Coming straight from
Yale College, Karen Burke ‘06 SOM ’08 had spent her summers interning
at think-tanks — jobs that appealed to her as an ethics, politics and
economics major but nonetheless left her “shooting in the dark” in
regards to a possible career path.
Now, as a first-year MBA student at the Yale School of
Management, she faces much more diverse and difficult choices in her
hunt for an internship for the critical summer between the two years of
business school.
In addition to starting a new section of the revamped core
curriculum last week, Burke and the rest of the SOM class of 2008 are
in the thick of the summer internship search process, a stressful
process that lacks of some of the structure offered to Yale College
students by Undergraduate Career Services. Despite the small size of
the school, students face a bewildering array of options and choices
that many hope will jump-start their career in one specific field or
guide them away from another.
Most business schools highly recommend or require first-year
students to take an internship in the summer between the first and
second years of an MBA program, and the SOM is no exception. Dean Joel
Podolny said internships can serve three purposes: to act as a
“stepping stone” to specific career goals, to allow the participants to
enter a new field or to help them move to a different level of an
organization. Just as important, Podolny said, is the opportunity to
use theoretical classroom knowledge in a real-life setting.
“For all, it’s an opportunity to consolidate and apply a lot of learning,” Podolny said.
In December and January of business school students’ first year,
many internship-seeking students head to the SOM’s Career Development
Office. Like UCS for undergraduates, the CDO manages workshops, posts
job opportunities online and maintains a network of contacts,
particularly in the popular fields of management consulting and
investment banking, Director Allyson Moore said. Two weeks ago, the
office hosted a large number of investment banks for interviews, a time
commonly known as “super week.”
“From the student perspective, [the internship process] is an opportunity to test and explore,” Moore said.
With the pressure to identify a potential career path combined
with the freedom of the search process, students said, the process of
finding a summer internship is ridden with stressful moments.
The tension is especially acute for those who want to enter
more specialized fields. Abby Goward SOM ’08 said that, at a time when
many i-banking-oriented students have finalized their plans for the
summer, the protracted search for a job in a niche field can be
especially anxiety-filled. Looking for a position in the small but
growing field of corporate social responsibility has presented a
distinct challenge due to the nascency of the field, she said.
Members of the business school administration say they have
taken steps to mitigate the pressure on students. The CDO has scheduled
on-campus recruiting trips around student courses and maintains a
database of individual students’ schedules to make sure interviews do
not conflict with academics, Moore said.
“I think the balance is always one of the challenges of any
MBA’s experience, but I’ve been very impressed with our students’
ability to stay committed to the classroom,” Podolny said.
But some students said they have been disappointed by the
support structure for internship searches. Jon Gruber SOM ’08, who is
seeking a position in the niche field of education consulting, said
that the CDO’s focus on investment banking and consulting puts an extra
burden on those looking at less conventional fields for internships.
Gruber, whose background in teaching has influenced his choices for
summer internships, must often deal on his own with desired employers,
who do not recruit on the Yale campus, in setting up applications and
interviews.
“For any route that’s not through one of the traditional doors,
you have to be proactive and flexible and you have to pound the
pavement,” he said. “The onus is on me to use all the resources that
are available.”
Then there are those like Burke who are not set on a specific
field and apply to a wide range of positions, which she said leads to a
certain agony of ambiguity.
“I think it’s definitely true that the people who have come in
not sure what they want to do probably have among the most stress,
because you’re casting your net so wide,” Burke said.
One thing that all first-year MBAs at the SOM can agree on is
that the process is a far cry from anything they have faced before.
“It’s definitely stressful, but its also something you need to keep in perspective,” Gruber said.
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发表于 2007-2-12 21:24:00
