B-School Bulletin: HBS MBAs Reflect On Summer Internships

HBS

News from Harvard Business School

“As a student at Harvard Business School, you’ll have the opportunity to realize your personal career vision with the help of resources available to you through the Career & Professional Development Office. The summer internship is a great way to explore a new industry, function area, or location or further your pre-HBS industry experience.

“As summer winds down and our second-year MBA students are preparing to come back to class, we wanted to take the opportunity to share reflections from the Class of 2019’s internship experiences.”

A half dozen of Harvard’s students write about their varied experiences over the summer, from Pascal Kriesche who followed his dream to launch a startup that is the first fully-automated, free-standing smoothie machine for offices to Madeline Keulen who spent the summer at at Victress Capital, an early-stage venture capital (VC) firm.

After having completed her first year at HBS, Paula Vich Serra spent her summer as an intern in the strategy department of Zalando, the leading online fashion platform in Europe. “At HBS,” she wrote, “we are constantly told that if there is a time to make a mistake, business school is the perfect one. Hence, my goal for the summer internship was to get out of my comfort zone and test the following hypothesis:

  • Can I thrive in an unstructured, fairly chaotic environment?
  • Is fashion the industry where I want to spend the next 30 years of my professional career?
  • Can I easily adapt to a different culture in a professional context?”

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UCLA

Why Can’t We All Get Along? On Some Things, We Do

News from UCLA Anderson School of Management 

“If you believe the pundits, Americans are divided as never before. Red states versus blue. Black versus white. Men versus women. Young against the old. This barely contained intramural warfare has created dysfunctional politics and is ripping apart the social fabric.

“Not so fast. Southern Methodist University’s Klaus Desmet and UCLA Anderson’s Romain Wacziarg suggest in a working paper that the picture is a lot more complicated — and not nearly so dire.”

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Vanderbilt MBA’17 hires by job function
Source: School 2017 MBA employment report

Switching Into A Consulting Career: What You Need To Know

News from Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management 

“Alongside finance, consulting is one of the most popular functions for MBA candidates to land in after graduation: 22% of the Vanderbilt MBA Class of 2017 accepted a consulting job. Many of those applicants had never worked in consulting before and used their MBA degrees to transition into the function.

“We talked to Emily Anderson, Director of the Career Management Center, to find out everything you need to learn before you switch into a consulting career.”

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Kellogg

Conspiracy Theories Abound. Here’s How To Curb Their Allure.

News from Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management 

“From Pizzagate to the grassy knoll, conspiracy theories often move from the margins of public life to the center. One 2014 study estimates that, in any given year, about half of Americans believe at least one conspiracy theory.

“While some are fairly innocuous, others have life-threatening consequences. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, many people came to believe the health workers trying to treat them were actually trying to infect them. As a result, they avoided medical treatment.

“Cynthia Wang has watched the spread of conspiratorial thinking with fascination — ‘Who is not interested in conspiracies?’ she says — but also with concern. ‘You start wondering, what causes people to come up with these alternative explanations that sometimes seem outlandish?’ says Wang, a clinical professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School.”

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Students participating in the GNAM program in Ireland concluded their week preparing and sharing traditional Irish food at Ballyknocken Cookery School with owner and chef Catherine Fulvio. Haas photo

Berkeley Haas Students’ Globe-Trotting Education

News from UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business

“On a recent study trip to Ireland, Laura Hassner found herself in a Dublin supermarket chatting with a Slovakian classmate who co-owns 250 bakery outlets about the difference between stores that buy dough from factories versus those that bake from scratch.

“For Hassner, an executive MBA student at the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, the conversation was one of many outlining the challenges facing small businesses as well as conglomerates that she took part in during a ‘The Future of Food’ course taught at University College Dublin’s Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. The course, with 30 international students enrolled, is one of many offered through the Global Network for Advanced Management (GNAM), an international consortium of 30 business schools that Berkeley Haas joined three years ago.”

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