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MBA internships are more important—and more competitive—than ever. Now, besides helping business school students get a taste of life post-graduation, they are the main gateway to a full-time job offer.
During the recession, companies cut back on their on-campus recruiting of second-year students, relying instead on internship classes for their full-time hiring needs, says Michelle Chevalier, director of the Graduate Business Career Center at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management (Carlson Full-Time MBA Profile).
At the strategy consulting firm Bain & Co., the internship class grew more than 20 percent in 2011, and the same will probably happen next year, says Mark Howorth, senior director for global recruiting. And a high percentage of interns will get a full-time offer at the end of the summer, he adds. When the economy is good, interns are more willing to be experimental with their internships, whereas nowadays they're looking for a permanent home starting in the summer, says Howorth. That, say experts, can bring on the stress to perform well from day one.
"It puts an insane amount of pressure on MBA students," says Chevalier.
Indeed, not everyone will get a full-time offer, and no one wants to have to explain to other potential employers why he was not hired. To improve one's chances of converting an internship into a permanent position, it helps to get an edge on the competition, even before the internship begins. What follows is a checklist with advice from experts on how to end the summer on top.
During the recruiting and interviewing process, most internship candidates have already begun to research everything from the company's earnings and executives to its dress code. But those initial findings are just the beginning. Once they've accepted an internship position, MBAs should ratchet up the research, investigating the company's MBA hiring record, its competitive position in its industry, and industry trends.
One easy way to keep tabs on an employer is to sign up for Google Alerts about the company, which are e-mails with links to relevant news stories and blogs that will automatically arrive in your in-box, says Priyanka Bajaj, a student at the Thunderbird School of Global Management (Thunderbird Full-Time MBA Profile) in Glendale, Ariz., who will be interning in the finance division at Mattel (MAT) in Los Angeles over the summer.
This is also the time to dig deeper, and learning about the company's culture—its core values and what it takes to fit in—should be at the top of every incoming intern's to-do list.
"Most students go into the internship perfectly prepared for the job," says Rebecca Joffrey, director of career education at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business (Tuck Full-Time MBA Profile) in Hanover, N.H. "But there are cultural differences."
One of the best sources of information about a company's culture are second-year students who have already worked there. Tuck conducts panel discussions with second-year students to help prep first-years who want to learn more about a company. Joffrey says the goal is to eliminate surprises for interns and give them a sense of what to expect.
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