While others in his class were deciding between multiple job offers, Ricardo Taveira, an MBA student at Chicago's Booth School, was playing a game of brinkmanship 

IN THE film “Rebel Without a Cause”, James Dean (pictured) plays a game called “chickie run”, in which two car drivers hurtle towards a cliff edge. The person who bales out first loses. 

At business school, this is how it feels to search for a job in private equity and venture capital (PE/VC). There are two types of MBA recruiting: on-campus and off-campus. For the traditional MBA paths of investment banking and management consulting, on-campus is a well-trodden path. For sought-after opportunities in private equity and venture capital, not only is the process usually off-campus, but it is a test of your appetite for risk. Where on-campus recruiting is typically done by February, most off-campus PE/VC recruiting begins later. Herein lies the game of chicken: if you wait for PE/VC recruiting in the spring and fail to secure an internship you could well end up having no summer internship at all. 

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Esha Chhabara reports from the St Gallen Symposium 

WE ARE termed the “Leaders of Tomorrow”, which sounds a bit silly, given that many of us are still struggling to pay rent. The 42nd St Gallen Symposium, held at the Swiss business school each year, brings together corporate executives, leading academics and heads of state. But it also draws a crowd of under 30s, a hodgepodge of students, entrepreneurs, writers, scientists and activists, all aspiring to leave a positive footprint. 

It’s the “mini-Davos”, I kept hearing, because of its stature in the German-speaking world of economics and political science. No shortage of smart suits, high-powered heels and corporate jargon here. The event, which ran last week, is something of a treasured tradition for this town, something that locals celebrate, and get frustrated by, thanks to the flurry of visitors that swamp their historic and obscenely charming town once a year.

This year’s big theme was “Facing Risk”, a rather vague and abstract topic. But that was the intention: translate as you see fit. There were many types of risk to spread around the sessions: corporate, environmental, political, nuclear, social and developmental. But the emphasis was clearly on finance and economics, given the climate that we met in. 

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And the hunt for a full-time job begins

THE sudden appearance of interns around the office is as sure a sign that summer has arrived as the sighting of the first cornflower. June marks the beginning of the season, when workplaces become briefly filled with new blooms eager to make an impression. For those hired from business schools, the typical placement will last around 10 weeks, before the call of lectures and a second year of study draws them back to college. 

Tough economic times had led to a dip in the number of interns that companies hired from MBA programmes. But appetite is on the rise again. Around half of business schools have reported an increase in the number of companies visiting campuses to recruit students for the summer holidays, according to the MBA Career Services Council, an industry body. Just 9% saw a decrease.

Before the crisis, it was the big financial-services firms that were the most voracious users of MBA students. Many had large formal programmes, sometimes taking in hundreds of students at a time. This is now less common. The crisis acted as a wild fire, says Michael Malone of the Kellogg School of Management near Chicago. Many prestigious firms were felled. But that has left the way clear for others who previously found it tough to compete for the best students. Consultancies, consumer product and tech companies, as well as boutique financial firms, have been particularly keen to fill the gap. 

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MICHELLE DUGUID, an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Washington University in St Louis, recently published a paper on the behaviour of women in high-profile corporate roles. It is often assumed that such high-fliers can act as mentors, bringing other women into similar positions. But Ms Duguid has a theory of “value threat”: that certain women, high-achieving but isolated, see others of their sex as a threat to their own special status, and therefore may not want to promote their female peers. One thinks of Becky Sharp  in William Thackeray’s novel “Vanity Fair” (pictured, as played by Reese Witherspoon in a film adaptation), who regarded all other women, even her best friend and her husband’s sisters, as potential romantic or financial rivals. (This is something also observed by Israeli professors, albeit at a more junior level, when they found female human resources staff were denying pretty job applicants an interview.)

Value threat can play out in three ways, Ms Duguid suggests. First, the higher-ranking woman (let’s call her Becky) might see the lower-ranking woman (Amelia) as potentially performing worse and thus reinforcing negative views of women, thereby hurting Becky’s own standing. Second, Becky might fear that there is only one slot available for a woman, and Amelia will take it. Third, Becky might fear being accused of favouring Amelia over her male colleagues.

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