This isn’t a situation that I’ve faced myself, but I have several friends who were in the same situation, so I developed my response based on what I learned in those conversations. This certainly is a sub-optimal position for this student, but, as I say in my email response, it isn’t the end of the world.
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AS wrote:
Hi Marquis,
I saw one of your old posts and thought I would reach out. I am currently a rising second year MBA student at a top tier business school. Â I am pursuing my summer internship at one of the big 3 consulting firm. I unfortunately do not believe I will be getting an offer. I just had my mid review and the feedback and experience on my team in particular has not been as great so far for many reasons. I am wondering (and a little scared) about how this will affect me in full time recruiting. Any thoughts based on your past experience would be appreciated.
AS
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My response:
AS,
I hope this message finds you well. Thanks for reaching out to me about your issue…and it sure is a doozie.Â
I know that your situation may seem dire right now, but please know that thousands of other MBAs have gone through the same thing and have still been able to find success in the end. Sometimes, fate just changes things for you in order to push you in a better direction. It may take a while for you to recognize it, but, once you do, you’ll feel much better about it all. I’m not saying that there’s no hope in your current situation, but I wanted to start this response off in this way in hopes of calming you down a bit.
Now, that I’ve got that out of the way, I will stipulate that not getting an offer from your internship does present a bit of a hurdle that you’ll have to face during the full-time recruiting cycle. If an employer is looking at you as a full-time candidate and sees that you didn’t get an offer from your summer, there may be questions about what might have happened.Â
Despite this, it isn’t the end of the world. Actually, it’s great that you’ve recognized a need to examine your situation in detail and prepare for next steps if you don’t end up getting an offer. By thinking through this at the halfway point in the summer, you’ve given yourself time to both work toward fixing things in your internship and start making plans for the full-time recruiting cycle.
Thinking about your situation, my advice for you is as follows:
- Don’t freak out!…try to calm yourself down: See my comments above. It may feel like the end of the world, but just know that everything is going to be alright, no matter what happens at the end of your internship. If you’re a student in a top-tier program, then you must have been a strong applicant, which would imply that you’ve got the potential to be a strong business leader. A rough summer internship doesn’t change that…it does make things a little tougher, but it doesn’t invalidate the filtering machanism that gaining admission to your MBA program has put in place for you. Once you get yourself to a calm place mentally, you’ll be in a much better position to make value-added decisions.
- Try to salvage the rest of your summer and work toward getting that offer: One of the good things about starting off on a rough note is that there’s nowhere to go but upward. As such, with a rough mid-summer review, you can look at this as you being at the bottom and can make the conscious decision to commence an epic turnaround. The key is for you to shake off the initial sting of being told that your performance isn’t up to par and to get strategic about recovering from the bad start.Â
I would hope that you were given very detailed (and hopefully actionable) feedback about the areas where you weren’t meeting expectations. If so, your Manager has pretty much given you a roadmap of what you should improve and it’s up to you to act on that roadmap. You mentioned in your email that your experience on your team hasn’t been good, so I’d imagine that you may be thinking that the bad environment is the reason for your perceived performance issues. Pride might be telling you to not believe the feedback and, once upon a time, I would have cheered you on to follow your pride. Now that I’m older and have been in the game for a while, my advice is to swallow your pride and let humility be your guide when trying to launch your comeback.
Now would be the perfect time to try to enlist your Manager (or some other senior person on your team) as a thought partner to recover from the bad first half of your internship. You should schedule a meeting with your Manager for Monday or as early in the week as you can to talk through the feedback that you received and how you can make changes for the last half of the internship. You may feel like you’ve already had this conversation when you originally got the review, but, given the initial shock of hearing that new, I don’t think you would have been in the position to have a productive conversation. This upcoming discussion would be more strategy/approach development session than a review.
In prepration for this meeting, create a single slide with 2 columns. The left column will be titled “Feedback received” and the right column will be titled “Ideas to address feedback”. Â For each row, populate the left column with specific shortcomings in your performance that were raised in the review and, in the right column, think long and hard about what you can do to to fix the area of concern. This may take a lot of humility and self awareness to do this, but do it. Once, you have this slide completed, talk through each row of it with your Manager and ask for his or her reactions on what you’ve put into the right column as a way to address the issue. This will be a great way to turn this into a working session where you’re opening yourself up for advice on how to improve versus taking the usual “human nature” response of being defensive.
- Think about the kinds of jobs you REALLY want to do post-MBA: What I mean here is to figure out what you truly want to do instead of what you think you’re “supposed” to do after B-school. If you’re targeting Consulting for full-time because you genuinely are interested in it and want that to be the start of your post-MBA path, then go for it. But, if you put some hard thought into it and realize that you TRULY want to do something else, that should change the entire framework through which you look at your full-time job search. I have had several friends who did summer internships in Consulting and were devastated to not get an offer at the end of the summer, only to realize that their true passions were in other industries or functions. It turns out that those people had pursued Consulting in the first place only because they thought they were supposed to do that after business school. Before you start punishing yourself for possibly not getting an offer at the end of the summer, make sure that Consulting is something that you’d really want to do after graduation…as you may have realized by now, it certainly isn’t for everyone.
- Develop the story to tell during the full-time recruiting cycle: If you don’t end up getting an offer, you’ll need to have a story to tell to explain why you’re in the midst of the recruiting “storm”. Of course, if you don’t get the offer, you shouldn’t volunteer that information under any circumstances. If you are asked about it during an interview, don’t be afraid to tell your story, but don’t just tell folks that you ended your internship without an offer because you’d be inviting a complication for yourself.Â
Now, on to the story…if you decide not to go after Consulting for full-time, you could just explain that you did the internship to get the experience for a summer and decided that your passion was in a different area. If you do decide to do Consulting for full-time, your story could involve issues with fit, type of work, or culture, but you’d express a strong interest in the type of work, which is why you’re looking at different firms.Â
I’m purposefully going high-level here because you’ll have to flavor the story with your own thoughts, preferences, and interests, but it is important for you to have a well thought-out story to tell during any interviews that you might have. The last thing you’d want is to be caught flat-footed if the topic comes up during the recruiting process. You need to be prepared to respond confidently to any questions that arise in order to position yourself as a strong and immensly qualified candidate, despite the lack of an offer from your summer.
Well, that’s about all I’ve got for you on your question. I won’t say that what I’ve laid out above is the ‘silver bullet’ answer for you, but I think this is a good way for you to prepare for what you fear may come at the end of the summer.Â
Take care and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you to have a big turnaround for the rest of your summer internship.
Marquis
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