The Application Process

Here's an article that I thought may be of interest to the Beat the GMAT community:


Wall Street Crisis Impacts Business School Campuses: The View From Darden


As part of our continuing coverage of the Wall Street shakeup and its impact on students at top business schools, we recently spoke with Jack Oakes, director of the Career Development Center at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Here’s a little of what he had to share.

“Both Lehman and Merrill have been strong recruiters at Darden over the long term, so we have some students who are directly affected” by Lehman’s declaration of bankruptcy and Merrill’s forced sale of itself to Bank of America, Oakes reports.

Together with his staff, Oakes has been in close communication with the affected students since just after the announcements were made, reaching out to the group as a whole and meeting with students individually to see what they have heard and how Darden can help them proceed with their search.

According to Oakes, the fate of several students who interned with Lehman this past summer and received full-time offers is still unclear. “Some things are still in flux,” Oakes said, indicating that students have not yet learned whether their positions will survive the proposed acquisition of core parts of Lehman by British bank Barclays.

Students with offers at Merrill seem more secure. “We have received assurances directly from Merrill that they are honoring those offers,” Oakes said.

The reaction of students on campus to the events of the past week has been perhaps what you might imagine, explained Oakes. “Talking with them about their feelings last week I found amazement, a lot of anxiety and surprise that the financial world has changed so dramatically in so many ways,” he said. “A number of them were quite upset about these vast changes, but each of them I know is moving forward positively from it,” he continued. “It is not a time to wallow in despair.”

Beyond the immediate triage work Oakes and his team have done with students directly impacted by the Lehman and Merrill situations lies the larger charge of coping with a significantly altered recruitment landscape.

“Obviously for the second-year students, full-time opportunities in financial services will be down significantly,” Oakes says. Add to that the fact that many graduates from 2006, 2007 and 2008 are conducting searches. “Competition for those remaining slots will be fierce,” Oakes warns.

Still, Oakes found some encouragement in the first-year recruitment process, which began at Darden last week. “I was pleased to see that there were financial services firms with at least 14 or 15 people down here at Darden to help students get to know their firms,” Oakes says.

“It was great to see that despite everything else that is going on, their focus is on bringing in a good class,” he said. “At least from an engagement perspective, recruitment seems to be going on strong.”

In terms of career counseling, Darden plans to re-emphasize its foundational focus on fit, says Oakes. “We are focused on making sure there is a great fit between what a student can do and wants to do,” he said. The current economic situation provides students with an opportunity to reassess that fit and rebuild a job search plan, choosing a path based on realistic expectations and shored up with reasonable back-up plans.

As students previously laser-focused on financial services begin to redirect their searches, won’t other hiring areas become even more competitive? Yes, conceded Oakes, but he hopes that those areas will hold up from an opportunity standpoint. Based on early indicators such as the scheduling of recruiting visits and interviews, “things look to be holding up rather well despite the slowdown in the economy,” Oakes reports. Manufacturing, consulting and marketing firms have each reported that they are looking to increase full-time opportunities, Oakes says.

Oakes does not anticipate sweeping changes to business school programs or curriculum as a result of the recent financial turmoil, though there are certainly teaching opportunies, he says. In fact, one of Darden’s corporate finance professors has already finished a case on the fall of Bear Stearns, said Oakes. “There will be any number of lessons to be learned from this,” he says.

For now, Oakes says, the main lesson students seem to be taking is this: “When it seems too good to be true, it likely is.”

Source: https://blog.clearadmit.com/2008/09/wall ... om-darden/