How Internship process works @ Ross

A lot of people have asked me what is taking me so long to find an internship for myself. So let me explain here the whole process for finding a summer at Ross.

Step 0 – Find a career – You will go through some of the psychometric tests and sit with career counsels to identify your career objective. Yes all those essays on short-term and long-term goals really don’t matter once you are in the B-School.
Step 1 – Resume Building – Having decided on the career, you will start working on your resume and resumes for various functions (yes a lot of them to be sure, why else I would call finding a career as step 0)
Step 2 – Network with firms – Start networking with all the firms that you want to target. Make sure you spend enough time on these firms before you touch base.
Step 3 – Resumes and Cover letter submissions – This is the step at which I am on these days. You drop your targeted resumes along with cover letters to these firms and pray every day.
Step 4 – Close listing by firm – So almost 75-100% of the interview seats are decided by the firms based on their interactions, resumes and cover letter. For remaining 25% seats you bid.
Step 5 – Bidding – So this is how it works. You get 1,000 points in the beginning of the process and you can bid various amount to get in the remaining 25% slots for a firm. For example if McKinsey has 60 slots, 40 will be close listed and remaining 20 are open for bidding. You can bid as many points from those 1,000 or remaining points and if your bids are in top 20 you will get a slot and will loose the minimum clearing points (MCP) for that firms. Simple, isn’t it. Just that you would never know how much to bid for. For example, last year McKinsey’s MCP were close to 460, which essentially means you will be able to bid for 1-2 companies maximum after this. Lehman went as high as 800! So that leaves you with nothing once you are through Lehman. Well its just around the corner now and I am sure its going to be fun!
Step 6 – Interviews – Two round of interviews. One at schools and second at firm’s office. You get paid for the trip; so that translates in to lesser people in second round… around a third of the first round candidates. After the second round… well it’s a simple go or no go decision after that.
Some of the ratios for the future MBA1s… people focusing on consulting… around 180… internships on offer… around 50 (upper side…) Happy Summers!!!