What Success Looks Like For An MBA Career Changer

Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business

Solomon: I went into my internship getting put on a brand team. That was really exciting for me because marketing was my end goal, so I felt really fortunate to get that experience right off the bat. We talk a lot about fit at Kelley and finding the right fit for you, and I think that’s probably standard across the board of other MBA programs. You want to be at the right company with the right culture.

So what was really great about my internship was I had a great team of mentors there that were not only making sure that I was the right fit for them, but that they were the right fit for me. And that’s where you go back to being comfortable being uncomfortable. That can be an uncomfortable conversation to have with your manager. I’m not really sure if this city’s for me. I’m from the northeast. I’m in Kentucky. What am I doing? Is this work challenging? It was. Is this something I could see myself being excited about doing every day? It was. Okay. Now how do you get that offer? And really persevering and making sure that come August that was the conversation I wanted to be having.

Byrne: Now at breakfast this morning, you were telling me about an experience around a round table. Explain the round table concept here and what actually happened to you.

Solomon: So the round tables are our very first interaction during our first year with recruiters from the different companies that come on campus. So there are between 50 to 60 companies that come from different industries. You sit around a round table with them. And typically you’re going around to eight or so different companies. You’re assigned about half of those companies based on your intended major and spend 20 minutes at each table. It’s like speed dating.

So you’re practicing. The companies that are assigned to you are typically based on your intended major and academy. So you’re practicing your tell-me-about-yourself speech for the first time, maybe fumbling a little bit. I know I did. So one of the companies that I was assigned to was GE Appliances, and at this point in time, I was still on the supply chain track and wasn’t thinking about marketing or a marketing rotational program. So I had talked myself into practice your pitch, practice networking. Appliances? I don’t know.

So my now manager was sitting there, and he was like, ‘You’re not a supply chain person. You’re going to work for me.” And I said, “Yeah, okay,” and start laughing out loud in my now boss’s face. But he was right, and he’s actually a Kelley alum too so he was able to see through some of the mental roadblocks I was facing.

Byrne: And Evelyn, how instrumental was your internship in making a career change?

Wang: had a wonderful but challenging internship because strategy is completely different from engineering. It’s much more high level. Cummins is a really good company because in my internship I learned that the culture of the company is very diversified. In my class, we have five interns for corporate strategy, all from different countries. An American actually in the minority on our team.

Cummins is really welcoming to international students and very supportive. Other than that, I think the work is very meaningful and I think I have made an impact. At the end of my internship, I’m supposed to do the presentation to the President of our business unit, but he wasn’t available. And later when I returned to school, my boss called me and said, ‘Would you have time to present to our President?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So I came back to the company and then did a presentation to our President. And he is going to be our CEO now in the next month. So it was a very meaningful internship.

Byrne: When David came back to Kelley for his second year, he had to do a whole search again, right?

Kay: Yes. They didn’t really even have a program to hire from an internship. So yeah, I had to hit the ground running. And I learned from my first year going through the process of recruiting that you really want to try to secure that as soon as possible just for your own sanity, especially dealing with all the other priorities of the school. There’s no hiding it. It’s stressful and challenging to go through recruiting while you’re also taking classes and traveling for interviews while doing exams. So trying to secure a full-time offer the first semester of your second year is definitely a good piece of advice for everyone out there.

Byrne: There are a couple of elements of an MBA program that would shape your ability to make a career transition. One would be student-run clubs and organizations, and the other might be experiential learning opportunities where you’re getting some real-world experience. Did either of those two inform your journey?

Solomon: So I was part of our executive leadership team, which we called Slade, which was a great experience for me because it solidified that I wanted to move forward in a path that involves working with other people, hopefully leading a team at some point, and really creating a strategy for our organization. So that definitely helped put me in the right direction. As far as the hands-on experience from the academies, it really told me what I didn’t want to do, which I think is just as valuable as really figuring out what you do want to do.

And being able to figure that out early on in the game was really beneficial for me. Another thing that I got involved with was called One Kelley. It was a consulting group where we worked and managed a team of undergraduate students who worked with local minority and women-owned businesses, which was just an amazing experience and spoke to me in wanting to have something that I’m passionate about. So getting involved in different affinity groups going back into your career, and knowing that’s an outlet where you can meld the two worlds together is helpful.

Kay: I would echo that. I was in the strategic finance academy, and that academy is really focused on corporate finance and how do you optimize a company’s financial elements, whether it’s cash, whether it’s their balance sheet or CAPEX decisions.

We had actual opportunities to work on cases where we would have the actual participants from the case, including CFOs. They came to the campus to walk us through the case, and we did some role-playing around what the exchanges were like in a merger. Then we had to do our own analysis and pitch to them either a buy or no-buy decision.

Our thesis would get pretty much stripped down and we’d really learn directly from the people who were in the trenches. The experience of going through that as well as the skills we picked up along the way to actually drive those analyses was super helpful and basically critical for me getting to where I am today.

Byrne: So if you had to do it all over again, would you, and would you change anything about your MBA experience? Jennifer?

Solomon: Hands down, I would do it again. If they would take me back, I would’ve done a third year and a fourth year. I loved my experience here. But if I were to do something different… Gosh. I feel like I did it the right way. I feel like I was surrounded by people who were there for me, the students, the faculty, the staff, that I just hit the ground running when I got here, and I don’t think I would do anything different.

Byrne: Jennifer, David, and Evelyn, thank you so much for joining us today.