1

BURIED ALIVEHow internships affect career choice amongst top-tier MBAs

PRISCILA BALA Yale School of Management

2 INTRODUCTION

People complain, Oh, my search is so unique,’ but no, everyone’s kind of the same.”

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— ANNA 1

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D avid is an incredible guy. He is hand-some, smart, and full of life; a talented poet with a pro-fessional degree. He is getting an MBA from a highly-ranked school, and like many other graduate business students across the country, David spent last summer as an Investment Banking Associate in New York.

Being a top student, David had an internship offer before he started business school. Competition for talent has become so stiff that in order to evade schools’ calendar restrictions on when firms can recruit on campus, companies have begun courting MBA candidates even before they set foot in business school. Many of these internship offers become full-time positions: effectively candidates could be getting their post-graduation job soon after their MBA acceptance letter.

At first glance, the situation may seem very positive for the candidates: they must have the upper hand, considering the lengths to which companies will go to attract them. The process starts with personal invitations to dinners or cocktail events, and continues with calls from partners, rooftop parties and corporate swag. Sounds like a dream. Does it turn out to be one?

The MBA internship is a well-known rite of passage. Every summer, many of the over 187,0002 MBA students across the US spend approximately 10 to 12 weeks on an extended job trial. In theory, the internship is a test of whether the candidate and the firm are a good fit for each other, and both parties are involved in active data gathering and analysis, to see if they are a good match.

This theory matched my view of the purpose of the internship. However, David, in hauntingly vivid terms, described his experience differently: U

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4 I looked down the hall, and I said out loud - there was no one there, it was 3am - “they will bury me here.” Everything that’s good about me, everything that makes sense, everything that makes me different, everything that people who know me have said ‘there’s something in the world for you,’ it will just be buried here. You can just put a stone on it and say “here lies David’s ambition, as a tribute to Mammon,” as opposed to a tribute to what it is that I’m actually supposed to be doing in this world.

It sounds like you are not staying after the summer.

No, no – I’m definitely taking the offer if they give it to me.

DAVID

DAVID

PRISCILA

5David’s intentions raises a thought: since the purpose of the internship is to give people insight into the life they will have should they accept the job, one would expect that greatly disliking the experience would mean not coming back. So why is that not the case?

It was surprising that students from top MBA schools, who already have a proven track record of not only getting prestigious positions, but also of excelling at those jobs, would discount their bad experiences so heavily, considering the many employment options they have. Given these options, the explanation that money, prestige, or desire for security are overriding factors for choosing a job seemed overly simplistic.

Considering the high correlation between successful outcomes at work and the money and prestige that follow, it was astounding to imagine the extent to which students could dissociate their unhappiness from performance: in effect, they were deciding to take jobs they don’t like while still expecting monetary and professional success. This requires a belief in the ability to succeed despite daily discontent. Students from top schools aspire to be in leadership positions at very competitive firms; at those levels, sustaining excellent performance relative to exceptional peers can be very difficult without the drive of passion and job satisfaction.

The results that follow are the result of surveying more than one hundred students from top schools about their recruiting intentions and summer experiences. Fifteen participants were asked to share, in great detail, their thoughts on the internship process, how it unfolded, andits aftermath.

Specifically, the work aimed to answer the following questions: what impact did the internship have on students’ perceptions of job fit? How did the internship impact the decision to accept an offer? If students dislike the internship, what stories do they tell themselves to justify a decision that is at odds with their continued success?

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6 SHEEP INWOLVES’ CLOTHING

I didn’t cope really that well. I wonder how people cope.”

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— GEORGE

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F inding a job, especially on the eve of a new professional degree, is a very complex affair. The process of recruiting is an emotional and exhausting one – ideas of success, identity, self-confidence and autonomy are all seemingly enmeshed in this one decision. It straddles romance, prestige, personal fulfillment, and a sense of purpose4. The feelings are no different for MBA students at top schools; if anything, they are heightened, given the company they keep.

Imagine you have been accepted to a top MBA program, along with a class of tremendously talented students. You arrive on campus to meet leaders in various fields, boasting military, athletic and artistic accomplishments. There are political chiefs of staff, healthcare directors, COOs of international development non-profits and finance whizzes. When it comes to recruiting, these are your peers—and your competition. There are others like them at other top schools.

Without warning, your feelings about what you can do, and what you should do, somehow begin to change. You’ve been successful in recruiting up to this point – you are, after all, at a top business school – and you are about to achieve another major accolade for your career. This would not be the time to doubt yourself, would it?

In his most recent book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the work of sociologist Samuel Stouffer, who coined the term “relative deprivation.” The bottom line of Stouffer’s research5 (which encompassed half a million men and women after World War II) is that we assess our situation and abilities according to local contexts, not global perspectives. We make sense of things “by comparing ourselves to people ‘in the same

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8 boat as ourselves.’ Our sense of how deprived we are is relative.”6 We measure our success in relation to the success of others around us. In the context of education, relative deprivation has been called the “Big Fish – Little Pond Effect.” While the research has been applied to students’ academic abilities 7 (termed academic “self-concept”), it is not hard to see its application in recruiting: “the more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities… and that feeling – as subjective and ridiculous and irrational as it may be – matters… It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.”8

“And then there’s also the trap of comparing with other people. The times I’ve been the most unhappy or stressed have been when I’ve caught myself comparing myself to other people too much, and I just have to remind myself that we are all on a different journey, and at different stages.” —Sandra

Back on campus, it’s the beginning of fall of second year, and some of your classmates arrive from their internships with job offers in hand. You give this little thought, as there is still plenty of time to recruit. Those peers are not aiming for the same industry as you – or are they? Then, a few weeks into September it begins: companies arrive on campus to start their networking and recruiting events, and what used to be a haven of jeans and trendy t-shirts becomes a torrent of business formal attire.

“Seeing everyone in a suit, heading toward this direction, it’s like that thing where everyone starts turning in the elevator, and you’re standing in the elevator and you’re like: Is this what makes sense? Should I be turning here?” —Jane

The feeling of “is this something I should be doing?” seems to go beyond questioning whether recruiting early in the cycle makes sense. Many MBA students (74.3% of respondents) report attending business school in

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9the hopes of switching careers: having to apply for jobs barely a few weeks into their program hardly seems conducive to the kind of productive exploration that would lead to well-informed decisions. Further, people’s assessment of what they believe they should be doing changes dramatically as their environment or a shifting economy signals which are the hot sectors or the prestigious tracks.

“Even not caring about energy stresses me out – nine out of ten people who care about the environment are interested in energy and I go ‘Am I missing that boat too?’” —Jane

“That might be where they are getting their self-worth from; so they are not in a great relationship or they are not happy about other aspects of their lives ¬but if they can go into a conversation and say I work at bank X that you’ve all heard of, or consulting firm Y that you’ve all heard of, then in that case that’s what people perceive of them.” —George

The lure from established tracks can be particularly overpowering for people who are uncertain of what they would like to do. Business school students balance between the exhilarating optionality and sense of agency they derive from the many opportunities they perceive they have, and the pressure to make the “right” decision for their career.

“It’s very strange, because it feels weird – I realize that if I wanted to, I could go work in London, or I could go work in Tokyo: I could do that if I wanted to, and it blows my mind, and it totally fulfilled my desire to have agency in my life.“ —Tom

10 Management consulting falls into the “people just giving it a try” thing; or a lot of people just get swept up in it. It’s the first thing coming, banking and consulting, and they go “I should probably do it” because they feel like they aren’t doing anything if they aren’t doing something.

It’s sort of like that thing in decision-making: the higher stakes the decision the less likely you are to make an autonomous decision, and the more likely you are to do what everyone else is doing, because if everyone is doing it, the more it must make sense, and the higher the stakes of the decision the more you want it to make sense.

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11LET THEGAMES BEGIN

Why am I doing this? Is this really the most reasonable thing to be doing?”

“

— MARK

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T i he on-campus recruiting process generally consists of several stages. First, companies will sponsor presentations and networking events, group gatherings in which students mingle with firm representatives and work to establish a positive first impression. The group events might be followed by informal coffee-chats, where one student will meet with one or more company employees for a few minutes of undivided attention. Formal submission of resumes and cover letters – known as the “drop” period – happens around this time, and might be followed by first-round interviews. These can lead to invitations to dinner or other select events, and a second and final round of interviews at the company’s offices, which usually involves travel and multiple back-to-back meetings with potential colleagues. At each step, students are unsure of what will happen next; they are feverishly researching the company, reaching out to current employees, and preparing for their interviews. At the same time, they are taking a mandatory and demanding set of classes, many in subjects they might not have had exposure to before, adapting to a different living environment and establishing entire new social networks. This process can last for months.

Recruits generally are not conscious of the massive amount of resources and research put into this process. Multinationals around the globe invest heavily in their human capital practices (Silicon Valley likes to call it “People Operations”). The prestigious companies that come to campus tend to have entire departments of full-time experts whose main purpose at work is to attract high talent candidates to their practices. They employ psychology (the scarcity principle, the persuasion of prestige, the endowment effect), professional marketing, big data and large budgets. Like fraternities, companies

13know that if they make people work hard for the offer, they will want it more. Coupled with the energy, time and emotions students invest in the process, all these factors create a heavily-skewed value perception in favor of the prestigious companies. Many students felt that, by the time an internship was finally graced upon then, their ability to reject an offer had dramatically diminished.

“When you reach that point, going from round one to round two, you are getting partners who are so established reaching out to you; I mean the amount of attention you get, the boosting of your ego and all the other stuff that you’re getting, it just gets really infectious – and you probably don’t even stop to think whether you want the job during that particular period.” —George

“I think there is something about this process that a lot of firms that really work hard to recruit MBAs know about, this process to really make you work for it and to make you want it – it makes it really hard to say no to the offer when it finally comes, because they keep you waiting, they keep you going through multiple rounds.” —John

“Prestige plays a big role in a lot of this; I think it did play into accepting the offer early, and even in just taking the offer. Being able to go to be on a panel on Welcome Weekend and tell people where I was going and have a flock of people come ask me how I got it – and I don’t know how I got it – does play a part.” —Gabe

It is possible that students are disadvantaged given the imbalance of their resources compared to companies, but that does not mean students lose all agency. Even if students accept internships they did not plan for, or that they believe are not good matches, the effects should be conscribed to the summer. And since they will then be able to properly assess the fit of the company and position to their own career goals, the tables should turn through the internship. But do they?9 See

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14 When I was offered this job in finance, I did think about what is the rational choice, does this make sense, what makes sense; but it’s a very strong and compelling argument or moment when somebody offers you something you don’t think you deserve; and then you think maybe I should take it just because it’s been offered to me, right, because these people must see something special in me, or know something I don’t realize, and it makes it easier to accept something weird or different when you haven’t really looked for it but someone wants you to do it… There’s a lot of ego in the job search and how companies play to people’s ego makes a big difference in the responses that they get.

MARK

15UNDERSTANDINGFIT

What will you do when you are good at a role that you don’t like? How do you get out of it?”

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— JAMES

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C urrent MBA students expect to spend the majority of their time either at work, or thinking about work.10 Many factors important to their sense of identity are tied to the careers they’ll be pursuing; therefore, “fit” is an important attribute to consider. How did the internship experience affect people’s perception of how good a match this company was to their interests and inclinations?

In the sample, 92 people had recently completed a summer internship. While it was certain that a few students, like David, would accept the job regardless of their internship experience, it was likely that the internship experience would have a big impact on fit. After all, one of the main purposes of the experience was to give future employees a sense of what their work-life balance would be, and whether this would be a good team and organization for them. Controlling for feelings about the organization, confidence in performance, fixed-growth mindset, work orientation, optimism, age and gender, the internship experience had no significant effect on fit.

The point bears repeating: student’s perception of job fit was not significantly affected by the internship experience.

Even more surprising was that the only factors that seem to have an effect on fit are people’s fixed-growth mindset and “calling” as a work orientation. These factors went from mere control measure to definitive indicator, as an organizational behavior scholar might have confidently predicted.

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17The fixed-growth mindset is Carol Dweck’s scale on how people think about personal attributes, like intelligence or talent: can people change or are people’s traits basically fixed at birth? This work has vast implications throughout various human domains, as beliefs about the malleability of attributes define how people judge themselves, what opportunities they pursue, what challenges they take on and how they make sense of those experiences. For instance, if you think intelligence is fixed, you focus on how much of it you have and see failure as negating it. If you think it’s a malleable trait (growth mindset) you place emphasis on developing intelligence, and focus on effort and problem-solving instead of self-judgment.11

“Calling” is one of the three facets of what Wrzesniewski et al. study as work orientation: the way people see their work as either a job (necessity and financial compensation), a career (advancement) or a calling (enjoyment of fulfilling work). It turns out that people with a Calling orientation have significantly higher life and job satisfaction, and miss significantly fewer days of work. Groups with a higher proportion of Calling members have stronger identification with the team, less conflict, more trust in management, more commitment to the team itself and healthier group processes.12

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18 ACCEPTINGAN OFFER

I don’t need another offer to negotiate – my worth to the firm is there.”

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— ANNA

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S o what does this mean, that students’ fixed-growth mindset or calling orientation overshadowed the internship experience? It means the students’ beliefs before the internship and the stories they tell themselves about whether this job is something that would be good for them completely trump the actual experience of the summer.

“It was access to a skill set, which is important; it was also having the name, which is also important: at the end of the day it leverages you to go into certain things in the future, and I don’t even understand what my own end-game is – but someway, somehow I think it involves some amount of access and names like [Bank] give you access… You’re trying to be part of the good old boys club; because it’s access, it’s credibility to have the name on your resume.” —David

“I expected not to like it; I didn’t think I would like consulting, I didn’t think I’d like some of the work involved – I just thought it would be good for me.” —Sandra

The stronger students’ growth mindsets were, the better they saw the fit between themselves and the internship firm. Likewise, students with a stronger sense of calling for the work they would be doing in the internship left those internships with a stronger sense of fit with the firm.

The interviews suggested that a segment of students had already made up their minds that this was the job for them, even before they started the internship. The process had become more of a rite of passage than a necessary investigation tool; their feelings about the summer

20 would not invalidate the already set decision that the organization they were joining was good for their long-term goals, and that they were willing and able to face short-term sacrifices if needed.

The problem here, both for students – whose careers and futures are on the line – and for schools – whose reputations and future support are on the line – is that students are effectively making uninformed career choices by ignoring first-hand evidence. To further their leadership objectives, asking whether this is a prestigious job is not enough: instead, one needs to know “is this a prestigious job in which I can excel?” and for that, fit is paramount.

In its current form, the internship perpetuates the appearance of investigative exploration and measured consideration. In reality, many students are deciding on the basis of their own beliefs rather than the reality of the jobs they are going into. How can that be? What makes talented and smart students negate their own experiences?

One explanation comes from the scholarship of Erica Dawson, Thomas Gilovich and Dennis T. Reagan. Their paper “Motivated Reasoning and Performance on the Wason Selection Task” explores how people approach their beliefs with a bias toward validation, and propositions against them with a bias for invalidation. This is possible through a double-standard: their metaphor is that when evaluating something agreeable, people tend to ask “can I believe this?” while when people are confronted with something disagreeable their tendency is to ask “must I believe this?” – in essence applying a much higher evidential standard. This makes it easy to dismiss disagreeable propositions, as most anything is liable to criticism.

Their conclusion is both a warning and suggestion that applies aptly to recruiting: “The motivation to find support for preferred beliefs may render people particularly susceptible to errors. Such a motivation

21often leads a person to overlook even glaring faults in the data, because it is difficult to find what is not sought. What is needed then, are ways to encourage a general or decontextualized skepticism that can facilitate sound reasoning in situations in which a strong motivation to disconfirm a particular proposition is absent.”13

A perverse flipside of discounting negative experiences is that students, by virtue of believing that difficulty is the norm, devalued positive recruiting experiences – which were probably positive and easy precisely because the students were such an excellent fit for those positions.

“It was very easy at the end of the day to get the internship, and I don’t know if that makes it less attractive by itself – especially if you work a lot to get what you really want, and then you have to move to a plan B, and the plan B is so easy because, OK, I interviewed and it was clear they were looking for someone with what I had…”

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22 WAITING FORTHE BOATS

When I didn’t have a parachute, things have turned out much better.”

“

— GEORGE

23

R ecruiting in business school is like standing on a dock by the ocean.14 At first, you are there with your friends, and you are all socializing together, celebrating the expectation and possibilities of all the places you’re about to visit. Then, a few large cruise ships come in, immense, impressive, with crews ready to attend to your every need, promising an open bar. It’s a great ship – it’s just not going where you want to go. Your friends are hopping on, and now you have to stand on the dock alone, and watch the cruise ship float away. Your friends seem totally carefree, and seem to be enjoying themselves so much, that you start to doubt your choice. Maybe the next cruise ship will take you on. No, no—you’ll wait for your boat. But a month goes by, and you’re still standing at the dock, being battered by cold winds and the sting of salt, while another month passes, and then one more month goes by, then another. By now you are starting to imagine each boat to approach might very well be the last. Finally, spring arrives, and a fleet of boats sails to you – skiffs, barges, yachts, speed boats, rowboats, fishing boats, going to marvelous places. By this point, the cruise ship is almost at its destination, and some of the people onboard, seeing all the little boats pass them by, wonder whether they got on the right ship.

So why is it so hard to remain standing on that dock?

“One of the guys I worked with this summer, who went to school in Chicago, was telling me a bit about himself and he said that before school, when he first started, he found this really cool company that does financing for really high tech spy equipment for the military, and he was so excited (and I could see it even as he was telling me about this), and he called them up when he got to school, and they said “you know what, we don’t do internships

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24 but check back again when you are looking for full-time.’ Then he got caught up with consulting recruiting and his words were ‘I forgot about it. I literally forgot about this company,’ and it was graduation, he’d accepted the offer with X, and then suddenly he thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I was so interested in this company and I completely, literally, just forgot about it.’ And so his advice was to shop around and make sure.” —Sandra

“I can’t remember how many late nights, it’d be two o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the morning and the two of us [a friend] would be sitting there and he’d be literally agonizing: I don’t know what the heck I want to do…even to me, even knowing I didn’t have an interest in it, it was so difficult saying no because you got this amazing salary waiting for you, it means your whole second-year of business school you can just chill and you know that at the end of the day you’ll have a great brand on your resume, and that you can kind of push through it for a few years, and that it will still put you in a great position, so it’s hard to say no to that, especially when you don’t have anything else.” —Steve

There are a number of things at play. As many of the stories indicate, the social pressures of the communal recruiting experience can have a large effect on personal preferences, along with the belief that, regardless of one’s experience, simply wearing the badge of prestige afforded by a renowned company will be enough to carry the day. The problem is that students underestimate the costs they will have to pay to gain that badge, specifically the opportunity cost of establishing leadership in a different line of work.

“I think there is an expectation that every year spent at one of these firms counts for two years outside of it, but in reality that’s not true until you hit partner. It’s not really the case that industry experience is devalued that much compared to consulting experience. It’s a great

25thing to go into any industry you want, the flexibility that it offers is unparalleled, but if you know the industry you want to go into anyways, there’s no performance-based difference in terms of what’s going to happen, and to me that kind of kicked the legs out from under the reason I wanted to do it, once I realized it wasn’t something I would enjoy doing in the first place.” —Tom

There is the sense that students are not yet sure of what they would like to do, and want to keep as many doors open as possible. However, the opportunity costs here are just as high, as students treat their early careers as a “prolonged MBA.” Schools could be doing a better job both helping students narrow down their target range of choices, and understand the costs they will incur with the recruiting decisions they make.

“I identified consulting fairly early as something I thought I wanted to do, and to be totally honest I don’t really know exactly why I wanted to do it, but I felt like it was the job that was accepting of someone who didn’t have a strong business background and I felt like maybe it could also help me get where I actually want to go.” —George

“I’m now pursuing management consulting again because I feel I can learn the most in the shortest amount of period and even though I won’t tell them this, I think I will probably be with them maybe three to four years, and then switch gears and either go into a corporate strategy role or maybe transition into more of a niche company, once I understand more about project management and can do more with it.” —Scott

During the interviews, I was surprised by people who had an idea of where they would like to eventually go, and yet had decided they did not have a chance, without ever trying to apply to those jobs. There was also reluctance to be pigeonholed in a particular practice – a fear that career offices could better help mitigate or manage.

26 There are a few companies I think I could work for. I have written myself off as having nothing to add to them or be of value to them… I think for me in particular, since I’m making a career switch, I feel I’m still at a place where I want to be learning and growing rather than just contributing, at least for these first few jobs. I think the first few jobs will have a much bigger impact on what ends up becoming available to me later, so yeah I’d love to work at Patagonia, but what happens if in two years I leave there and then I’m just this sportswear, apparel guy?

SCOTT

27THE REALITYOF RECRUITING

There was also a bit of impostor syndrome there for me.”

“

— TOM

28

R ecruiting can feel very lonely. Despite all of its immediacy and urgency, the very emotional core of recruiting can make open conversations about it seem superficial and dissatisfying, especially when rejection occurs. David worked really hard at the investment bank all summer, and hit every assignment out of the park. He was willing to sacrifice his (short-term) well-being for the position he thought he needed. At the end of the internship, like many other MBA students, he didn’t get “the offer:”

“When I didn’t get the offer I felt like it was a deep, deep rejection and negation of a lot of what I value and find true to myself. So it was a negation of my ability to work hard, a negation of my ability to succeed among peers, my ability to kind of “be a banker” – you know, we can go back and forth on whether one should take all that from one company saying no, but anyway that was the immediate reaction. And that faded… but there’s always that sentiment – the same as losing a girlfriend. There’s anger, denial, and deep withdrawal at times as well… In retrospect, it’s one of these things, when you’re at school there’s this fetishization of names, and you begin to trace your career as though you had 20:20 vision or foresight and you can plot the next five steps and one step is dependent on the other, and there’s this ridiculous sense of linearity and causality that doesn’t even exist, but is very comforting to those who are smart and hard-working and ambitious because you think there’s a reason for everything. “I am here because I am smart, and I got into a [Top MBA] because I’m smart, and I’ll get from [Bank] to somewhere else because I’m smart, and because I’m this and that.” —David

29The drive to make sense of the process can lead students to hold on to skewed points of perception, by turning choices into absolutes. Many interviewees employed binary terms such as “nothing else”, “no one”, “only one”, “only way” in reference to internships or offers students were pursuing. There is a strong push for “black and white” – a desire to neatly define success – in order to turn these difficult choices into “common sense.”

“Coming from undergrad there was this sense that there were four things you could do and be successful: you’re either going to go to Law School, go to Med School, be in management consulting or be an investment banker. I did consulting already… My process was essentially I don’t know what I want to do, I know there were these four things, this one seems like one I can actually do, because I’m not going to go be a doctor and I didn’t see any downsides to pursuing it for the summer – I only saw upside.” —Steve

“Nothing was going to be quite as exciting or interesting, and in some sense I think nothing was going to ignore my resume [his lack of previous experience in the industry] to the same degree – like here is this real stretch, and no one else was going to let me do that, no one else was going to take that risk with me.” —Mark

The desire for absolutes is as common as the absolutes are false. If we shifted the conversation towards say, romance, it is highly unlikely that an educated 29 year-old at a top global institution would say that there is only one person (or four) in the world for him. This extreme parallel highlights how high the pressure to feel at peace with recruiting decisions goes, driving the most intelligent and qualified candidates to overlook the scope of the arguments they are making to themselves. Clearly being single is quite different from being jobless and destitute, but the latter is unfounded for the group under

30 discussion: MBA students from top schools with access to truly global opportunities.

Amongst participants, there is an unspoken sense that success must be effortless, that pain, failure or struggle must be easily overcome, that being the person who needs help is somehow less than otherwise. But such beliefs are ultimately unfounded, as work measures people’s contribution and not just their endurance – and as far as contribution goes, fit is extremely important, if not essential.

Recalling the survey results, the only factors that appear to have an effect on fit are people’s fixed-growth mindset and Calling as a work orientation. Additional evidence suggests that the primary reason people take jobs that go against their grain is not money, prestige or security – it is the fact that they fear or do not believe they have good options.

31CHARTING THE PATH THAT WORKS FOR YOU

There’s no substitute for real passion. You can’t fake it.”

“

— DAVID

32

F ive months after his rejection from the bank, David got the job he had wanted all along. His dream had been investment management – he had spent much personal time trading and he was passionate about discussing investment ideas. Over the summer, he had talked about this hobby as if it were a blemish in his track record; later he would recognize his love for the markets as the defining and crucial element of his present success. After the summer he enrolled in an independent study with a few classmates to focus on picking and debating investments. He kept trying to recruit with other banks, but he also applied to the job he dreamed about. By the time he got to his investment management interview he felt emboldened and energized.

“[In the interview] eventually I blossomed, I am bubbling, I am bouncing… I was told after the fact that some partners had looked at my resume and asked “wait, what is this guy doing here?” only to have people meet me and totally convert, saying this guy is amazing, he is awesome: he is passionate, he knows what he is talking about and he is eager.” —David

David was able to experience the value of harnessing his real passions in the job search. When people move away from their preferences, drivers of satisfaction, turnover and performance are all affected – it is as if students grabbed a golden ring – prestigious or established jobs – with one hand, and shot their foot with the other.

When it comes to recruiting, subjective biases abound: how can we prepare people to be more objective as

33far as the jobs they will excel at? Recruiting is not easy, and managing the feelings and pressures of the process requires a lot of focus and energy. How do the students who stay on the “dock,” who stick to their plans and their values (as far as what they are looking for in a job) do it?

“I focused on what I came to school for – which was to change my career path – but I came in with a very open mind, trying to figure out what was talking to me, and more importantly, I tried to figure out why something was speaking to me more than something else… There’s a trap where you can think you have a lot more time than you have, and I think just making sure that whenever you are doing something or working through something you’re not just spinning your wheels – you need to be making progress, and I think dedicating that brain energy was very central to me doing as well as I did in finding the firms, interviewing at the firms and then knowing how to make the right choice at the end… Think about the things that are important to you; develop your job; design it without even thinking about what is out there, because then as you see all these postings come up you can mark down if they fit those criteria… It’s not worth going through interviews in places where you know you definitely don’t want to work at.” —Anna

“My mindset is that in order to be successful at something you have to be in it 100%...A mentor of mine said to me at one time: ‘you can’t just accept everything that comes – you have to be able to say no to things, and be able to do that after evaluating and understanding what you want to do, and what is right for you.’ And that sunk in after a few years and I got to the point when I said I can actually do that: I have the inner willpower, and I don’t know if it’s self-confidence or what, to be able to say ‘I don’t have to take everything that comes. I can say no.’” —Steve

34 “Recognizing what my core competencies and interests were and then how much physical, emotional and financial resources I have not had the discipline to not get drained away, sort of being like, ‘maybe I want to try this or maybe I want to try that,’ and I think I was just like, ‘ok – stop.’ I made a list for a while and the stuff on the list was really random, like all of these things that in a world of infinite time and resources I might pursue, you know, but just in terms of coherence – and economics of resources – it didn’t fit. So basically now, when I see something I say ‘ok, is this like a distraction thing or is this part of the matrix that makes sense?’ If it’s not part of the matrix that makes sense, then I’m like, ‘it will be ok, the matrix makes sense; trust the matrix; it’s worked well so far: in your entire life, the good parts of it have been in the matrix, and the parts that have come and gone have by and large been outside of it.’” —Jane

“I really defined and linked who I was to my interest in education, and I think that was influential in allowing me not to be so caught up in whatever hysteria there was around, with people getting offers in what were considered the most prestigious firms or things like that. I was less concerned with that, and I think in part because of this identity piece.” —Grant

One intervention would be to encourage people to get more data. Students who had prior or concurrent data were more objective in their trade-offs and generally discounted their experiences less than those who limited their options.

Behavioral scholarship demonstrates that minority influence – even a single dissenting voice – can be enormously powerful. Talking to people who are at the target company is not enough; encouraging students to talk to people who had offers at said company but

35did not take them, or people who are no longer at the company, would provide a more complete picture of the challenge ahead.

Ultimately, it is up to the students to clearly assess their feelings: more than their thoughts or judgments, it is worth paying close attention to how they feel about the people they will be working with, how they feel about the work itself, and then how they value the final result of their work. David had once been adamant that he should take the banking job; now he couldn’t imagine his life with it.

“To be part of a program that is meant to promote leadership within [asset management] is beyond my wildest dreams. I was just hoping to be some kind of portfolio analyst... It feels incredible; it feels like everything was meant to be… Banking was a tough experience but it was one of those trials by fire that you kind of need to go through… I shudder to think what would have happened if I had gotten the offer and taken it – because I would have taken it.” —David

Choosing an established, prestigious, low-risk trek that keeps options open and reduces anxiety and uncertainty might seem like a good option – and it is a great one, for the people whose passion lives in those jobs. For everyone else, while the costs of those choices are not as visceral or immediate, they are inescapable: personal satisfaction and high performance (measured by one’s own potential) suffer, limiting future options.

Escaping this conundrum is MBA students’ first managerial task. Schools must prepare and support them; companies must be wise in balancing their public desirability with recruiting policies and practices that focus on fit. Transparency and openness about real motivations will ensure better outcomes for all involved.

36 The hard and happy truth of David’s journey is that he was saved from himself. Had the bank not closed the door for him in investment banking, he would not have pursued the job where he truly shines. His passion would have been buried, along with much of his potential for leadership. His courage to persevere made clear what had been true all along: there are many, many paths open for him, and the ones that suit his passions might just bring him the happiness and success he seeks.

37

APPENDIX

38 DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

Participants completed a web-based survey including age, gender, degree, background industry and future industry as control data. I assessed participants’ levels of generalized optimism versus pessimism using Scheier, Carver and Bridges’ revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R)15, as well as Wrzesniewski’s work orientation scale16 (scales of 1. Strongly disagree – 7. Strongly agree). The survey allowed participants to numerically describe their internship experience (scale of 1-100, from “Worst experience possible” to “Best experience possible”) and their feelings about the organization following the summer (scale of 0-100 from “Completely negative” to “Completely positive”).

I then asked participants the likelihood they would accept an offer; either one they received or that they could receive (summer offers are extended throughout the months following the internship and possibly after data collection for this work). For those who had already made a decision, there were open-ended questions to describe the factors that led them to that point. There were also questions related to perceived person-organization fit, including a sixth item (alpha = 0.92) added to Cable’s established measure17.

Additionally, there was a set of questions regarding anticipated tenure with the organization, confidence in job performance, and confidence in recruiting in regards to organizations at the top of one’s recruiting list. The survey closed with Dweck’s fixed to incremental18 mindset scale. Participants’ average age was 28.86, with a minimum of 23 and a maximum of 39 years old. There were 52 women and 53 men (variable gender, male=0, female=1).

Sche

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15 16 17 18

39AGE

CALLING

FIXED-GROWTH MINDSET

EXPECTED TENURE

OPTIMISM

CAREER

40 INTERNSHIP EXPERIENCE

LIKELIHOOD OF

ACCEPTING THE OFFER

FIT

FEELINGS FOR THE ORGANIZATION

CONFIDENCE INPERFORMANCE

CONFIDENCE INRECRUITING

41

42

43FIT

To probe deeper into the relationship between fit, the internship experience and personal traits I tested various models (using stepwise estimation) that considered how Age, Gender, Career, Calling Orientation, Above-average Calling Orientation (binary dummy), Fixed-growth Mindset, Above-average Fixed-Growth Mindset (binary dummy), Optimism, Internship Experience, Tenure, Confidence in Recruiting, Confidence in Performance and Intended Future Industry affected fit. I added and removed variables in steps to arrive at the highest R-squared model, with the highest F measure, as well as adding a dummy variable for fixed-growth values above average, finally settling on the model:

According to the model, Calling Orientation and a High Fixed-Growth measure were statistically significant to assessments of fit. However, it is possible that this model is affected by endogeneity, as it could be the case that people with a Calling orientation or high Fixed-Growth measures are more likely to look for jobs with a better fit in the first place. An instrument – like parents’ calling (a measure correlated with calling but not with fit) – could help us assess whether that is the case, but the data collection efforts in this project were anonymous and self-contained.

TENURE To assess factors significant to tenure, I used the model:

The internship experience was barely significant at the 5% level, with a very low coefficient. However, including internship experience improved the fit of the model from 0.14 to 0.22, and increased the significance

44 of the calling coefficient. These results indicate that work orientation – calling and career – are very significant to tenure expectations. An increase in one-point of calling is related to an expected 1.17 additional years on the job, while an increase in one-point of career is related to a decrease of 0.76 years in tenure expectation.

LIKELIHOOD OF ACCEPTING A FULL-TIME OFFER

The sample included 36 students who had received an offer from the summer and had not yet decided if they were going to take the job. The data questionnaire asked the probability on a scale of 0-100 that students would accept the offer. If the internship experience were significant in helping students figure out whether they should take the job, it would be highly related to this measure of the “likelihood of accepting the offer.” That was not the case, however. The internship experience was not significant on its own, or controlling for other factors. Ultimately, the most significant factor affecting the likelihood of accepting an offer was a student’s career orientation. Improved model fit, controlling for additional variables, only intensified the coefficient magnitude of the career – acceptance likelihood relationship. However, given the small sample size, these results would be best replicated along larger populations. The fit of the sample was significant however, indicating a strong relationship.

FACTORS INFLUENCING INDUSTRY CHANGE A significant portion of the sample (74.3%) indicated a desire to change industry post-graduation. The survey asked students about their background industry and future industry; cases in which both answers were the same were coded as a zero, otherwise the variable was coded as a one. The data ran through a Probit model to

45gauge the probability that one would change industries:

None of the coefficients were statistically significant in this analysis, and the fit of the model was very poor, indicating that other factors, outside of the model, account for an inclination to change industries. FACTORS AFFECTING DECISION VS. INDECISION

While certain students had decided to accept or decline the offered jobs, another contingent was still holding on to their offers. Did any of the variables gathered in the data explain any differences between those groups? Was there something about students’ confidence in their ability to perform, their internship experience, or their gender that might explain indecision? I used Ordered Probit models to investigate these potential relationships, with Declined the offer, Considering the offer and Accepted the offer as ordered outcomes. I explored ten different variables in sequential combinations and none of the analysis was statistically significant. Even the most significant variables were not relevant at the 5% level, indicating that factors outside of the model accounted for the different outcomes.

FACTORS AFFECTING INDUSTRY CHOICE

Were there differences between people who wanted to go into different sectors? To investigate this possibility I coded five different outcomes:

Consulting = 0 Finance, Banking and Real Estate = 1 Technology and Entrepreneurship = 2 Other sectors = 3 Don’t know what sector = 4

46 These outcomes were assessed based on the following Multinomial Logit model:

Only Calling was significant, and only for those who were still undecided (coef. -0.925; std. err. 0.436). This conclusion seems reasonable, as those with a higher Calling orientation would be more likely to settle less easily for a job that was not a high fit.