing them with strong candidates for all functional areas of their firm. So for a company that traditionally hires finance majors, we also want to offer them strong candidates for their marketing and accounting sectors.