Veritas Prep Admissions Consultant
Joined: 19 Aug 2015
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How to prep for your MBA internship
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19 Mar 2016, 13:56
How to prep for your MBA internship
Now that you are on the right track for preparing for the rest of your life and in your first year as an MBA student, it is imperative that you look, interview, and land a summer internship. Why? Business students tend to think about their career paths before they have turned in their applications for school and many MBA programs, which now require prospective students to submit their resumes when they apply to give admission advisors a sense of what students are like as employees. However, just getting the internship is not enough.
“Once you accept an internship, the process doesn’t stop,” says Associate Dean and Director of Washington University in St. Louis Olin Business School, Mark Brostoff. Once a student knows where their summer internship will be, they can use their spring semester to help prepare for work. Here are some useful tips to help you prepare for your summer internship.
MBA students who find their summer internship early, can register for classes that are related to their job, which helps to refine their skills that are used on the job. For example, if you are going into finance, maybe take one or two more finance classes before summer.
If you receive your summer internship after the start of classes, you can still sign up for business school case competitions. Many competitions provide specific opportunities in order for students to develop skills that will help them in their internships. The teams that are formed within this competition are given a business problem and an allotted amount of time to solve it. These competitions will help give you real world like experiences that you might use in the workforce.
Student organizations or clubs are another great way to help a student prepare for an internship. Clubs help offer other career development opportunities and are often partnered with the school’s career services department, which may host events that bring in recruiters or alumni who can help with a student’s career goals. Clubs are important because they offer an alternative way for MBA students to work in a team setting on real-world problems.
Another tucked away treasure, is the school’s career center, which gives students opportunities to help improve their presentation skills, practice writing white papers, and even puts them in touch with alumni, who can also advise them on interning.
Start learning about the company that you will be interning for, before you even begin work and brush up on the skills that you will be using on a day to day basis, beginning on day one.
Lastly, it is important that you research and cover all of the technical skills that you will be using, such as: financial rations, excel modeling, advanced PowerPoint features, and statistical analysis techniques. After you have covered those, practice on your soft skills as well (communication, corporate communication, and networking skills).
Remember that the goal of an internship is to land the full-time job. So, be ready to wow the pants off of your bosses by following the tips above.