The primary reason students choose to pursue their MBA is to acquire higher level and high paying jobs in organizations. While there is a ton of personal development, networking and even some fun during the program... everyone knows why we’re here. We all want to make it big and we see this program as a stepping stone to achieving our dreams.
During the first year of the program, students try to survive the tremendous class load while attempting to acquire an internship. Many of the classes we took during our first year were considered “foundational” meaning that they were generally out of our area of speciality.
During our second year, the atmosphere seems to be very different so far. Other than our business law requirement, all of our classes are electives this semester. These classes aren’t necessarily easier, but generally seem easier because they are in our areas of interest and focus. The catch however, is that for most second year students, this is the time that they need to find their ever important job.
The first job someone takes upon graduation from their MBA program is a vital piece to their career puzzle. If you land a great job with a reputable company, you become much more marketable and valuable 5 years into your post-MBA career. If you don’t land that initial job with a good company, it can seriously delay all of our “make it big” goals. Being with a company that understands the value of an MBA and has early-career management development programs in place is a huge asset.
To help us navigate the ever complex and changing job market, Pepperdine has provided us with the Career Services Office. The career services staff is made up of 5 Pepperdine staff members dedicated to helping individual students with their career development and job search. Each student is assigned an individual career counselor that we are able to schedule meetings with pretty much as often as we would like.
The value of our career services office is a hotly debated subject among many of our Pepperdine MBA students. This vital piece of the MBA program operates very differently than some of the other MBA programs in the area. If you are a MBA student at UCLA or USC, you are constantly being recruited by various companies that have recruiting relationships with the schools. On-campus interviews are very common and often times companies come in and hire entire groups of students.
Many of our students are not happy with the quality and the quantity of companies that do on-campus recruiting at Pepperdine. Their main complaint is that career services doesn’t go out of their way to help the average student as much as other higher ranked programs. When looking at the MBA program, there are generally two sides: the academic learning side and the job placement side. Our students feel that the allocation of resources is skewed largely towards the academic side, leaving the career services side lacking.
In my opinion, the main problem that career services has is that they are understaffed. First lets talk about basic numbers. The career services office serves as a resource to both 1st and 2nd year students, from the programs 12-Month MBA, 15-Month MBA, 20-Month MBA, International-MBA, MS in Applied Finance and MS in Global Business. Added together, this equals approximately 400 students. One of the career service staff members works as an administrative role, which leaves 4 career counselors to be divided up among the 400 students. So each career counselor is the “go-to” person for the career advice, planning and preparation for 100 students from various backgrounds from all over the world going into different industries.
When looking at what an “ideal” counselor-student relationship would look like, it becomes almost unimaginable how a single counselor could create that with 100 students. Career counselors help with industry selection, target company lists, alumni contact, networking, career advice, resume building, cover letter writing, locating job postings, connecting students with industry professionals, salary negotiation skills, mock interviews, etc. It is a tremendous amount of work for even the student who knows exactly what they want to do. So the idea proposed by many of the students is that if we were able to increase the number of career counselors from 4 to say 10, then the relationship between the average student and counselor would become closer to the “ideal” stage. This would bring the ratio of counselor to student from 1 - 100 to 1 - 40, which would be a significant improvement. Because many students in the program know how over burdened the career services office is, students have begun taking their career searches into their own hands.
The second point that it usually brought up about the career service counselors is that there isn’t any categorizing of students with particular interests to counselors with particular areas of expertise. For example, take a primary MBA subject like finance or investment banking. Those industries are incredibly unique and have very set ways they acquire new employees. At this time, Pepperdine doesn’t have a single career counselor that has industry knowledge, networking contacts or insights into the application processes at any well known firms. In an ideal setting the school would have one counselor for each major industry discipline, or at least on for every concentration the school offers. So for example, the ideal office would have a marketing career counselor that would work with all of the students interested in pursuing a career in marketing. This counselor would have industry knowledge, connections to marketing firms, contacts for students to meet and marketing experience of their own. With the current system, many times the students know more about their particular field of interest than their counselor does.
While I do agree that career services is understaffed, I have had an overall good experience with career services. I see Pepperdine’s career services similar to many other aspects in life, you get out of it what you put into it. Meaning that if you take the time to stop by and schedule continuous appointments, they can provide a lot of value on the career development side. But most of the work, the networking, the target firm lists, the finding contacts, figuring out what it is you want to do, getting interviews... is conducted by the student. Personally this has worked out for me so far, as I have gotten good advice from my counselor and have been successful in my own career development and job search thus far.
While it would be nice to envision these “ideal career counselors” and “ideal office setup” I would imagine that there would be a strong resistance to change in this area of our program. Budget cuts, perspectives on priorities and people trying to maintain the status quo would make any change substantially more difficult. But one can’t help but weigh the pros and cons of having that 3rd accounting class or second IT class vs having a substantially upgraded, more connected career services office. It goes back to why we as students are here... to obtain that higher level, higher paying job. With that in mind, it is clear that a new strategy in career services would add tremendous value to the MBA program.
