Exclusive Survey: Most MBA Summer Internships Impacted By Pandemic

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Courtesy photo

It’s those sorts of initiatives that have likely helped business school career offices earn high marks in our survey. When asked to rate the helpfulness of their B-school career offices on a one-to-five scale, 30.28% of respondents gave their school’s career office a perfect “five” rating of “incredibly helpful.” Another 24.44% score their school with a “four.” And just 7.22% of respondents said their school’s career office was “not at all helpful,” with a score of “one.”

Besides calling on alumni, other schools have boosted established funds and fellowships like the Haas Social Impact Fund, which dishes out a pot of cash to MBAs taking internships in lower-paying or non-paying social impact internships. Stanford’s GSB has similar programs in the Social Management Immersion Fellowship and the Entrepreneurial Summer Program for students interested in working at an early-stage startup. Those programs have helped Stanford maintain internship rates similar to last year, according to the school.

SCHOOLS CREATING NEW FUNDS AND INITIATIVES TO GET MBAs INTERNSHIPS

Other schools — like the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business — have been creating funds for students that had internships canceled or rescinded. Ross recently launched its Business Consultant Corps, which will give $5,000 to about 120 rising second-year MBAs and undergraduate seniors to work on projects with executives at sponsoring organizations.

“Industry-wide a number of students have had internships affected by the pandemic and I was struck by a recent study where 64% of students having internships were canceled and had no alternative in place,” says Ross School Dean Scott DeRue in an interview with Poets&Quants. “Most of our internships are happening. But they are all virtual and they may be modified by the timing or duration of them. We wanted to mobilize to support students who were affected by the pandemic or wanted an alternative plan.”

UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business launched a similar fund — also giving out $5,000 stipends to rising second-year MBAs — called the MBA Summer Internship Stimulus Fund.

“We know that some companies are experiencing significant financial constraints right now and supplementing student compensation through this stipend program will help impacted organizations access Berkeley MBA talent for the summer,” Abby Scott, the assistant dean of Career Management and Corporate Partnerships at Haas said in an announcement from the school on April 27. “If a company cannot pay a typical summer salary, they can still hire a Berkeley MBA intern as long as they are contributing to student wages and meeting standards governed by employment law.”

Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management’s Career Management Center recently created a “Hire Kellogg” initiative that partners with the alumni relations team to connect current students with alumni.

“In the past two months, through the Hire Kellogg initiative and ongoing conversations with our recruiting partners, our Career Management Center has uncovered more than 250 summer internship opportunities for our students,” says Liza Kirkpatrick, the managing director of Kellogg’s Career Management Center. “Success stories in the past few weeks include a student accepting a financial services internship with an insurance technology company in Chicago, and a senior product manager internship with a West Coast tech company. Our alumni have been incredibly active and eager to engage with Kellogg students right now. They are really demonstrating Kellogg’s pay-it-forward culture.”

In mid-March in response to the pandemic, New York University’s Stern School of Business created the SternWorks program to “ensure that every full-time MBA student who seeks a summer experience (or whose start date for an internship is delayed) will have one in order to skill build, create impact, and have the opportunity to give back to the NYC community during these extraordinary times,” a Stern spokesperson says. In three weeks, the school partnered with many stakeholders and created more than 100 projects and $600,000 to support MBAs this summer.

MOST B-SCHOOLS ARE SEEING RELATIVELY LOW NUMBERS OF STUDENTS STILL SEEKING INTERNSHIPS

Poets&Quants reached out to each of the top-25 American business schools for this article asking how many rising second-year MBAs they currently have searching for internships to try to compare with the numbers we received in our survey. Most schools refused to release that data or didn’t respond to the request. Those that did say numbers of MBAs still looking for summer internships are low.

“As of March 27, nine students in our Full-Time MBA program were still seeking internships, but based on what we’ve experienced with companies, we expect to have all of our students placed by the end of next week,” a spokesperson from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business said in a statement sent directly to Poets&Quants.

Similarly, at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, a school official reports the number is currently less than 10 MBAs still seeking a summer internship, but the number is fluid and changing by the day.

According to Michigan’s DeRue, the number of MBAs that had their internships canceled at Ross was 22.