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CFN hosted its annual webinar to launch interview season Most MBA students today, including Consortium students across the country, will argue there is no one segmented part of the calendar for "recruiting season."  Every aspect and experience of business school is "recruiting season," from the time students declare their intentions to attend a certain school until graduation. Every day, not just a few weeks in the fall, MBA students contemplate where they want to be and what they should do to secure the right job. Students today, and their career-advisory specialists on campus, say there is seldom a time when an MBA student is not absorbed in thought about information interviews, mentors, alumni connections, career choices, or a specific post that awaits after graduation. Nonetheless, late fall usually signals the formal start of interviews:  information interviews,  first rounds, lottery interviews, interviews earned from being selected by companies, second rounds...

Lists can be amusing. Sometimes they might be taken seriously.  Magazine and media companies like to produce them--even if they are flawed or biased, because they sell thousands of copies of issues or generate thousands of Internet clicks. They spawn discussion and banter and get people talking. Some lists should be shrugged off and dismissed. Some are worth examining, because they might offer helpful information about the topic being ranked. Employees like good pay, good benefits and, yes, fitness centers Fortune Magazine compiles many lists from year to year. One recent list in its latest issue is its "Best 100 Companies to Work For." To believe in the list and to ensure it's credible and useful, you must believe in its criteria. You must be assured that Fortune has amassed significant data and measured the information properly. Ask employees why their company is a favorite place to work, and you may get dozens of reasons, including especially compensation, benefits, v...

From Emory MBA to Film Production Now and then MBA graduates depart from business school with aspirations to succeed in a conventional career: Consulting, banking, investing, marketing, or start-ups.  Somewhere along the way, they  re-discover themselves or  re-kindle other passions and head into other directions.  They find new interests and opportunities. And off they go.  Sometimes they transition into another conventional pursuit. Or sometimes pursue something off the beaten paths. Theresa Moore, a Harvard athlete and graduate, earned an MBA from Emory (now a Consortium school) and started out conventionally in marketing at Coca-Cola.  However, along the way, she switched courses, while  taking advantage of her business education and experiences.  Today she runs her own film-production company and directs and produces her own documentary projects. Her most recent project aired on CBS-TV in December and the NFL Network in February. She directe...

Bonus season at financial institutions has come and gone. Yet for the month or two afterwards, there is the inevitable aftermath, the ruminating over what happened and the pondering over whether lucrative payouts in years past will ever reappear. In the post-crisis financial industry, where many just feel fortunate to be employed, there will still be some degree of anger, frustration, or disappointment in payouts. Many yearn for the times of the 1990s or the early 2000s.  Most know the industry is still enduring a shake-out or a re-engineering of sorts, and compensation is a candidate for shake-out, too.  Handsome compensation packages still exist in certain segments, perhaps most prominently at venture-capital firms, private-equity companies and hedge funds.  Even in 2012, you can read about insane, mind-boggling bonuses, likely because someone made an insane, mind-boggling hedge-fund trade.  Payouts at banks, investment managers and other financial institutions (or...

On campus, the hiring process is not quite over. For some MBA students, including those in Consortium schools, whether in their first year or about to graduate, February's arrival could cause panic:  Do I have significant job offers on the table?  Will I spend the summer at my first choice--proving myself in a formal internship program that will lead to a full-time offer in August?  Or must I resort to the only choice I have? Must I return to an old job I wanted to leave in the first place?  If graduation looms, do I settle for the first offer available, or do I wait for my dream post? When February comes, some students beam and boast of offers from top-tier financial institutions, consulting firms, or big corporations. Some have already accepted offers. Others, without the offers or opportunities they covet, grow worried and try to figure out what to do with composure and a new strategy in mind.  There's no need to panic just yet.  Buckle down. This is the...

Trying to project 2012 is like reading tea leaves. Who's willing to make an informed, detailed forecast and be comfortable and confident about it? The variables are too numerous, too complex, too bewildering.  If you are a finance professional, an MBA student or a Consortium alumnus, how do you brace and prepare for next year--a year of turning points and pivots with Europe unable to make up its mind about a corrective course and with U.S. elections hovering? By now, we have grown weary of the tail end of 2011 and are ready for the year to get going. Early in 2011, business and financial signs were uplifting. We were poised for a sustained upturn until we fell off a cliff in August. Since then, we've feared a repeat of the fall, 2008, with a different set of plots, twists and finger-pointing. The plot this time revolved around the bickering in Congress about budget deficits and debt levels and bickering in Europe about debt levels and budget deficits. The collapse of MF Global...

Remember days of yore--when an MBA in finance accepted an offer from an investment bank, commercial bank, brokerage house, trading firm or insurance company in the spring of second year and thereafter embarked on a long career with one firm, one employer?  Shortly after arriving at the firm, the MBA started a training program or entry position--with the expectations of earning promotions every few years and with sights on becoming a senior manager (at the same firm) at the apex of a productive, memorable career. In those days, you had the luxury of failing or slipping up in performance (a few times, not often), as long as you showed drive, loyalty, commitment and some promise. Now and then, you could fail to win a deal, could lose a major client, or could report a decline in revenues. You were reprimanded slightly, gently coached, and learned from experience. You were confident you would get a second chance, and you envisioned a career lasting, oh, 15, 20 or more years. What happen...

A Carnegie Mellon quintet of MBAs faced challenging competition from teams from USC and Michigan, but managed to emerge as the winner of the Executive Leadership Council 's (ELC) annual business-case competition in Alexandria, Va. in May.  (See http://www.elcinfo.com/ .) The USC and Michigan teams followed in second and third place, respectively. Exxon Mobil and ELC sponsored the annual competition. ELC has presided over the competition since 2002. This year the topic was energy and the reduction of greenhouse gases. Students from top business schools were asked to present a detailed business strategy outlining America's transition to lower greenhouse gas by 2030 in the most cost-effective way. Carnegie Mellon's winning team from the Tepper School earned over $35,000 in scholarships.  The team from Tepper, a Consortium school, included recent Consortium graduate Jacob Garcia .  Other team members included J esse Alleyne, Ian Buggs, Felix Amoruwa, and Richard Burgess . ...

Dartmouth's Tuck leads top business schools in alumni-participation in donations Who are the most satisfied alumni among top business schools?  "Satisfied," for these purposes, isn't defined by the alumni happiest in their careers, the most content in their outlook,  or the most optimistic about business opportunities. Satisfied," in this case, applies to alumni who are happiest about their business-school experiences.  They are the ones who most appreciated the two years of toil to get the MBA and reflect fondly on time spent with professors, deans, classmates and career advisers. They might recall cheerfully the class "field trip" to China, the end-of-year skit performed before a standing-room crowd, or the thought-provoking cases in project finance. They will have appreciated the school's brand-new, state-of-art facility--featuring technology marvels and electronic wizardry. Sometimes satisfaction in career correlates closely to satisfaction at b...

To join or not to join. To get involved or not.  The New York Times Sunday posed the query to Consortium CEO Peter Aranda in its July 3 edition:  Should members of under-represented groups join the "affinity groups" that exist in certain business settings?  They are special-purpose groups within a company that attract a membership of women, Hispanics, or Asian- or African-Americans. Or they may be groups that attract others with shared interests or backgrounds:  LGBTs, Native Americans,  Arab-Americans, or South Asians. They may include--within the institution--groups of African-American investment bankers, an Asian society of traders, researchers and analysts, or women in risk management. They could include Latinos in private banking or financial consulting. The Times posed a challenging question, one that many within these groups grapple with from time to time. Is there an advantage or disadvantage if you choose to affiliate with affinity groups while you ar...

Just when we thought all had turned around and we sensed the corner had been turned, we hear banter about financial institutions pondering lay-offs and staff reductions. Haven't we heard these rumblings before? As big banks and other financial institutions stumble toward the end of the second quarter, 2011, published reports say lay-offs are looming. Senior managers have begun to panic over whether they will be able to generate returns that will match those of 2010, especially with deal flow, trading activity, and the economy sputtering.  Historically, the first response of financial institutions (from trading desks and deal teams to operations groups and compliance functions) is to reduce personnel numbers to brace for rougher waters.  And always, the method that comes to mind to reduce is "LIFO" outplacement--the last in are the first out. Critics say the first reaction is to protect compensation among the elders when the industry must weather a brief storm. This time a...