All You Need To Know About MBA Internships

Internships are the gateways to a student’s introduction into the corporate world. Internships are hence, indeed one of the key highlights of a two-year MBA program. During the course of an MBA program, when one takes an internship with an organization in a specific field, one gets to learn about various roles and responsibilities that they may be required to take up in the future during their course of professional life.

Sadly many times, students take the internship phase rather lightly. Candidates who take the internship for granted often risk losing out on some excellent takeaways from their experience. Consider it this way, a successful internship program could turn out to be the opportunity that would land you in your dream job. Keeping the same in mind, we, at the K.R. Mangalam University, have made Internship an integral part of the MBA course we offer.

Apart from strengthening your experience earned from the MBA course, the Internships offer several other advantages as well, a few of which are:

Understanding of the Roles & Responsibilities: When you pursue an internship with an organization of your interest, you get to learn about various roles and responsibilities and get to prepare yourself for taking them up in the future. Thus, internships make it a lot easier for you to fit into those responsibilities when you come out as a fresh graduate from a business school. Internships give the students a sure shot edge over the others due to the practical knowledge gained during the course.

Invaluable Work Experience: There is nothing that can replace the learning that you acquire with actual work experience. An internship is a wonderful chance to gain experience that is invaluable for any candidate pursuing an MBA.

Raise your Employability Score: Taking up internship opportunities not only adds more value to your resume but also makes you a likeable candidate for a job opening. Moreover, it helps you understand your subjects in a clearer way and also adds to your grading.

Boost your Skills: An internship provides a vital exposure to the talented students that helps them to learn about the challenges and more importantly how to tackle them. It might be a small experience in terms of length but can be a huge learning curve in terms of value. When you complete the internship, you feel more confident to take up the challenges in your career ahead.

A Route to Pre-placement Offers: Your impressive performance during an internship can earn you a pre-placement offer in the very organization that you pursue your Internship from. There are many companies that use the Internship as an opportunity to assess the skills and knowledge of a student. Instead of conducting any exclusive recruitment program, the recruitment experts get involved with the candidates during the internship to judge their suitability for the company.

Working as an Intern

It is important to know about the tasks that interns are generally assigned during the internship period at companies. Given below are some examples of MBA internship projects and assignments:

• Example of Finance Internship: Tech giant Microsoft recruits finance interns to track and analyze business metrics and to create financial models for evaluating investments.
• Example of Marketing Internship: P&G offers assistant brand manager internships to work on real branding projects, executing product launches, and working on partnerships with creative teams.
• Example of Consulting Internship: McKinsey offers 8-12 week long internships in management consulting. You’ll get the opportunity to work on client projects and if you do a good job, they’d make a permanent offer.

MBA Internship Programs

Many companies that recruit MBA graduates offer internships as well. Following are some of the top names in the industry that do offer internship opportunities to students:

• Management Consulting – McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte Consulting, Accenture
• Investment Banking / Private Equity – Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citi, Credit Suisse, Bank of America, Blackstone
• Technology –IBM, eBay, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel
• FMCG – P&G, GE, Nike, Pepsi, Unilever

These are just a few of the biggest names where students can plan for their internships and gain invaluable experience from the same. Keeping these aside, almost every second company/organization you approach will be open to offering internship experiences to MBA students. However, the existence and package of a stipend would vary from company to company.

Internship Tenure: We, at the K.R. Mangalam University, have incorporated internships as a vital element of our MBA program and typically last between 2-3 months. The actual duration would depend on whether you are joining a pre-defined internship program or a one-off / ad-hoc project that has been created for you based on the company’s immediate needs. There are instances wherein MBA students at the K.R. Mangalam University have completed multiple (smaller) internships within the allotted time-frame.

At K.R. Mangalam University, the internships are graded. Your internship mentor would be called upon to provide an evaluation of your performance. Apart from this, you will be expected to submit a report or a mini-thesis based on the work you did during the MBA internship period.

We, at the K.R. Mangalam University, take precise care in enabling the students with the right guidance and support to land in the internship programs that they desire. Our teachers are dedicated towards each and every student and hence stay involved in their internship programs, guiding them throughout the process. The sole aim of the internship programs is to provide the students with the real-time experience of working in the corporate world. Internships serve to provide the students with hands-on industry experience, which turns out to be immensely beneficial for them when they enter their professional life post completion of their studies.