Internships: B-Schools Get Creative

At some schools, half of the first-year MBA students still don't have summer jobs. The solution? On-campus, and in some cases unpaid, positions.

Every Friday morning like clockwork, Ken Keeley, executive director of career services at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, runs a program on his computer that tracks job and internship placement figures for students. His end-of-the-week ritual has been especially gloomy this spring. Out of the 210 MBA students in the first-year class, only 55% had landed a summer internship by mid-April, leaving nearly half of the class scrambling to land internships before the end of the school year. It's a sharp change from last year, when 81% of students had secured summer jobs by this time, says Keeley.

"The biggest surprise to all of us in the industry has been how huge an impact the economy has had on internships," says Keeley. "We all knew it would hit graduate students hard, but I think we were caught off guard."

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