What To Do When You Hate Your Internship

Many MBAs are starting their summer internships, and many of them have discovered they are miserable. Miro & Tom talk about what to do if you are one of them ... and some tips for business school deans on the job hunt.

We’ll provide Resume tips for business school Deans lookin’ for jobs
and talk about what to do if your Internship sucks

(1) Headlines: John’s Hopkins Dean Resigns

Yash Gupta has resigned abruptly as Dean of John’s Hopkins Carey School of Business. Gupta was the founding dean of the business school which was created in 2007. He left before his first class of full-time MBAs even graduated.

Big vote of confidence to those students Miro!

Students weren’t too sad to see him go. In the past 6 months his name came up as a finalist in 3 different university president or provost searches.

It’s always awkward to run across your Dean’s resume on Monster.com

An what a resume it was! We have a link at the site. The dean compiled a 41 page resume of his accomplishments.

I love this thing

I know you do Tom. I have come up with highlightst hat I think you will enjoy.

As the inaugural dean, I have been
charged to create a unique program that can leverage the strengths of Johns Hopkins.

That’s it? For a 41 pager, I would have expected something a little more concrete. For example, you’d like to see some numbers in there so you can get a sense of what was really accomplished.

“Graduated 0 full-time MBA Students”

“I have developed very strong relationships with Maryland legislators [sic] I have used my visits to Annapolis to share our vision for the Carey School with them, and have received an overwhelmingly positive response.”

Received overwhelmingly positive response.

Applied for consulting position with McKinsey. Received “Overwhelmingly positive response.”

Did you get that job?

If I had gotten the job, wouldn’t I have just said so?

[Cut away to McKinsey: Someone takes resume from job applicant and files is into one a bin labled “Overwhelmingly Positive Response” which is immediately adjacent to “Actual Job Offers”.]

To strengthen ties in the school community, I introduced Dean’s coffee sessions for faculty, staff and students, respectively to provide a venue for participants to talk directly to the dean.

This isn’t really a resume. It’s more like a calendar that has been exported to Microsoft word. Went to grocery store, And, received overwhelmingly positive response.

So, I’ve spent some time with this monster, and I think I can boil these 41 pages down to 1 message:

Please let me out of Baltimore! Seriously, have you seen the wire. It was based on reality.

http://poetsandquants.com/2011/05/24/the-b-school-dean-who-didnt-want-to-be-dean/
http://www.csv.vcu.edu/dev/provostsearch/pdfs/Gupta_CV.pdf

Jargon
The Say/Do Ratio

Remind me of what the Say/Do Ratio actually is.

It’s the ratio of things you say you’ll do, to the the things you actually do.

Ideally, you want to keep your say/do ratio as low as low as possible. That means minimizing what you promise, and maximising what you do do.

Some people call this under-promise and over-deliver.

What should the say-do ratio ideally be?

Well, it depends on the situation.

For example, if you say you’ll meet your friends at 6pm, you want try to keep those promises as close to 100% as possible.

Otherwise you’ll experience credibility collapse.

Shouldn’t we just keep the number as low as possible all the time?

Well, no, in government contracts for example, it is standard industry practice to under bid, typically by a factor of about 10:1. If you bid 1 to 1, you’ll quickly be out of business.


Business School tip of the week
Hate your internship? Congratulations!

This doesn’t sounds like casue for celebration

MBA’s, many of you out there are just starting your internships and for many of you, you are not liking it.

Are you sure this is good? This sounds like a disaster.

Compare the idea of a bad internship with the idea of having a bad job. One of the great things about the internship, is that it’s guaranteed to end in 2 months. Hate your intersnship? Congrats! You have just run a successful experiment.

It will probably be hard to appreciate right now.

Avoiding a terrible life-long career by discovering you hate it iearly with an internship is one of the main values provided by b-school

So, what do they do now if they hate it?

The first thing you want to figure out is whether you hate the industry, or you hate the culture of your specific firm. It may be that your job is bad because of the jerks you work with, or it maybe that your industry is full of jerks!

Tease: If you’re stuck in an internship you don’t like. You’ll want to stick around for our bonus content, where we’ll go over some specific steps you can take to help make it right.


What’s on your radar this weekend
Miro: Going to the Provincetown film festival.
Tom: Kim Harves is getting married. Congratulations Kim and Mark.