Lining up a summer internship or full-time position for after graduation tops the New Year’s resolution lists of many a current MBA student. At Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, students get a helping hand thanks to two annual school-led tours of major job markets on the east and west coasts in early January.
Approximately 45 first- and second-year students are scheduled to depart for the West Coast on January 3rd as part of a seven-day tour that will include meetings with such top employers as Apple, Google, Cisco, HP, Intel, SAP, KLA-Tencor, Agilent and Yahoo! Additionally, the tour is scheduled to coincide with the West Coast Forum, a collaborative recruiting event with the MBA programs at Duke University, Yale University, Vanderbilt University and the University of North Carolina.
As a special feature this year, the West Coast trek will also include a Silicon Valley Technology Leadership panel at Yahoo! featuring Tepper School alumni, including Jeffrey Housenbold, CEO of Shutterfly, on the evening students arrive. Other West Coast meetings will be held at a hotel in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.
Meanwhile, a second group of Tepper students is New York–bound instead. This tour, which takes place from January 7th through 11th, puts Carnegie Mellon’s New York City classrooms (normally used for its Master of Science Program in Computational Finance) to use for students to interview with some of Wall Street’s biggest names, including Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, UBS and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
“Since some companies interested in the quality of student we have at Tepper aren’t able to come to Pittsburgh to see our program firsthand, we make it convenient for recruiters and take our students out to seek them,” said Ken Keeley, executive director of the Tepper School’s Career Opportunities Center.
Despite some uncertainty in the economy, Keeley reports that Tepper is still seeing strong interest in its students from companies across the board. Last year, more than 85 percent of Tepper MBA students had accepted a full-time job offer by graduation, and 96 percent had done so by three months after graduation. Of first-year students, nearly 100 percent had accepted a summer internship position by the end of the academic year.
Keeley expects similar results this year. “Our unique, analytically focused brand of management education is a hot commodity among recruiters as they seek the next generation of business leaders for their organizations,” he said.
For prospective MBAs anxiously awaiting news of first-round interviews or scrambling to meet upcoming application deadlines, isn’t it nice to know that once you’re in, you can look forward to some help from schools on that next round of applications and interviews…?







