MBA Students Shopping Their Skills At Recruiting Event to Be Held In Virginia

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The journey to success will begin in a rented van on Wednesday, Nov. 12, for five MBA students from the University at Buffalo School of Management.

That's when they'll set out for Arlington, Va., to compete for jobs, along with hundreds of other MBA students, at a mass-interview event to be attended by 28 national companies seeking to hire soon-to-be-minted MBA graduates.

The five UB MBAs will join 18 of their classmates who are flying or car-pooling to the event, called the Capital MBA Consortium, to be held Nov. 13 and 14 in the Doubletree Hotel/National Airport at Crystal City in Arlington, just outside Washington, D.C.

Armed with resumés and their best business attire, most of the students have been "pre-selected" for interviews by the companies. Others are listed as "alternates" hoping to move into interview slots vacated by no-shows, and some will try to convince the corporate recruiters of their interview-worthiness at a job fair to be held on Thursday, the day before scheduled interviews.

The consortium, organized by 15 business schools nationwide, is designed to improve the range of job opportunities available to MBA students, and is particularly important for smaller MBA programs, like UB's, that would not ordinarily attract to their campuses the corporate recruiters in attendance.

Some schools to be represented at the event, such as Pittsburgh, Maryland, Case Western, Florida, Georgia and Notre Dame, are ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News & World Report, which means their campuses are regular stops for many major companies during annual fall recruiting tours. Other business schools, like UB (which is ranked in the top 100 among more than 500 MBA programs nationally), must leverage as much as they can from recruitment consortia and use the events to build greater corporate interest in their MBA programs as a source for talented hires.

"The stakes are much higher for our students because they are going up against students from more-visible programs," says Michael Paolini, associate director of the UB School of Management's Career Resource Center, a co-organizer of the consortium.

"For us, these consortia are a very important part of our strategy to expand job opportunities for our students to areas beyond Buffalo and New York State," he says.

"And if our graduates prove to be assets to their firms, recruiters will begin to involve us more in their recruitment plans."

Paolini and other members of the management school's career center staff repeatedly have stressed to students the importance of attending the consortia and have diligently worked to help polish the students' interviewing skills.

It's paid off.

Last year at the National MBA Consortium in Chicago, the UB MBA program more than held its own against programs with higher pedigrees. In fact, it had the most hires of 14 schools at the event. Nine UB MBAs landed jobs, at an average starting salary of $52,000, according to Paolini.

Their success has proven to be a significant reputation-boost for the management school, as more national recruiters have begun to express an interest in the program's graduates and because national rankings of the best MBA programs are based heavily on average starting salaries.

Of the UB MBAs attending the event next week in Arlington, 11 have been pre-selected for interviews, seven are alternates and five others hope to score interviews at the job fair.

Michael Gorksi, one of the students who will be at the wheel of the van during the eight-hour drive to Arlington, has an interview scheduled with the LakeWest Group, a consulting firm for the retail industry, but he hopes to line up additional interviews by shopping his credentials to other recruiters at the job fair.

"It's definitely going to be very competitive, but on a gut-level, I know I'll do well," says Gorski, 27, of Buffalo. "It's a great opportunity for us to prove the caliber of our education and experience."

Unlike Gorski, who is seeking a position outside of Western New York, some of the UB students, like Brian Hines, 30, of Hamburg, are using the consortium as practice for potential interviews with Buffalo-based companies.

"I'd like to stay in Buffalo and find a job as a human-resource manager for a not-for-profit organization," says Hines, who is car-pooling with three other students. "If I'm offered a good job somewhere else I'll consider it, but my first choice is to stay in Buffalo."