Look Out for These Boston Internships
If you’ve read MetroMBA’s look at how summer internships play a crucial role for MBA students, you’re probably already familiar with the many benefits of interning during your MBA career. Between forging professional connections, gaining hands-on experience, and top tier salaries, MBA students have lot to gain from seeking out these opportunities. Boston internships manage to stand out, in particular, because of a wealth of excellent business school options.
Of course, the internship model is a win-win for all participants: students get the opportunity for professional experience, and companies get to work alongside emerging talent in the business world. Companies across the U.S. actively search for and recruit this talent. The need and capacity for interns, however, can vary from organization to organization. As students begin their search for the perfect internship, and can be important to take note of what companies are the biggest internship employers in their area.
Boston Internships for MBAs
Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), created ten years ago through the merger of Anheuser-Busch and InBev, is one of top hirers for MBA students in the Boston region. A Belgian-Brazilian beverage and brewing company, AB InBev has offices throughout the world, currently employing around 183,000 people. Given the global nature of their product, the company sponsors MBA and internship opportunities with a focus on global business. Each summer, the company offers a 10-12 week summer internship at their New York office, which often results in getting hired into the company’s Global MBA program—a one year high potential leadership program that prepares participants for quick career growth.
Anheuser-Busch InBev was one of the top hirers for MBA internships at both the Harvard Business School and the Sloan School of Management at MIT, two of the most highly ranked business programs in the world. At MIT Sloan, AB InBev employed nine members of the Class of 2017 as summer interns.
Founded 173 years ago in London, Deloitte remains one of the world’s top professional services networks today, providing tax, consulting, enterprise risk and financial advisory services throughout the world. As of 2016, Deloitte was recognized as the 6th largest privately owned organization in the United States.
With roughly 263,900 employees worldwide, it’s probably no surprise that Deloitte offers plenty of Boston internships. Deloitte Consulting hired six MBA interns from MIT Sloan for the summer of 2017, and also made the lists of top employers for F.W. Olin, Harvard, and Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School.
The vast number of student interns employed at Deloitte may be a reflection of their vast internship program, which include programs like the Deloitte Consulting Immersion Program, Deloitte Women’s Leadership Launch, and the Advanced Degree Veterans’ Forum.
At Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, 108 different companies hired 140 students for internships in 2018. CVS Health, also an employer for MBAs from Harvard Business School and Babson College’s F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, hired five students from Questrom for summer internships, making it the number one employer for that school.
CVS Health Corporation, headquartered in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, has grown since 1964 into a top Fortune 500 company with more than 246,000 employees and $177 billion in annual revenue. In December 2017, the retail and health care company also made headlines when it acquired health insurance mega-company Aetna for $69 billion.
CVS Health offers a number of MBA internship programs for MBA students, depending on their interest within the field. Among them are the CVS Year-round internship, Spanish Immersion Summer Internship, and Specialty Clinical Innovation Internship. CVS also believes in students growing their careers with the organization, which likely means greater opportunity for an internship to turn into a long term career.
With the growing popularity of jobs within the healthcare administration field, it should come as no surprise that one of the top employers for MBA internships in Boston is the Boston Children’s Hospital. The hospital, founded in 1869, has been ranked by the U.S. News & World Report #1 in eight of ten clinical specialties. For 2018-19, it was named the country’s number one pediatric hospital.
The hospital is affiliated with Harvard Medical School, so it’s likely no surprise that they are a top employer of MBA students as well, learning about the other side of health care. They are also one of the top employers for MBA students at Northeastern’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business, which requires students to pursue a corporate residency for six months of its 24-month full-time MBA program.
MIT Sloan MBA Deadlines Have Been Announced
The newest batch of MIT MBA deadline dates have been announced for the Sloan School of Management, going in to the 2018-19 academic season.
Round One
Deadlines: September 25, 2018
Notifications: December 19, 2018
Round Two
Deadlines: January 22, 2019
Notifications: April 2, 2019
Round Three
Deadlines: April 8, 2019
Notifications: May 8, 2019
Head over to the official MIT Sloan website for more application information.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg Arrives at MIT, and More – Boston News
What’s happening at the best Boston business schools this week?
Asia Is Ripe For Investments. Here’s How U.S. Companies Can Capitalize – D’Amore-McKim Blog
The Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim School of Business recently published an overview of the recent Emerging Markets’ Symposium, in which Ravi Ramamurti, University Distinguished Professor of international business and strategy brought together seven CEOs and corporate executives to unpack the discussion topic, “On the Rise of Asia: How Should U.S. Companies Respond.”
Jimmy Weng, DMSB’07, and Credit Suisse’s current head of offshore investment strategies, told the audience via conference call that he believed “Asia’s economy is entering a “supercycle” of market boom.”
Symposium organizer Ramamurti said, “China is leading the way to a new era in globalization. The headroom for growth in Asia is very significant.”
You can read more about the symposium here.
Sheryl Sandberg On Facebook’s Missteps and What Comes Next – MIT Sloan Newsroom
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg delivered MIT’s 2018 commencement address last week and used her speech as an opportunity to come clean and share the lessons learned from her company’s recent Cambridge Analytica data mining imbroglio.
She told the audience, “It’s painful when you miss something — when you make the mistake of believing so much in the good you are seeing that you don’t see the bad. It’s hard when you know that you let people down.”
Sandberg speaking at the 2018 MIT commencement / Photo via Dominick Reuter
“The larger challenge is one all of us here today must face. The role of technology in our lives is growing — and that means our relationship with technology is changing. We have to change, too. We have to recognize the full weight of our responsibilities.”
You can read more Sandberg’s commencement speech and check out footage of the event here.
A Big Problem with Big Problems – Questrom Blog
Boston University Questrom School of Business associate professors Stine Grodal and Siobhan O’Mahony recently published a new study that explores how “competing and misaligned goals—combined with a lack of oversight—can derail an ambitious vision.”
In their paper “How does a Grand Challenge Become Displaced? Explaining the Duality of Field Mobilization,” Grodal explains how common “interest misalignment” can be when it comes to tackling big problems.
“The academic community might agree to focus on a grand challenge, but [individual] professors are also interested in publishing in top journals and funding graduate students, which can create misalignment between a grand challenge and a community’s existing goals.”
It’s also much easier to “develop advances in existing areas” rather than explore uncharted terrain. “People graft on to the grand challenge but are rewarded by the status quo, and end up pursuing goals that are closer to their existing work.”
Oversight is key to keeping researchers on track. Grodal notes, “With little overarching supervision, it shouldn’t be a surprise that communities found plenty of reasons to support their own missions more robustly than the mission of the grand challenge.”
Read the complete article and study here.
How To Create Your Own Internship, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
How to Land an Internship That Doesn’t Exist Yet – D’Amore-McKim Blog
The D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University recently published an account of how Matheus Dos Santos, DMSB ’19 created his own internship at Brazilian bank branch Banco Bradesco.
Dos Santos, a Brazilian native, sought out an internship at Banco Bradesco as an opportunity to “learn more about the industry” while he spent his summer back home in between his first and second years at D’Amore-McKim.
Dos Santos reports, “When I was talking to them about a summer job, they didn’t have any process in place. They weren’t sure at first how to hire me formally, and since I’ve started, all sorts of people have come up to me to say that I’m the first one the bank has hired for this kind of position.”
AP Photo via Victor R. Caivano
Dos Santos helped Banco Bradesco “develop an online trading platform to reach millennials.” Edilson Fontenele, head of customer experience at Bradesco and Dos Santos’ supervisor, writes that Dos Santos’ appeal was his unique perspective as a “millennial who knows the Brazilian environment and also had exposure to international markets.”
You can read the full article here.
The Big Leap – Sawyer Business Blog
Sawyer Business School student Jennifer Wiens writes candidly about the precise moment she decided to transform her life and career. After being laid off from her job at a Seattle biotech company, Wiens chose to move cross-country to Boston in part to “go where the jobs were” but also because she thought Sawyer “could help me capture that sense of control in my career.”
Wiens simultaneously began her Sawyer EMBA and a stint as Charles River Labs’ global product manager where she coordinated “multiple teams and meeting with clients all around the world.” She writes about how the two fed into each other.
“Because of my Suffolk experience, I don’t feel like I’m out of my element. I’m explaining business concepts to people who’ve been in business for 20 years. I’m teaching them current approaches to certain things.”
Then Wiens pulled another 180 by leaving the Charles Rivers Lab gig. As part of her EMBA capstone course, she created a business strategy and marketing plan for Advanced Dental Sleep Medicine, which offers “alternative, non-surgical ways to reduce sleep apnea.” According to the article, both of which worked so well that the “owner convinced her to leave Charles River Labs and come work for him [as] full-time employee number three.”
Wiens writes, “The company’s gotten a lot of good buzz, so the business is poised to explode and franchise out. And that’s where I come in.”
You can check out the full article here.
3 Steps Toward Safer and Sounder Software – MIT Sloan Newsroom
Deutsche Bank CIO and head of safety and soundness Frédéric Véron recently gave a talk at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, where he shared 3 pieces of wisdom for making software “safe and sound.”
Véron said “safe and sound” software is about a “mix of hyper-awareness, good planning and foresight, and learning quickly from mistakes.”
According to the article, “hyper-awareness” involves knowing “how all your software is actually being used day-to-day, ensuring all stakeholders in development understand the full scope of the product, and continuously taking baseline metrics to understand what can be considered normal operating conditions for a system.”
Good planning and foresight entails that “all of the different procedures that will be necessary to maintain the system in production mode need to be thought through ahead of time. You can always bolt it all on later, but it will cost you more money and it won’t be native or work as well.”
Véron advocates “failing and adapting fast” by adopting agile and DevOps. “The whole point of agile is about adopting the philosophy where you break down major efforts into smaller efforts, allowing you to do incremental releases so that you can make a small change, and if it isn’t working you can pull it out of production quickly without impacting the whole thing.”
He elaborated, “Safety and soundness is about ‘How do we make the enterprise safer and more sound, right from the get-go?’ Not just when things happen, but before things happen.”
The full article can be found here.
MIT’s Unique Team Building Tool, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Music Making as an Effective Teaming Tool – MIT Sloan Newsroom
The MIT Sloan School of Management recently hosted an Innovation Period workshop entitled “Music Making as Effective Teaming Tool,” which focused on leadership training through music. The workshop was developed in conjunction with New York nonprofit Found Sound Nation, which uses “collaborative sound-making as a tool to help enhance communities and build bonds.”
MIT Leadership Center Associate Director Abby Berenson explains, “Through music-making, they create a sense of community and a sense of teams, and through teams, this leadership practice. That’s really at the heart of what we try to bring for any of the SIP workshops we do.”
Sloan MBA student Faye Cheng added, “Being able to experience failure in a low-risk setting gave [me] new insight into how it can open up new avenues for creativity and innovation. It didn’t have to be a perfect sound, it was just ‘Let’s try things out and layer them on.’ In real life, it can be more daunting to fail in that way or make a decision and have to undo it later.”
You can read the full article here and listen to the students’ songs below.
How Companies Can Identify Racial and Gender Bias in Their Customer Service – Harvard Business Review
The Harvard Business Review recently published an article by HBS Organizational Behavior Ph.D. candidate Alexandra C. Feldberg and UVA Darden assistant professor of marketing Tami Kim in which they explore the prevalence of racial and gender bias within customer service.
As part of their ongoing research, Feldberg and Kim “audited 6,000 hotels in the U.S. by sending email inquiries from fictitious email accounts that signaled senders’ race and gender. By systematically examining replies to these inquiries, we observed that frontline employees were less responsive to nonwhite customers and objectively less helpful and friendly. In other words, compared to white customers, black and Asian customers received worse quality service.”
They offered four effective strategies that large companies can implement to combat racial and gender bias:
- “Develop anticipatory service protocols.” In other words: “standardize scripts and develop rules.”
- “Develop channels for employee feedback” to accommodate any new customer service issues.
- “Emphasize not just “best” service,” which the researchers argue can be “onerous and subject to interpretation,” but “equal” service.
- “Diversify employees’ experiences … through hiring and employee rotations.”
You can read the full article here.
Real World Statistics with Professor Ed Vieira – Simmons Blog
The Simmons School of Management blog recently re-published an interview with associate professor Edward T. Viera, Jr., whose 2017 textbook on applied statistics raised a number of interesting questions related to how big data and statistics can be utilized in the health care industry, for instance.
Professor Viera explains, “Statistics allows us to analyze complex problems and provide reliable results, which humans cannot as easily do. Statistics offers the tools to “objectively” analyze a situation so that we can make reliable, data-driven, informed decision … with unprecedented precision.”
He adds, “Through the use of health care analytics, which deploys advanced software and hardware technologies, we can monitor and adjust our research or treatment based on the collection of data in real time.”
Check out the complete interview with Professor Viera here.
MIT Breaks Down Starbucks Response to Recent PR Nightmare, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
What Starbucks Got Wrong—and Right—After Philadelphia Arrests – MIT Sloan Newsroom
Following Starbucks’ PR nightmare this past April in which an employee at a Philadelphia Starbucks had two African American patrons arrested after while they waited to conduct a business meeting, Starbucks announced it will host an afternoon of racial bias training for 175,000 employees across 8,000 of its locations.
MIT Sloan senior lecturer Roberta Pittore commended the coffee giant on the sincere response it made following the initial clumsy attempt to address the controversy in a generalized statement.
Regardless of the potential impacts a single afternoon of racial bias training might have on its employees, Pittore believes that “something is better than nothing, more is better than less, and sooner is better than later. I think what it does achieve from Starbucks’ point of view is that it changes the discussion from ‘What did our employee do that was offensive,’ to ‘How can we learn and how can we change?’”
You can read professor Pittore’s entire take on the incident and the Starbucks response here.
Two Northeastern Students Created an App to Revolutionize the School Bus Industry – D’Amore-McKim Blog
The Best Buy-sponsored E-Fest recently awarded $40,000 to BusRight, an app current D’Amore-McKim School of Business students Keith Corso, ’21, and Evan Eddleston, ’22, co-founded to “revolutionize the school bus industry.”
BusRight is designed to “track school bus passengers, current location, calculate optimal travel routes, curb carbon emissions, reduce transportation costs for bus companies, and improve quality of life for passengers, parents, and bus drivers.” According to the article, many school administrators and bus company officials have expressed interest in using the app.
Eddleston writes, “Bus drivers are home earlier, students are home earlier, and parents know where their kids are. It’s a much more efficient system than the one in place today.”
You can read more about BusRight here.
“Be Unreasonable” – Sawyer Business Blog
The keynote speaker at the Sawyer Business School 2018 commencement was Boston Foundation president and CEO Paul S. Grogan who received an honorary doctorate and shared some refreshing words of wisdom drawn from a lifetime of devotion to the betterment of communities.
“Powerful interests conspire to keep things the way they are. They’re fiercely resistant to change because they benefit from the status quo. [There is a] need for courageous public servants who can stand up to pressure and citizen activists who can reshape public opinion in their communities.”
Boston Foundation president and CEO Paul S. Grogan, speaking at this month’s Sawyer Business School commencement / Photo via suffolk.edu
Grogan advised graduates to think beyond the material success their prestigious degree will help them attain. “I implore you to volunteer, to vote, to donate to charity … but moreover to be an active citizen and fight for your fellow neighbors who don’t enjoy the full promise of an American life.”
You can read more highlights from Grogan’s lecture here and watch his speech in its entirety below.
