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Race To Land A Summer Internship Position

From the minute we walked back on to campus after winter break was over, people were already in a race to land a summer internship position. Those running the hardest were those looking for positions in management consulting, investment banking and brand management. In part, that’s because these are the three mostly highly sought after industries at Kellogg. But it’s also because these industries are very structured in how they interview, so students are doing the best they can to prepare for the interviews to come at the end of the month.

At long last, it’s finally second quarter here at Kellogg, the time that many students have been waiting for. Not that most of them are excited to embark on the quarter after spending a week ski’ing in Aspen, spending a few weeks in front of the TV back at home, and now immersed in the pressure to scramble and find a job for the summer. On the other hand though, it is the reason that just about everyone came back to business school.

As I mentioned, those in banking and consulting are up first. There are dinners and receptions taking place this week, hosted by some of the industries’ top firms, such as McKinsey. Many of these firms put an enormous amount of time, and resources, into the recruiting process, not only by having dinners, meet-and-greets, and receptions, but also by having “atrium hours” at Jacobs and by having “alumni” and current consultants lingering around campus talking to prospective applicants about the firm.

This Friday, some of the closed listed interview results will finally be released. Most of them will be from banks and a few others from consulting firms. Likewise, other big names firms, like Monitor Group, have drop deadlines this Friday, so lots of people are still writing cover letters and submitting applications.

Meanwhile, we all also have to figure out what classes we want to take, step up our involvement in clubs again after a few weeks off, and figure out the details for the KWEST trips many of us will be leading next summer (click here for my post on KWEST last year).

Sound like a lot of chaos and pressure at the same time? Well, I suspect it will be over the next few weeks. But thankfully, most people at Kellogg usually end up doing well across all these activities.  As a class full of smart, accomplished, achievers in our past professional lives, they can at least be assured they’ll have summer jobs and won’t be facing long term unemployment after school.

While those prospects certainly won’t necessarily make everyone happy, from a 30,000 foot view, it’s important to keep in mind that we all have a lot of opportunities at our finger tips, that we’ll all get another shot to try for new opportunities in the following year, and that we all get to go through the process with a great set of Kellogg classmates.

It should be interesting to see how those opportunities get spread out amongst the class. Stay tuned to hear how things play out.

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