Internships and Career Management Center (CMC)

First of all I want to apologies for not writing that often in the Blog. Many colleagues student have asked me to write a few letters but since we started in January I haven’t got the opportunity to breath. In fact next week we have the first term exams and I am going crazy.
Today I am writing about Internships and IE’s CMC. For those of you that do not know what CMC is, it is IE’s department in charge of finding jobs opportunities for students and alumni. Even though I am not well aware on how they work, what kind of internal procedures and interfaces they have with the rest of IE’s staff I could give you my impression on the work they do.
For an IMBA student CMC is a mixture of different components. In one side you have a website where you could find very useful information on how to edit your CV and cover letter, what companies are currently hiring (right now you will hardly find one), a list of headhunter firms, free access to Vault library that offers training books on how to do interviews in different industries (consulting, financial, IT, etc) and other very useful resources.
On the other hand there are a team of professional staff divided by sector and industry (for instance one person is in charge of marketing and consumers products companies and other is in contact with investment banks and commercial banks) that is willing to help us in editing or CV and giving their thoughts and ideas on how to do interviews. It also prepared mock-interviews so you could practice with real recruiters form different industries.
But not everything that shines is gold. Many students complain that CMC does not notice the student community with enough time to prepare the CVs & CL. In fact many times we receive the notification of a position deadline one day before. How could we possibly prepare our CV in such a short notice? Others complain saying that we don’t receive enough notifications.
From my point of view this complains have some validity, but it is true that CMC staff replays that they have scheduled mock interviews and that nobody have showed. What does that say? Are the students really committed to get an internship or job after the MBA.
IE have provided us with a different set of tools. My recommendations is that we should use them wisely and according to our interests and not relay or responsibilities on others. That is what I am planning to do. In fact after next week exams I am planning to Google MBA internships and start making some phone calls.
Until next time…