Job-Hunting Time

Not everyone is choosing the international route. With more than half of all business schools reporting a significant drop in recruiting activity on campus this winter, according to a survey by the MBA Career Services Council, many students feel pressure to tend to their job searches instead of spending a week globe-trotting.
At Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, second-year MBA student Adam Treadwell, a 32-year-old husband and father of two, is sticking close to home. Treadwill, who already has a job lined up at health-care giant CIGNA (CI), says that even friends who have already landed jobs are opting to stick close to campus for vacation in order to pinch pennies. He notes this is particularly true of his international student friends, who are scrambling to finance their degrees since many big lenders have changed student loan policies. Says Treadwell: "Credit has dried up for a lot of international students, so getting even normal loans is pretty tough, let alone trying to [obtain additional funds] for international trips."
These stay-at-home students appear to be the exception to the rule, though. At schools such as Kellogg that have a required international component built into their programs, students are still coming out in full force and signing up for these trips. Roughly 40 students at Emory University's Goizueta Business School are currently in Brazil (cost: $2,650), while another 35 are in China (cost: $3,300). J.B. Kurish, the associate dean at Goizueta's full-time MBA program, hopes that students, who can also fulfill their international requirement by taking a mini-course on campus during the break, opt to spend spring break abroad instead. "I personally believe that international experience is vitally important to people," says Kurish. "Our students have been willing to spend money to go to places where they can have an enriching experience. It would be very disappointing if, because of economic forces, students felt they could not afford to go overseas."