Friday, 27 January 2012
Thursday, 19 January 2012
Virtual Internships in Rising Demand
Kenneth Durell knew he wanted to do an internship during the spring of his junior year at Columbia University, but a 30-minute-or-longer subway commute to an office was not an option. In addition to a full class load that semester, he was involved in student government, working as an intramural referee, training as a bartender, and preparing for a marathon. When he learned that Columbia University’s Center for Career Education had recently begun a virtual internship program in which he’d never have to set foot in an office, he jumped at the opportunity. Says Durell: “A big, big draw was that I didn’t have to leave Columbia.”
For the next three months, Durell interned with the New York-based Business Council for Peace, a nonprofit network of professionals offering pro bono business help to entrepreneurs in conflict-torn countries. He fit the internship around his classes, working 12 hours a week and communicating with the group’s staff via Skype, e-mail, and conference calls. His assignment: helping raise funds for female Rwandan entrepreneurs visiting the U.S. and reviewing applications for the program.
“My work space was essentially my dorm room and if I had a computer and Internet connection, I was essentially at work,” says Durell, 22, now a senior.
Nontraditional internships such as Durell’s, in which students work for an employer remotely via an Internet connection, are becoming increasingly common on today’s college campuses. Students are drawn by the flexible nature and the experience they gain, while employers like them because they don’t have to worry about providing office space and can assign projects to interns in other states or countries, say career experts. Career-services officers and those who run national intern job-search boards say they have seen an uptick in the last few years in such offerings—most of which are unpaid—especially from small ventures and startups seeking additional help to take their businesses to the next level. Larger companies, too, are starting to explore offering these types of internships. Even the U.S. State Dept. has started the Virtual Student Foreign Service, which pairs college students, or “eInterns,” with internships at diplomatic posts overseas and at State Dept. domestic offices.
Geni Harclerode, an assistant director at the University of Michigan’s Career Center, says she has recently seen an increase in listings for virtual internships, especially those asking for student help with social-media campaigns and blogging. Remote opportunities can serve as equalizers for some students, allowing those with limited resources to apply for internships in cities where they otherwise couldn’t afford to work, she says.
“Most students I speak to love the idea of interning in what they perceive as a glamorous locale like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, but the reality is the cost of living in those cities can be overwhelming,” Harclerode says. “I think there is an appeal with some of these virtual internships because they can still contribute to an organization while living at home for the summer and saving money”
At Urban Interns, an intern-job board that connects small business owners and startups with people who want to do part-time jobs and internships, about 40 percent of the listings on the site this year are for virtual internships, up from 30 percent last year, says Cari Sommer, the company’s co-founder.
Lauren Berger, who runs the website internqueen.com and recently wrote the e-book All Work, No Pay: Finding an Internship, Building Your Resume, Making Connections, and Gaining Job Experience (Random House Digital, 2012), says the number of virtual internship listings on her site has tripled in the last few years. She runs a virtual internship program for her company and says career-services centers at universities are starting to warm to them, provided they are structured enough and have a point person who can give students daily guidance and feedback on assignments, whether communications are conducted via Skype, video conferencing, or e-mail, she says. Still, students should be wary of accepting just any opportunity they see online, she notes.
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
MBA Journal: Getting Settled
I’ve been welcomed back to college. And it’s tough (which was expected).
An early morning alarm clock buzz before 8 a.m. classes replaced sleeping in, a benefit of working late shifts for many years. Tests—and the associated cramming—come in bunches every month or so. Most of my free time involves some sort of MBA thought. Years working and the challenges of a career make one forget all that comes with college.
That’s not to say that the two-plus months at Georgia Tech’s College of Management haven’t been a good experience or that they haven’t had their difficulties.
I’m surrounded daily by incredibly smart classmates: engineers, PhDs, scientists, computer programmers, finance professionals, and more. And I’m just an ex-sports reporter. Our class discussions run deep and are thought-provoking, with past experiences mixing with new ideas. Just about everyone has something to share, as both my classmates and professors allow for open discussions. As I expected, the discussions are colloquial and considerate; no one is out to prove how right he or she is—or how wrong everyone else is. It’s not a competition. We’re all here to learn, to grow, and eventually to get a job.
Every day, I learn something. Some days, it’s from the faculty. (Some are more engaging). Other days, it’s from a class discussion. And I have learned some things about myself. Accounting, a miserable experience as an undergrad and therefore one class I dreaded taking, has been anything but that. The class is taught by Charles Mulford, one of Georgia Tech’s top business school professors. He makes the material easy to understand and apply. Coming in, I was going to be one-and-done, taking accounting courses. I am now considering taking an accounting elective or two next year.
A typical day includes two classes (accounting and organizational behavior on Mondays and Wednesdays; analytical tools/stat and finance on Tuesdays and Thursdays), several hours working at my graduate assistanceship, and assorted homework and studying. Mix in the constant group work and case studies (which never seem to end) and an internship search and my free time has all but disappeared.
I soon discovered that something else is missing.
I have never thought of myself as overly creative. I can’t draw or paint, play a musical instrument, or sing. Writing (along with some design work) was never something I considered a creative outlet. It was just what I did. For several years it was a job. Now I realize I was wrong: My writing was my chance to be creative. Putting words together—telling someone’s story—was how I expressed myself. Increasingly, as the semester has progressed, I have missed this. Core MBA classes just don’t provide much of an opportunity.
As I slowly figure out areas I want to consider pursuing for an internship and job, I’ve learned how important a creative component is for me. Media, communications, online, and marketing jobs would provide a chance to be creative, particularly through writing and designing. So, too, would analytics, research, and strategy positions—helping an organization to learn, solve, and then explain.
As my routine—something that took quite some time to figure out—has set in, I have found more time to run. Running is my necessary, mind-clearing escape and it’s a popular sport among my classmates. The Georgia Tech campus has a three-mile loop and I aim to run it twice a week. Over the past month, I’ve done pretty well and I’m slowly working myself into shape. Soon it will be time to extend my runs, giving me a chance to explore some other areas of the main Tech campus, across the interstate from the management building.
It took a little while, but I’ve settled in here at Tech. The idea of getting an MBA is no longer a daunting notion, although some days are much tougher than others. As I am almost a quarter of the way through the program, it’s now a reality.
Between journal entries, you can keep track of Matthew’s business school adventures at the Business Schools Facebook page. Follow the Bloomberg Businessweek B-schools team on Twitter.
Matthew Borenstein is a first-year MBA student at Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Management. A journalist covering sports for the likes of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before business school, Borenstein grew frustrated with the lack of business knowledge among his colleagues in the dying newspaper industry. Inspired, he hopes to use the skills he gains earning his MBA to breathe life into media.MBA Electives Offer Hands-On Learning
After a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, MBA students at Wharton launched a course designed to apply business principles to humanitarian crises.
By Francesca Di MeglioMany an MBA student has sighed with relief when completing core requirements and moving on to electives. After all, electives are a chance to explore the subjects that interest one most and will be most relevant in one’s future career. Where the core curriculum tends to be rigid and structured, the electives can be whatever professors and students want them to be. Says Benn Konsynski, a professor of information systems and operations management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, “Electives are a venue for experimentation.”
Indeed, professors at top business schools say electives are their opportunity to help business students see beyond the numbers, grow personally and professionally, and even wax philosophical. Electives, adds Konsynski, are a chance to do something a little out of the ordinary. When done well, say professors, electives can get students to work in ways they might not have imagined. There are a slew of MBA electives being offered at top B-schools—too many to name, in fact—that are designed to do just that, and make the world a better place in the process.
At top MBA programs, leadership is the means to that end. While all of today’s top business schools address leadership in one form or another, some of them take a unique approach. For instance, in the Leadership Out of the Box elective offered at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, students analyze Disney’s The Lion King, write letters as an 8-year-old to their adult selves to connect their hopes and dreams from then and now, and consider the journeys of such pivotal figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring is widely credited with launching the global environmental movement.
“This course allows us all to take a time-out in a very hectic curriculum, take a breather from the quantitative work of business, and recapture ‘What’s the dream? How can I be the best self I can be?’ ” says Ella L.J. Edmondson Bell, the associate professor of management who teaches the class.
While Bell’s students are contemplating how The Lion King’s Machiavellian Scar character represents the dark side in all of them, students in the Leadership Immersion course at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School are participating in Apprentice-like challenges, such as coming up with a new food item to sell in the school’s cafeteria and creating a marketing plan for it. There are winners in the challenges, but on the flip side nobody gets fired by Donald Trump. Instead, everyone, including executive coaches, participates in conversations about the strengths and weaknesses of each team. Two challenges like this, a business simulation, and a customized Outward Bound experience are the highlights of this elective, says Mindy Storrie, director of leadership development at Kenan-Flagler.
Developing the leader within is not always accomplished through the artifice of challenges and simulations. Sometimes it takes place in the muck and mire of real life.
In the case of the Fundamentals of Quality Improvement in Health Care elective at Vanderbilt University, students from the Owen Graduate School of Management join nursing and medical students to focus on process improvements at the university’s hospital. The students track events at the hospital, such as the process of taking umbilical cord blood from newborns to harvest stem cells or the process for discharging patients, and then offer recommendations to make everything run more efficiently.
Similarly, Columbia Business School students in the elective, NYC: Innovative & Entrepreneurial Solutions to the City’s Complex Challenges, spent the fall of 2011 in teams working closely with senior executives in New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office to offer recommendations for solving some of the city’s problems. They tackled subjects such as education and economic development, and their aim was to help the city implement changes to curb costs and offer a better quality of life to residents.
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Meet Cornell's New B-School Dean
Long-time INSEAD Professor Soumitra Dutta will be crossing the Atlantic this summer to take the helm at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, the school announced today. He’ll be taking over the deanship from Joe Thomas, who has led the business school since 2007. Dutta’s appointment marks one of the first times that a Top 30 U.S. business school has hired a dean from an institution outside the country.
Dutta, an expert in the intersection of technology and innovation in business, is coming to the Ithaca campus at a momentous time in the university’s history. Just a few weeks ago, Cornell was chosen by New York City to receive funding and property on Roosevelt Island to create a new engineering and applied sciences campus, with the ultimate goal of creating new companies and jobs in the city. As head of Cornell’s business school, Dutta—who currently serves as the director of a new media and technology innovation lab at INSEAD—expects to help shape how the business school is involved with the New York campus as it develops.
In addition to his technological strengths, Dutta will bring a variety of assets to his new role, including a passion for globalization and executive education. He’s held three deanships at INSEAD’s Fontainebleau campus, serving most recently as dean of external relations. In that role, he worked to raise awareness of INSEAD’s brand by working with alumni, fundraising, and forming partnerships in emerging markets. Those skills should prove useful when Dutta becomes dean at the Johnson School, which during the last few years has put emphasis on emerging markets, expanding the school’s global footprint, and heightening awareness of the school’s brand. Dutta’s familiarity with the U.S. education system should also help him ease into his new role; the Indian-born academic received his master’s degree and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked in the U.S. for General Electric before joining INSEAD’s faculty in 1989.
Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Alison Damast recently spoke with Dutta about his new role and his plans for the Johnson School. Here is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Cornell has been in the news lately after the recent announcement that the school, in collaboration with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, will be building a New York campus. What role do you expect the business school to play in this new initiative?
The business school will be a very important part of that because the technology campus in New York City is really about applying technology and science for entrepreneurship and creating new businesses. We will be very intimately involved in this, so that is what makes the job exciting for me. We will look to offer programs that support the mandate of the new technology campus and we will probably create programs and offer courses along that dimension. Today, the Johnson School already has an Executive MBA program in Palisades, near New York City, and it is quite likely that the portfolio of executive programs in New York City will be enlarged, with the new campus being out there.
You have a long history with INSEAD, where you’ve been a professor for 22 years and held a number of top administrative roles. Why did you decide to leave Europe to become the dean of an American business school?
It was a tough decision to leave INSEAD for Cornell. I’ve had a wonderful career and wonderful life out here, but then the Cornell opportunity came along and it was too good to let go. There are a number of reasons why I perceived it was a very good fit between my own background and Cornell and the Johnson School. There is an increased focus on globalization and emerging markets inside the business school, and a lot of my own background is very international, having lived and worked both in Asia, Europe, and often, America. Secondly, over the last 20 years, I’ve done research on applied technology in business and this combination of business and technology is something that is certainly an emphasis at Cornell and the Johnson School. That was an immediate fit, especially in light of the new campus in New York City.
MBA Journal: Helping Hands
There are few places as exciting as a college campus at the beginning of the school year, and Michigan State University embodied the spirit of energy, anticipation, and promise on campuses throughout the nation this past August. Walking paths filled with eager students crisscrossed the gently rolling shaded greenery of the MSU campus. The bubbling Red Cedar River created scenic background just steps from the Broad Graduate School of Management, and the warmth of late summer greeted students.
Nearly 100 first-year MBA students at Broad set out to blaze their own unique trail during the next two years. We had all come from different parts of the world, bringing with us a wide range of experiences and skills, but a common goal united this distinguished group—we would leave this campus as the well-educated, thoughtful, and insightful business leaders of tomorrow.
A group of strangers, making up the Class of 2013, assembled in late August not quite knowing what to expect as we began our journey as MBAs and reacclimated to student life. As I initiated conversations with my classmates, I was surprised to learn how many different backgrounds were represented. When I was accepted to the program, I could not have imagined that I would be enrolled in classes with a former automotive engineer, a 7th-grade English teacher, several military servicemen, and the owner of a hotel, among many other former professions. Between the small class size and the opportunities to socialize, I was able to network with my new classmates before the semester even got under way.
All first-year students are required to take the same classes, which focus on several disciplines, including financial management, accounting, supply chain, marketing, statistics, communications, and leadership and teamwork. As courses began, I discovered that many moved at a relentless pace. My travel coffee mug didn’t leave my side, and I exchanged numerous bleary-eyed nods in the hallways with my classmates. Between classes and my graduate assistantship position at MSU’s University Relations department, I was certainly overwhelmed and lacking sleep, a sense of camaraderie prevailed among the class. We exchanged study strategies, dissected test questions, and sought the expertise of one another.
I truly knew I had selected a wonderful program when classmates went out of their way to help, such as the accounting teaching assistant who scheduled a personal tutoring session with me before both the midterm and final and the second-year finance student who created his own weekly study group because of the high demand for extra help. I knew business school would be competitive; however, I am continually and pleasantly surprised by the collaboration among classmates. The program is set up in such a way that it loosely resembles an actual corporation, so students have to reach beyond their immediate circle for resources and therefore become experts in engaging cross-functional teams. I also discovered that professors especially enjoyed interacting with MBA students, and I scheduled one-on-one meetings with several of them to discuss my academic progress as well as my career goals.
In conjunction with classes, everyone is assigned to a team of four or five students with different concentration areas, work experience, and nationalities. I have gotten to know my teammates well, beginning with intense collaboration for a case competition that we wrapped up late in the evening during the first week of school. Throughout the rest of the semester, our team has been required to complete numerous group projects. Today’s business environment exhibits complexities that necessitate teamwork, and the group assignments are an ideal way to practice this collaboration.
Besides coming together for class and group work, Broad MBAs also congregate to cheer our beloved Spartans on the football field. The MBA Assn. hosts a tailgate event just yards from Spartan Stadium and invites recruiters to attend, giving students an opportunity to mingle with potential employers in a more relaxed setting. In addition to enjoying Big Ten sports, students have countless opportunities to get involved in clubs, case competitions, entrepreneurship events, and development workshops to strengthen their business and leadership abilities.
As I’ve settled in to my new life in East Lansing, I’ve watched the campus greenery give way to concentrated fall colors. Hues of auburn, gold, and crimson blaze throughout the university grounds, signifying the change of seasons. The newest class of Broad MBAs has finally adjusted to a rigorous routine of classes, studying, and testing and is well under way with a significant change of its own.
Between journal entries, you can keep track of Megan’s business school adventures at the Business Schools Facebook page. Follow the Bloomberg Businessweek B-Schools team on Twitter.
Megan Brody is a first-year MBA student at the Michigan State University Broad Graduate School of Management. Before business school, Brody directed the public relations and marketing department at McShane Companies, a construction and real estate company in Rosemont, Ill. A travel lover, Brody is planning to combine her career aspirations with her desire to see the world.Cornell: A Virtual Tour
Image Courtesy of Cornell
By Sommer SaadiAny person can study any subject—that was Ezra Cornell's vision when he founded Cornell University in 1865 on a hill above Cayuga Lake in central New York. The Ivy League school that was once called "the first American university" by educational historian Frederick Rudolph is also home to the nation's first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine.
On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools, including three accredited business degree programs. Undergraduates earn the BS degree in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics & Management; the MBA and PhD degrees are awarded by the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management; and the Master of Management in Hospitality (MMH) degree is earned at the School of Hotel Administration.
Photos provided by Cornell. Caption information provided by the school and Bloomberg Businessweek research.
Cornell (Johnson) on Business Exchange
Cornell (Johnson) MBA Events Calendar
Cornell (Dyson) Undergraduate Business Profile
Slide Show: Top U.S. MBA Programs
Slide Show: Top Undergraduate Business Programs
Sunday, 8 January 2012
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
Business School Entrepreneurs
For years, business schools have been working as a silent partner in hundreds, if not thousands, of new business ventures dreamt up by students. Without the assistance of professors, administrators, alumni, and fellow students, most of the concepts would never have made it past the idea phase. What follows are profiles of some of those businesses, the individuals behind them, and what the schools did to help.
Photographer: Adam Friedberg/Getty Images
Resources For Entrepreneurs at Top MBA Programs
For some aspiring entrepreneurs, business school is like protective bubble wrap. Students get to leverage the experiences of faculty and alumni to test their ideas. Prize money doled out at business plan competitions allows for experimentation. And the support of student entrepreneurship circles may take some of the sting out of pursuing a solo endeavor. But do some schools provide more support than others when it comes to starting a business?
Bloomberg Businessweek asked each school ranked among our top 30 MBA programs to show us what they’ve got when it comes to supporting student entrepreneurs. This list is a compilation of those resources.
The schools are ordered according to our original MBA ranking. Of course, limiting the list to top 30 schools leaves out several with well-regarded entrepreneurship programs, including Babson College’s Olin Graduate School of Business. And several schools—Michigan State’s Broad College of Business, Emory’s Goizueta Business School, and Brigham Young’s Marriott School of Management—either did not supply all the necessary information or did not meet our deadline.
On the slides that follow, money available via school-sponsored entrepreneurship competitions may include the value of non-cash prizes.