As signs pointing to a rapid economic recovery remain ambiguous, students at the Fuqua School of Business are facing the daunting task that they may not get their first-choice job.
Applications to business schools have risen in recent years due to the decreasing availability of investment banking and consulting positions. As the job market has improved little, however, even students who entered business schools to escape the economy are now beginning to question their plans for the future. Many jobs, particularly in finance and small business, have taken a severe hit, decreasing the overall number of available openings in as many as two thirds of the positions students from top schools previously sought.
"When we [first] went to business school, you could jump into any career you wanted to," said Gregg Wurster, a second-year Fuqua student. "That's gone. People have to be more sensible and refine their job searches."
Tera Ferguson--a second-year Fuqua student and president of the MBA Association, the Fuqua student government--stressed the importance of students to refine their job searches to show interest in just a few opportunities.
"A lot of companies hold out of the formal recruiting process now," Ferguson said. "Since they have few recruiting dollars to spend, they put more stock into how much interest you express."
Whether such efforts will pay off will have to wait until the end of the fall recruiting season, but some students said they have noticed increased competition even in their classrooms. Although the Fuqua curriculum has not seen any structural changes in response to the economic decline, students said there is greater pressure to be at the top of the class. Wurster, the business school liason to the Graduate and Professional School Council, said he has noticed the difficulty of courses mounting.
"People are working much harder. It is very competitive to get in, but things became harder once you were in," he said. "It may happen that students begin considering law or policy or international economics because there are not as many positions available nationally."
Second year Fuqua student, Marc Sokol agreed with Wurster, but did not express concern about getting jobs in general. He said that while students may not get their first job choices, Fuqua graduates are not overly concerned with finding employment.
"I expect the economy will get better," said Sokol. "But the recruiting happens in the fall; even if the economy is better by the time we graduate, the companies that are recruiting base their decisions [for the number of recruitment's] on the economy now."
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