Business school students with their sights set on investment banking careers are landing internships and jobs in greater numbers as banks climb out of the recession, according to a recent article in the New York Times.
Drawing on interviews with dozens of students and administrators at business schools across the country, as well as a December survey by the MBA Career Services Council, the Times on Sunday reported that the job market in the banking sector is stabilizing.
“The banks this year kept saying, ‘It’s a good year,’ ‘We just approved a lot of hiring,’ ‘The market is clearing up,’ ” Kwame Yankson, a second-year MBA student at the University of Virginia’s Darden School, told the Times. Yankson, who was turned down for summer internships by 15 banks last year, received a full-time offer from Wells Fargo when he conducted his job search this year. “It was a completely different experience,” he said.
Indeed, Darden told the Times that the number of banks interviewing on campus increased 20 percent this year over last, and job offers are up 33 percent so far.
At Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, the reports were also encouraging. According to that school’s career office, twice as many students had lined up investment banking internships last month than the year before, and four new banks came to interview.
Student interest in banking is likewise rebounding at Fuqua, the Times reported. The number of students submitting resumes to banks was up 37 percent, and the number of students participating in the school’s Week on Wall Street was up to 90 this year, from 60 last year.
“There’s reason for students to be optimistic,” Tracy Handler, a spokeswoman for the M.B.A. Career Services Council, told the Times. The council, an association of business school career advisers, conducted a survey of its members in December to gauge students’ internship prospects. The findings: 39 percent of business schools expected internship opportunities to increase this summer, while 26 percent expected them to decrease.
“Any signs of recovery are modest,” Handler told the Times. “But business schools are looking ahead and seeing a light at the end of what is now a pretty short tunnel.
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Phew…this is a relief. I was starting to second guess the ROI of b-school!
That is just great news. I know they say ‘modest’ but at least things are going in the right direction.
Yes, a definite relief…I figured there’d come a time when new jobs opened up, but I’m glad they’re opening up as I begin to seriously consider pursuing an MBA – makes the decision to do so a bit easier to rationalize!
I am pursuing mba from cosmic business school from marketing and IT specilazation. I want to do summer intership programme in banks. so pls give me information as soon as possible………….
This is an encouraging post, if investment banks are starting to increase the amount of interns they are taking on, hopefully that is a positive indicator of how the rest of the job market will do. There is a fairly sizable increase in these internships among banks, which is great for business students. I recently read an article that talked about an increase in accounting jobs as well; perhaps unemployment is on its way down.