Tag Archives: MBA internships

MBA Adcom, MBA Admissions

What Goldman Sachs Told Its MBA Interns And Why It Matters For B-School Admissions

MBA interns started their summer banking and consulting summer internships earlier this month, and the news point was Goldman Sachs instructing newbies at its offices around the world to leave before midnight and not come back before 7am the next day.

Policies like this follow the 2013 death of a 21-year-old Merrill Lynch intern, Moritz Erhardt, who collapsed and died in his London apartment after working 72 hours straight.

Shortly after Erhardt’s death, Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein effectively told his interns to get a life:

“You have to be interesting, you have to have interests away from the narrow thing of what you do (at Goldman),” he said. “You have to be somebody who somebody else wants to talk to,” he said.

Sound familiar? It does to me. Every time I work with an MBA applicant who is all about the office and nothing else, the red flag goes up: MBA Adcoms are not going to like this.

Remember, you have to be somebody somebody else wants to talk to.

So, get some outside interests. It doesn’t matter too much whether these interests are sports, arts, or community oriented, but preferably (very preferably) your outside activities should be group or team-based rather than solo endeavors because “works well with others” is a big part of a successful admissions profile for business school.

MBA Recruitment

Job market stabilizes for MBA students at the end of ‘a pretty short tunnel’

NYT, March 7, By Robbie Brown (extract) — Last year, Mr. Yankson (UV Darden) was turned down for summer internships by about 15 recession-plagued banks and ended up working for an education nonprofit organization. This year, as he sought a full-time job, Wells Fargo quickly gave him the response he wanted: When can you start?

“The banks this year kept saying, ‘It’s a good year,’ ‘We just approved a lot of hiring,’ ‘The market is clearing up,’ ” Mr. Yankson said. “It was a completely different experience.”

With banks climbing out of the recession, more business students across the country are finding banking jobs and internships, enrolling in finance clubs and going on class trips to Wall Street, universities say.

… On a recent interview day at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, students in pinstriped suits and polished shoes waited anxiously for meetings with representatives from J. P. Morgan and BB&T Capital Markets.

The competition would be steep — with dozens of students applying for each internship — but less selective than in 2009. The number of banks interviewing at Darden this year increased 20 percent, and the number of job offers so far has risen 33 percent, the school said.

“There’s reason for students to be optimistic,” said Tracy Handler, a spokeswoman for the M.B.A. Career Services Council, an association of business school career advisers. “Any signs of recovery are modest. But business schools are looking ahead and seeing a light at the end of what is now a pretty short tunnel.”

Full Story in the New York Times.
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