Career services directors at business schools have really had to rack their heads this summer to help students find internships. For many, creativity has been the name of the game. I wrote an article back in April about the efforts that school such as the Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business were taking to ensure students had something to put on their resume. As I reported, the once unheard of unpaid internship has become commonplace and students have been taking up summer jobs that, in headier economic times, they never would have dreamed of considering.
Here’s one more example of a school that is getting creative about helping MBAs land positions. At the MIT Sloan School of Management, the school was able to raise $50,000 from alumni to help students who wanted to work at start-ups or in the field of sustainability, according to a school press release. The school’s faculty allocated that money to firms that agreed to hire those students, allowing the companies to provide students with a stipend for their work.
Many of the start-ups the school reached out to were eager to have business school students work for them, but were unable to provide them with any compensation, says Jackie Wilbur, director of MIT Sloan’s Career Development Office. “Start-ups had the need for interns but were only able to offer little or no compensation,” Wilbur says.