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Transcription (MBA Summer Internships):

Welcome to MBA Podcaster the only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process. I’m Janet Nekano, landing the best summer internship possible is a huge importance for first year MBA students. It’s often referred to as the twelve week interview since an internship can lead to your next full-time job. “We would like to be able to fill a large portion, most of our full-time hires from people who come out of the intern rank.” Every MBA student is encouraged to get a summer internship and competition is tough, this time we’ll explore what to look for in an internship, what it can do for you and how to find and choose the best one. We have two career management directors from top MBA programs, a student who has made a summer experience into his next career move and we’ll also hear from a recruiter and a top consulting company.

On an upcoming program we want to answer questions you have on any MBA related topic. Maybe you have a question for an admissions director, career counselor or recruiter. We’d like to hear from you so please send us a question along with your name, city and state or country to info@mbapodcaster.com and we’ll try to answer your question on our show.

When it comes to MBA internships most if not all students will get one. Not getting one could even be a red flag to recruiters when looking for full-time work after graduation. That’s how important they are says Joyce Rothenberg, Director of the Career Management Center at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, “They offer students an opportunity to explore a new industry or a function, or a career path and for some students who have very specific goals about certain companies it can also help to make in roads into a company that they’re targeting for full-time employment. For students that come to business school with some gaps in their skill set, or gaps in their resume it helps them strengthen their resume and bridge any of those experience gaps before they start into the permanent job search you know during their second year of school. And then for many of our students the summer internship is also an entree to a full time offer from that same company.”

Jessica Christopher is Associate Director & Career Counselor at The Parker Career Management Center at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Christopher says the search for your summer internship begins even before you start class, “Scary enough but it really literally starts on day one. We send out a lot of information over the summer to the incoming class, do a big push in orientation for that because it is overwhelming, all of the sudden, you know you just lost your job and now you have to make your decision about what you want to do next and all of these companies are coming and I mean you can literally spend hours upon hours going to presentations, so the sooner somebody can be focused on what their looking for the better for them definitely and I think that those students tend to have the most success.” Christopher says students find internships through a variety of different ways; they can find one through their own networks, other students, alumni, staff or professors.

And Vanderbilt’s Joyce Rothenberg says that you’ll likely become well acquainted with campus recruiting. “Every fall at probably every business school in the country companies come, they do what’s called information sessions where they’ll usually use a room at the school and they’ll talk about their companies, they’ll talk about opportunities at their company and then frequently afterward they will have some kind of reception somewhere near the campus. So I mean there are cocktail receptions, there are dinners, students are invited generally it’s a broad open invitation and students will go there. It’s a great opportunity though for students to meet the company in a more relaxed and informal environment than sitting in an interview room. I mean I have had recruiters tell me that over the course of a reception where a student has been very you know, or a student had come to the reception knowing quite a bit about the company, knowing about the job opportunities with a real interest in the company that they’ve managed to really impress a recruiter and they remember that student’s name and then when they look at resumes that student might have a little bit of a leg up.”

MBA summer internships are a great way to jump start a career, especially for career switchers. However, switchers do have an added challenge says Rothenberg, “What they really have to be able to do is demonstrate that they have transferable skills that you know what they were doing in the past transfers to the target opportunities they’re looking for the future. The other thing I think that companies really look for is they’re really looking to see that the student has a genuine interest and a very strong understanding and a passion about their future career. They have to demonstrate strong academic achievement, so if somebody’s trying to switch into finance you need to be doing very well in your finance and statistics classes. You know what companies are looking for is somebody that is smart and that can come up to speed quickly. It’s really important I think that career switchers do research on what are the most important things to that new industry or that company so that they can really then look at their skill set and say okay how do I think about what I’ve done in the past and how will that be valuable to my new employer? And every year we’ve got lots of students that successful make that kind of switch but it’s a question of preparation.”

Consulting is one field that many MBA students decide to pursue after graduation and it’s also an industry that often hires career switchers. James Rile is Senior Manager and Recruiter at Deloitte Consulting, he says their MBA interns take on roles that are similar to those of new MBA graduates, “They will not have had the benefit of their last you know year of business school but the expectation is that they’re going to be a contributing member of the team in accordance to what their experiences and skill sets are. So they tend to take on you know more of an individual contributor level role but there’s an expectation that not only can they kind of handle the analytics but that there’s also client interaction, client management owning and structuring pieces of work which might include you know providing guidance and direction to team members.” Rile says they aren’t looking for a specific set of industry experiences rather they hire interns for what he calls the generalist position. “The generalist skill set is strong quantitative capabilities, we’re looking for great interpersonal skills, people who can interact with the client you know, obtain information from them, make presentations strong written/verbal presentation skills. We’re looking for people who have sort of an EQ and work well in collaborative environments. The way that we consult with our clients requires us to roll up our sleeves and develop solutions with the client so we need people who can work well and collaborate in a team environment.”

Consulting along with industries like banking often like to hire from an intern pool. Rile says, Deloitte offers internships to those who appear to have long term potential, “It’s not automatic that people who have internships will get a full-time offer, although that’s sort of our goal and hope when we make the offer to them. We would like to be able to fill a large portion, most of our full-time hires from people who come out of the intern ranks, you know if allows us to have essentially a ten or twelve week job interview where we can actually watch them perform. And it makes them much more educated when they receive the full-time offer because they kind of you know actually live the experience and have seen the ugly underbelly of the beast and seen you know the firm from the inside and really understand the way we deliver business.”

Interviewing for summer internships is very similar to the full-time process. You’ll often have second, third or fourth round interviews with some companies. Rile says while interviewing with consulting firms make sure you have a clear understanding of the industry, “While there’s not an expectation that you know it like an insider who’ve done it for five years because most people are career shifters, or career changers. But we are looking for people who have read up and understand the basics of the industry and you know when we’re talking to them that understand you know at least what we advertise as you know what we think makes Deloitte different from other firms. So at the basic level kind of understand the type of work that gets done in the firm that you’re talking to. The other is just don’t fumble the basics you know be able to articulate why it is that you’re interested in consulting and you know why that is the right career path for you versus what you did before, versus going into banking, versus going into you know operations management for general motors. Be able to kind of articulate what attracts you to the business and why you think you’re a good fit for it. We utilize case interviews in the intern recruiting process as well as the full-time recruiting process. I don’t think business school students can spend too much time preparing for the interviews by practicing case interviews so I think that you know I would say that a common error is people who sort of look great on paper, do great in the behavioral interviews, have demonstrated all of the qualitative and quantitative capabilities that we like and then in the end they are not very articulate in the case interviews. So practicing the case interviews is a key.”

If you’d like to hear a full version of the interview with James Riles from Deloitte Consulting, visit our website mbapSodcaster.com. Rile discusses in-depth about the hiring and interviewing process.

Fortunately your internship will likely be paid. At Vanderbilt the median salary last summer was about 1300 a week. Anderson’s Jessica Christopher says but pay will depend on the industry. “I’d say that the majority are paid internships but some are willing to take something that is unpaid just in order to get the experience that is a personal choice and that depends also on industry. So if you like entertainment obviously the unpaid internships tend to be a little more likely in that industry than other but you know a lot of companies structure things differently so maybe they’re not paid throughout the three months but they get a big bonus at the end. Some companies definitely do that to reward the students for their work. You know when we say unpaid sometimes it is a little bit flexible.”

But pay should probably be the last thing to think about says Vanderbilt’s Joyce Rothenberg, she says what you should think about is whether it’s a position or industry that’s right for you, “Is it a company that they’re interested in, perhaps even if the internship is in a different functional area. So if you want to go work for say Reebok and what you really want to do is brand management but you have an opportunity to do public relations with them for the summer. Well it might be good to go do a PR or market research project for them in order to get inside the company and get to know them if that’s a target company for you. So some times you might do something that’s not exactly the internship you wanted in order to get to know the company and to get your foot in. The other thing we talk to a lot of our students about is if they have a gap in their experience they need to evaluate their summer internship opportunity and pick the one that is going to fill the gap the best. You know so will it add to their skill set or put them on the clear path that will help them get to their full-time employment goal. So and then the other thing is there’s lots of companies that do summer internships but don’t have full-time MBA jobs and some times they don’t even typically employ or hire a summer MBA so it’s really important for them to understand that job. What we tell them to look for is really to look for projects that will allow them to you know to conduct analysis, to make recommendations where they will have an opportunity to work closely with senior manager, where the project that they’re working on is a strategic project for the company so it’s important to the company.”

Rehan Choudhry is a second year student at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Last summer Choudhry took an internship with Harris Entertainment and was offered a permanent position with the company at the end of summer. He has already accepted the offer but Choudhry says he had no idea that this was his path when he started school. “I went into MBA terrified that I wasn’t going to get a job because I fit that generic background that a lot of MBA’s come from. My parents are from Pakistan, I have an IT background, I had two years experience, I was younger than the average MBA so I was just terrified I wasn’t going to get a job. So I started day one, I started networking day one and I kind of threw a wide net out there and tried everything in some capacity. I had informational interviews with everyone from Deloitte human capital consulting to private wealth with Goldman Sacks to leadership development with Home Depot and Harris. I really wanted to make sure that I talked to everybody that I could before making a decision on what company or what industry I was going to pursue.”

Summer internships are a useful tool to explore new fields. Once on the job some discover the work or industry isn’t for them. Fortunately for Choudhry he fell upon something that worked. “I realized for the first time how much, or how important fit is to a person in an organization. When I was in college I picked computers because that was the hot thing to do at the time, that was the secure position and it just if you wanted to have a career and you wanted to start off strong coming out of college you went into computers. And I didn’t realize how miserable I was until I had an experience with a company that I was truly a fit for. I realized I think it was my first week on the job, if not my first couple days on the job that I realized that was it, that’s where I wanted to be. So when the offer came at the end of the summer if wasn’t even a question for me.”

Evaluating your summer experience honestly is key and Choudhry says what he’s learned in the process is that it’s important to keep your options open from the beginning. “The MBA application process I feel is flawed just from the start because I mean every school has this one essay that says what do you want to do, essentially when you grow up? And I think it’s such a bad question to ask because people change so much. I feel like I’m a completely different person now than the day I started school. So how could I have rightfully known what I could do with my career based on the limited knowledge that I had. And a lot of people feel like they need to stick to that explanation that they give in their application essays, they feel that because they said they want to do HR that they need to do HR. I see a lot of students and every year, I mean you see this in every MBA program where people just commit themselves too early to what they want to do and by the time they realize that that wasn’t the right decision it can some times be too late. So if a MBA student goes in their first day of school with a completely open mind with a completely clean slate and rebuild their expectations for their career from there. I think that’s the best thing someone can do.”

Once on campus you’ll have a lot of resources available to you from information sessions from advice directly from career management. Anderson’s Jessica Christopher says that exploring options is important but even more important is exploring yourself, “In knowing what they’re interested in, knowing what they value, what they’re strong at ability wise, most importantly out of all those things is interest because you can be good at something and not be interested in it and if you take it because you’re good at it you might really not like it anyways. And then kind of evaluating what did you like in your past job, what didn’t you like, what kind of culture are you looking for, what kind of boss are you looking for, what kind of work do you want to do and really try to evaluate all those things and then looking at down the line where do you want to be and how does this position fit in with that goal. We often tend to ask students to you know if they could create their ideal internship what would that look like and if they could write a job description what would that be, so that they are really trying to evaluate themselves before evaluating opportunities.”

For an upcoming program we want to answer questions you have on any MBA related topic. If you have a question for an admissions director, career counselor or recruiter we’d like to hear from you so please send your questions along with your name, city and state or country to info@mbapodcaster.com and we’ll try to answer your question on our show. Also if you’d like to hear full version of the interview with recruiter James Rile from Deloitte Consulting, visit our website mbapodcaster.com. Rile discusses in-depth about the hiring and interviewing process.

For more information, advice and to register for your weekly podcast visit mbapodcaster.com, I’m Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster. Next time we’ll cover the must read list for MBA students. Thanks for listening.

Transcription (Recruiting Tips From Deloitte Consulting):

I’m Janet Nakano with MBA Podcaster; we wanted to bring you a special full-length version of my conversation with James Rile, a Senior Manager and Recruiter for Deloitte Consulting. Only a portion of it was included in our podcast on MBA Summer Internships and because many of you are interested in consulting work we hope this will provide you with more information on the industry. James talks about hiring and interviewing interns and where an internship at Deloitte could lead for those seeking a career in consulting. If you haven’t already listened to our program on MBA Summer Internships you can visit our website mbapodcaster.com.

I first asked James to tell me a little bit about Deloitte Consulting, “Deloitte is one of a few firms that offer sort of a broad range of consulting services still reaching from you know the peer advisory strategy consulting in through the implementation and that’s really what we think that we bring is unique in our focus it’s executable strategy. So there are lots of firms that play somewhat in multiple disciplines, you know focusing on strategy, certain amount on operations, certain amount on technology and most of the firms that we compete with now we see trying to grow into those other areas so a lot of the technology oriented firms are trying to kind of move farther to the left or early in the process take on more operational process type work and also strategy work. A lot of the strategy firms are starting to reach farther into the operations work and then through partnerships and alliances do more of the technology delivery. We’re already playing across the spaces and so one of the things that we think that makes our approach different is that it’s not just coming up with the appropriate strategic direction it’s also then being able to make that advice real and help clients actually execute on those strategies.

Now for summer interns do you place just in your area? Or do you place in other cities as well?

“That’s a great question. All of our recruiting is actually we have a national model so we have recruiting relationships with a variety of schools that they’re designated as our national recruiting schools and although there is some alignment between geography and sort of office placement in that most of the students from offices will end up in or from certain schools will end up in offices that are geographically close to where they’re going to school, it’s not a 100% match, the sorting process also kind of takes into account oh some things like sort of industry preference and if we have certain offices that tend to serve certain markets for example financial services in New York, if we have a strong financial service person who happens to be going to school at a place like say somewhere in the south like Vanderbilt or Duke, they might end up working in the New York office.”

Now do you hire for a specific position or is it a general position for these interns?

“That’s a good question. Our recruiting at the entry level so for our full-time hires from the MBA program and the MBA intern really we’re looking for generalists although you are likely to your first consulting experiences will likely leverage whatever you did prior to business school. You know we’re looking for people to ease the transition into consulting it’s often good to put people back into industries that they know well or around certain problem sets or competencies that they have some prior experience but there’s an expectation that you’ll be a generalist and be able to serve sort of multiple industries, multiple problem types. So we’re looking for you know we are looking for a good generalist skill set.”

Okay but if an intern wants to go into a particular area, can that person do that?

“Yeah and we tend to try to push people in that direction just because it eases that transition. But what we cannot usually do is guarantee that if you have someone here who’s a deep pharmacy, pharmaceutical experience prior to business school that they’re necessarily going to work on a pharmacy project, we would try to align them in that direction. The other end of the sorting equation or the other part of the sorting equation is just what projects are coming online when we bring the staff on, the things that are available to staff on. So the first preference would probably be to put someone into for instance a life sciences client simply because that’s where their industry experience has been and that might be where they’ve you know where they’ll be able to add more value to the project immediately. But you know given the lag time between a recruiting cycle and then when people actually start up we have limited visibility to what specific projects we’re going to have up and running and actually putting staff onto by the time you on board the resources so that’s why we’re generally looking sort of at the industry level or more for a generalist skill set because we would prefer to put people into certain project types and we try to accommodate their interests as well but there’s no guarantee about which projects are actually ongoing staff at that time.”

And do the interns actually participate in the actual work?

“They do. They typical you know I could tell you from having recruiting for this and then also staffed interns onto my projects, the you know an intern, a MBA intern will take on a role that’s similar to what a new MBA graduate would be taking on. You know it’s a typical senior consultant type role. They will not have had the benefit of their last you know year of business school but the expectation is that they’re going to be you know a contributing member of the team in accordance is to what their experiences and skill sets are. They tend to take on a more of an individual contributor level role but there’s an expectation that not only can they kind of handle the analytics but that there’s also you know client interaction, client management, owning and structuring pieces of work which might include you know providing guidance and direction to team members.”

And what’s a typical work load like? I mean how many hours do interns usually put in?

“Sure. Well it’s whatever is typical for that project because the you know projects vary it’s sort of resource intensive depending on the type of project, the type of client, the time frame, you know in general we’re striving toward a 45 hour a week billable environment when you’re on projects. It’s not uncommon for our interns to end up on more than one project over the course of their summer experience but you would generally not be on more than one simultaneously. So a typical work load would probably be up to 45 hours billable then layering on top of that some of the travel time, things like that I would say a typical work load for kind of a heavy industry position. So specifically we you know we try not to set people up in environments where they have to you know where it’s going take them 60, 70 billable hours to accomplish what they need. However, if you’re looking at 45 billable hours, 9 hours day well given some travel time, things like that you end up spending some 10, 11, 12 hour days during the middle of the week to be able to kind of balance all that out. So you know overall in terms of you know travel time and things like that it’s probably closer to a 55 hour week.”

And does that intern position mirror the full-time position?

“It does, yeah. We try to make that intern experience as realistic and representative of the full-time experience as we can so that’s why I mean you know you don’t get light projects, you don’t get light project roles, you might not take on the exact same role as someone who’s been in the Senior Consultant spot for two or three years but because they might have more project experience but to the extent that you know we will make that as representative as possible. It’s better for the students because we look at our intern work experience as extension of our full-time recruiting process, it’s actually better for the project and for the client. You know we want them to be contributing all the, you know all the experience and skills that we saw during recruiting that we liked, we’d like to be able to bring that to the project.”

And do the interns actually get some training right when they get there?

“They do. It’s much more, it’s pretty concise when compared to our full-time training and on-boarding but there is a certain amount of in office training that happens when they on-board which you know typical policies, procedures things as well as some orientation around you know the way we do business, project structuring, you know where to find information. It’s kind of the short version of our full boot camp that we do when we on-board new senior consultants. And then for people who are going to the intern process we also have, they’ll be national meetings and sort of check points where the interns are brought together for a Friday or something like that in a central location where they’ll do some additional training and as well as get exposed to some other aspects of the firm that you really don’t have the ability to you know absorb in that 10 or 12 week period so that will be some training and education about other service areas, other industry groups, you know how the firm structures itself, you know maybe some parts of the sales process that they won’t have the ability to participate in.”

And what’s Deloitte’s benefit for taking on these interns, I mean do you offer them full-time positions afterwards? Is that common?

“It is. Our preference would be to you know we’re extending offers to people to join us for internships because we think they have long term potential for full-time employment with the firm. So it’s not automatic that people who accept internships will get a full-time offer although that’s sort of our goal and hope when we make the offer to them. Most of the you know, we would like to be able to fill a large portion, most of our full-time hires from people who come out of the intern ranks. And you know if allows us to have essentially a 10 or 12 week job interview where we can actually watch them perform and it makes them much more educated when they receive the full-time offer because they’ve kind of you know lived the experience and have seen the ugly underbelly of the beast and seen the firm from the inside and really understand the way we deliver the business. So benefits to us from having an intern, an active internship program is we think it provides access to the top candidates at the full-time placement level and obviously you know we don’t restrict ourselves to hiring only from former interns. Some times our needs sorted out striped that pool that we have at the end of the internship process. But our preference is to leverage that internship pool for a large component of our full-time hires from campus recruiting.”

And so would you say you hire more so from the intern pool or is it through other recruiting?

“It kind of depends year over year because it, the mix also changes depending on whether we’re it’s a heavy year for campus recruiting versus experienced hire industry recruiting, which also plays into mix. And so it kind of depends, in general we hire probably mostly from our intern pool but it depends on what our actual needs are for that recruiting cycle.”

And what about career switchers, you know they’re going to business school to get into a new field. And they, a lot of them use internships to test out the field. So what about them, do you hire those candidates?

“We do. I would say probably most of our candidates look like that. You know there are a few reasons for that. I think you know if you have somebody who’s coming from another consulting firm we do end up recruiting those people, having them join us. Although you know there are many incentives to return to the company that you came from and so people who are committed to the industry and have worked somewhere else, sometimes feel that those incentives are strong enough to convince them to go back to their other firm so by necessity that means if we’re looking for good generalist talent coming out of business school programs, we’re taking people who you know who have done something else other than consulting before they came to school. And you know, I came through that pipeline where had done something else, went to school made a switch into consulting. I would say most of our interns look like that in terms of experiences.”

And what are the skills that you look for in interns?

“Well, so we’re hiring for sort of a generalist position so there isn’t a specific set of industry experiences. But the generalist, you know the generalist skill set is strong quantitative capabilities, we’re looking for great interpersonal skills, people who can interact with the clients, you know obtain information from them, make presentations, strong written, verbal presentation skills. We’re looking for people who have sort of a high EG and work well in collaborative environments the way that we consult with our clients requires us to roll up our sleeves and develop solutions with the client so we need people who can work well and collaborate in a team environment. There are very few projects where we’ll send, people will go off and collect data and sit in a room and come up with an answer and present it back to the client or to the project team. We’re required to sort of work hand to hand with the client so we need people who are very comfortable and very skilled at doing that. And then I think just basic intellectual curiosity and the desire to continue to stretch and learn is required in this business overall especially if you‘re going to be doing different types of projects for different types of clients you have to be comfortable kind of stretching the envelope a lot so we need people who have that interest and desire and frankly have been able to demonstrate that they’re comfortable doing that.”

And during the interview process can you name a few mistakes candidates make?

“Sure. I mean you know the general guidance I give to candidates who are preparing to enter our recruiting process: one is understand the firm that you’re talking to; you know understand the industry in general. Now there’s not an expectation that you know it like an insider who’ve done it for five years because most people are career shifters or career changers but we are looking for people who have read up and understand the basics of the industry and you know when we’re talking to them that understand you know at least what we advertise as you know what we think makes Deloitte different from other firms. So at the basic level kind of understand the type of work that gets done in the firm that you’re talking to. The other is just don’t fumble the basics you know be able to articulate why it is that you’re interested in consulting and you know why that is the right career path for you versus what you did before, versus going into banking, versus going into you know operations management for general motors. Be able to kind of articulate what attracts you to the business and why you think you’re a good fit for it. We utilize case interviews in the intern recruiting process as well as the full-time recruiting process. I don’t think business school students can spend too much time preparing for the interviews by practicing case interviews so I think that you know I would say that a common error is people who sort of look great on paper, do great in the behavioral interviews, have demonstrated all of the qualitative and quantitative capabilities that we like and then in the end they are not very articulate in the case interviews. So practicing the case interviews is a key.”

Would you explain what the case interview is exactly?

“So in addition to going through a sort of standard behavioral interview to understand what people have done and ask for examples about how they, you know examples of how they’ve interacted in certain situations to understand them as a person, we’re also interested in assessing their sort of intellectual horse power and their ability to drive toward a solution in a realistic business problem. So what we will do is present a scenario based often times on you know real project experiences that we have seen and ask the students to step us through their general approach for solving the problem and in some cases actually drive us toward a solution and it’s a structured format, it usually lasts depending on sort of which round of the recruiting process you’re in it’s a 30 or 45 minute interview. But there’s a specific business problem that is described to the student and they’re asked to you know essentially step the interviewer through their thought process and drive toward either a specific recommendation if that’s what’s being asked for but more generally it’s around how they can frame and approach a problem and it’s a way for the interviewer to assess a few things. One is just you know sort of general business actions because typically these will involve things like financial numbers, understanding of income statements, balance sheets, understanding of basic business process and you know you could be a marketing person but since you’ve taken some core opts you might end up with a case question that involves operations management you know at a discrete manufacturer. Do you understand sort of at the basic level you know how things work within those organizations and when you’re presented with a problem can you devise an approach that would be appropriate for you know moving through that particular case scenario or problem scenario. As I said these mimic the project environments and the types of problems that we are working with with our clients so this is as close to sort of a live test as we can develop and all consulting firms pretty much will utilize this approach. You know we’re like everyone else, we use the case interview process and so I recommend that students avail themselves of the learning resources that are out there to make themselves familiar with the format as well as spend enough time practicing through these because you have to demonstrate not only that you are really bright and comfortable with numbers and can do all those things but that you’re also personable and can interact with the interviewer at the same time you’re solving this challenging problem.”

We hope you’ve enjoyed this special full-length conversation with James Riles, Senior Manager and Recruiter for Deloitte Consulting. If you’re interested in hearing similar conversations, have ideas or comments on our shows please send us an e-mail to info@mbapodcaster.com. I’m Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster, thanks for joining us.