I Heart My MBA

This summer, Financial Times has created an MBA blog, written by four current or recently graduated business school students about their summer internship experiences. The implicit good news to read from these postings: your degree can get along fine without finance. While internship opportunities for I-banking and private equity firms are still available, full-time hiring prospects in these fields are still shaky, and recent grads will be competing recently laid off workers. However, B-school students and graduates are flourishing in more nontraditional fields--all of the featured bloggers either work for start-up or nonprofit (or both) organizations, and gleefully report that their course work has equipped them for careers oceans away from Wall Street.

There's no doubt that the economy's sucker punch to finance careers accounts for some of the increased interest in such areas, but as banks begin to patch themselves up, will the trend snap back? Or will the new surge in start-up and nonprofit tracks cause a ripple effect for future MBAs? (More alumni in these sectors equal more alumni support at on-campus recruiting, which means more students will accept positions at these companies, and so on.) Additionally, this hiring season has forced MBA career services to work overtime to collaborate with a more diverse set of businesses to come recruit on campus. Should these new partnerships produce a long-lasting relationship between the schools and businesses, tomorrow's tree-hugging MBA might gain a little more facetime on the employment stats page.

-Posted by Megan Cassidy