Today’s interns may be tomorrow’s corporate leaders, and MBA interns are especially sought after.
Among employers who offered internships to MBA students in 2015, 92 percent plan to increase or maintain the number of internship offerings in 2016, according to a report from the Graduate Management Admission Council.
Business school applicants should look at a school’s track record for internships and job placement when deciding where to go, experts say.
“MBA recruiting is relationship-based. And so, recruiters and students have to engage with each other at a very high level throughout the entire recruiting process. A strong career management center will have strong relationships with both recruiters and students that will help facilitate those really strong connections,” says Liza Kirkpatrick, the director of career services for the full-time MBA programs at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
When 27-year-old Michael Schick applied to business school, he wanted to transfer the skills he’d learned working in investment management to another industry.
Now a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, he’s readying for a career as a consultant.
[Prepare for an MBA internship.]
“When I came and I visited, the people at the career development office here were just really awesome. They really had their stuff together. And they also just were really personable,” says Schick, who graduates this year.
As an MBA student, he interned at the consulting firm Bain & Company, where he learned about strategically analyzing problems, working with clients and other skills.
Internships are critical for getting your foot in the door in some industries, says Sue Kline, co-senior director of the career development office at Sloan.
“If you’re someone who’s interested in investment banking, it becomes important to have an internship because that is the way into the full-time opportunity. Or in some cases, leadership development programs,” she says.
The best way to find out what type of internships and jobs students get is to look at a school’s annual employment report, experts say. These reports are usually published online.
Among Kellogg’s MBA students, consulting is the most popular industry for interning, according to its employment reports. At least 24 percent of students interned in this field each year between 2011 and 2015. Many of the students rely on the school to help them get real-world experience.
[Define MBA goals before applying to graduate school.]
In 2015, about 78 percent found their internships through Kellogg, says Kirkpatrick. “They either find it via the job posting board or one of our on-campus interviews.”
At other schools, students may gravitate toward other industries.
“We live in a business community — a very active, engaged business community — that has a kind of emphasis in the areas of technology and life sciences,” says JoAnne Starr, assistant dean for graduate programs at the Rady School of Management at University of California–San Diego. These industries are especially popular for student internships, she says
Applicants should consider how a school’s location ties into networking and internship opportunities, Starr says.
[Leverage MBA mentors to reach career goals.]
“Our deepest relationships, I think really at any business school, are going to be regional. It’s people in the region who can come and do a seminar in the evening, who can be a guest speaker in a class, who can serve as advisers or coaches for a particular project,” she says. For Rady students, Starr says, it’s easier to have coffee with someone who lives in Orange County than St. Louis, for example.
Many students also travel across the country to make professional connections and intern. Schick, from MIT, interned in Atlanta, where he’ll also relocate to for a job at Bain & Company once he graduates.
MBA internships are important for applying all that’s learned in school and seeing how it plays out in the real world, he says. “You can read about it and talk to people about it a lot, but really the best way to learn is to just do it.”
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