A Farewell to Summer: The Pre-MBA Internship

The MBA summer internship is morphing into something new. Increasingly, students are taking on internships before classes even begin

By Alison Damast

A few weeks after she got admitted to Columbia Business School, Cristina Benitez Sacasas started cold-calling dozens of companies in the hope of landing summer work at a consulting firm. Like many MBA students, Sacasas was a career switcher with no previous consulting experience. She worried that her four years as a sales associate in the private wealth management division of Morgan Stanley wouldn’t impress recruiters from top consulting firms visiting her school that fall.

Her determination paid off when a recruiter from Deloitte told her about a new summer internship program the company was starting called the Deloitte Consulting Immersion Program, geared toward students like her about to enter business school. She was accepted to the program, and by July she was working on a restructuring project for a manufacturing client. When she got to (Columbia Full-Time MBA Profile) last fall, she had a leg up on many of her fellow students, as well as a coveted offer from Deloitte to return the following summer as a first-year associate.

"It was a crash course in what you were expected to do as a consultant," says Sacasas, 26, who accepted Deloitte’s offer and is interning there again this summer. "It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for."

GETTING A LEG UP

Perhaps the biggest quandary for MBA career switchers is how to get the attention of a recruiter in a field they’ve never worked in before. Increasingly, the solution for many is landing a pre-MBA internship, which runs four weeks or longer internship and gives students experience in a field they hope to get into after business school, plus an edge that impresses recruiters. With the still shaky economy making it more competitive for MBA career changers to land a job in a new sector, students have been more aggressive about pursuing these types of opportunities, says Nicole Hall, president of MBA Career Services Council (CSC) in Tampa and executive director for career services at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management (Graziadio Full-Time MBA Profile). The CSC does not track the number of students who do pre-MBA internships, but Hall says she and other career services officers have noticed more students pursuing them. Companies are making the experiences available to students because it helps the companies get a head start on the fall recruiting process, Hall says.

"It is becoming increasingly important for employers to have early visibility with students," Hall says. "If they can connect with them before they literally start their first class, that increases their access to the best talent."

One of the most common ways students land these opportunities is through minority leadership organizations, which set them up with paid internships at banks and consulting companies. Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing the number of minority students enrolled in MBA programs, has been one of the early proponents of the pre-MBA internship, says MLT Chief Executive John Rice.

The organization started its pre-MBA internship program about seven years ago, as an extension of its larger MBA preparation program. Every summer, Rice helps about 20 to 25 prematriculating MBA career-switchers find paid summer internships at leading banks, consulting companies, and venture capital firms.

A "GAME-CHANGING EXPERIENCE"

Almost all the MLT fellows end up with either job offers from the company where they did their pre-MBA internship or a position at another leading business in the same sector. Most don’t have any experience in the sector where they spend the summer, and they would otherwise have trouble competing against classmates with more experience during the competitive fall recruiting season, Rice says.