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Peter Bright graduated from Cornell University's Johnson School of Businesss in June, 2000, with a Master's in Business Administration. A month later, lured by a hefty salary and stock options, he packed off for Chicago to work at MVP.com, a Web site that sold sporting goods online. He wasn't alone. Eight percent of MBA grads last year followed a path into cyberspace. "I was hired to do business development," he says, "but ended up implementing projects from deals [the company had already made] but never executed."
But the dot-com meltdown has taken its toll. On Jan. 4, the 30-year-old Bright was laid off. So he recently boarded a plane to New York City in search of a more traditional job that he hopes will afford him more security. "I'm 60% excited, 40% anxious," he says. That 40% prompted Bright to go back to his alma mater for help. He sent an e-mail to the MBA career-services director at the Johnson School, John Nozell, asking to get his "name on the top of the minds of the well-connected." After all, Bright figures, being just six months out of B-school doesn't make him much different than the MBAs graduating in 2001.
It turns out that Bright is one of hundreds of MBAs who have awoken from their dot-com dreams to a slowing economy. And many are heading back to their cozy, confidence-boosting MBA career centers. There's just one problem: Most centers aren't set up to handle additional requests from alumni. The demand has such offices "overloaded," says Nancy Ortman, director of the MBA Career Management Center at Emory's Goizueta Business School. "It's a sad situation. They call, having just gotten laid off, [and say,] 'What can you do to help me?'" Ortman is in the process of creating a career-services office for alumni at Goizueta.
GEARING UP. The staff of the University of Los Angeles' Anderson School of Business tell similar tales. Alysa Polkes, director of the MBA career center, says she doesn't recall anybody coming back to the school last year, but she's in touch with at least 10 graduates so far this year. "We recognize the need to offer more [for alumni], but it's a question of budget and time constraints," she says. For now, they refer alumni to a handful of career counselors throughout California.
Other top schools have been gearing up for this moment. Herbert Crowder is director of the three-year-old office of alumni career services at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. As many as 600 alumni call his office for career advice annually. But since the fall of 2000, he has noticed an increase in the calls he receives from jobless alums. He expects 25% more in 2001 -- and is hiring a full-time employee to field calls from recent graduates. "These [graduates] have never seen, or lived through, a downturn," he says. "They aren't positioned to proactively go after a job, because they've always been sought after."
Not all risk-taking MBAs are heading back to get help from their schools to find traditional jobs. Some still believe in the dot-com revolution. "There was always a core group of [MBAs] that understood where the [dot-com companies] were going," says Allan Cotrone, director of career development at Michigan Business School. "Even if those people are out [of a job], they won't leave [the industry]."
"WATCH US RUN." But the message is clear for current students: Hedge your bets. Cotrone says Michigan's 2001 grads probably won't match the average 3.2 job offers that the class of 2000 got, according to data collected by BusinessWeek. Graduating MBAs at the University of Texas at Austin's McComb's School of Business and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management are cautious of jobs with startup companies, both schools report. "A couple of [our] second year [MBAs] have said, 'Watch us run back to the traditional recruiters this year,'" says Jacqueline Wilbur, director of Sloan's career-services.
And it's not just recent grads in the dot-com field who are victims of the slowdown. Schools say grads from a range of classes are coming back for help. Take Steven McConnell, 40, a 1992 graduate from the Haas School. He was laid off in December from his second new media job since 1998. "You can't look for a new job every year and half," he says, and make ends meet with a family and mortgage payments. And the best job leads, he adds, come from business school. After all, headhunters aren't calling as much as they used to.
With grads heading back to campus to network with fellow alums and say hello in the career offices, B-schools at the University of North Carolina and Dartmouth College are working to have alumni programs in place as soon as possible. After all, if the schools help their alumni snag jobs, they might receive the reward that Darden's Crowder got from two, newly hired grads in 2000: a pair of $100,000 checks. In the meantime, the B2B and B2C phenomenon that MBA recruiters are talking about these days doesn't refer to business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce -- instead it's back-to-banking and back-to-consulting.
By Mica Schneider in New York Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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Copyright 2001, Bloomberg L.P.
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