MBA blog

How to Turn That MBA Internship into a Job

London Business School student Hamish Forwood-Stokes, 34, is currently completing his internship at Splittable, a small startup company with a very small budget, dealing in finance.

Splittable sells an application for smartphones that manages bills. The company is so small and moneyless that they are incapable of paying their intern anything, and they can’t even promise him a job later.

Career-Switching Chance

Still, Hamish treats his internship at this small startup as an opportunity to change his career from the financial sector to tech. His dream is shared by almost a quarter of his classmates at London Business School – 22% of the previous masters degree holders from that university went to work in the tech sector. Hamish’s ultimate dream is to find a job in a multinational tech corporation like Amazon or Google and invest into startup incubators.

As it’s highly unlikely for him to get hired straight from school (large corporations usually want someone with more business administration experience), he got the penniless internship at Splittable. Hamish found this startup at his business school to become more credible for big-game players like Google. His master’s degree alone wouldn’t let him get hired.

Hamish explains that for most large companies, job experience is immensely more important than a business degree, as they tend to see b-school graduates as useless in the ‘real’ business.

It’s not Easy to Find Internship

According to business education experts, to secure a place anywhere as a business school student, you have to be prepared to work without payment and be very adaptable. Hamish Forwood-Stokes believes that his internship with Splittable has given him a much better chance of finding a post-graduate job at a large and powerful company. Still, it’s really difficult for the tech sector, as Hamish’s colleagues from business school have already found well-paid internships and jobs in consulting and finance.

However, being an intern without hope of securing a place at the same company afterwards is fairly common. Lucrative and promising places can be only found via business school networks, as they are usually not put on the market.

Another example of doing anything to secure a post-MBA job is Rupinder Singh from India, who has recently graduated from the IESE Business School (Spain) and found a place at a Japanese online shopping company, Rakuten. Rupinder had previous experience in ecommerce and has, as he himself admits, a lot to learn yet – including the difficult Japanese language and the cultural shibboleths.

According to Rupinder Singh, his success at landing a job so soon after graduation and internship was due to him being ready to go out of his way and do the impossible. While interning at Rakuten, he did much more than his duties as an intern, including giving his own ideas to the company’s management and single-handedly completing the project he partook in.

Join MBA25 events for more information about top business schools!

Sign up for newsletters

Subscribe
We respect your privacy. Your email and other contact information is safe with us.

Upcoming MBA events

Meet Admissions Officers at an event near you.

View all events

Want to know more?

FAQ

If you have a question or a suggestion, please read our FAQ.

Read event FAQ
Back to top Back to top