One of the things I noticed when I was a first-year student beginning to talk to second-year students was that there were certain employers hiring a lot of Tepper students while some hired very few or didn’t come on campus at all. Having been on the other side of the recruiting table in my job before school, I knew as well as anybody that this might have a lot to do with internal politics and whether Tepper happened to be the alma mater of anybody with particular influence in recruiting at an organization.
I wondered if there was more to it, though, and started to raise my hand here and there at company presentations and ask the question, “Why do you choose to recruit at Tepper?” or “Why do you choose to recruit at the six schools you have listed there?” One of the things that drew me to my summer employer, Deutsche Bank, was the answer they gave to that question; and for them, it boiled down to intellectual capital.
They view themselves as an organization that prides itself on intellectual capital in that they invest time and resources into staying at the forefront of financial engineering, and Tepper is a great fit for them because we have the same organizational focus on intellectual capital. We’re not just a screening mechanism that provides trainable individuals with high leadership potential to the MBA recruiting system – we actually equip all of our students with relevant and marketable skills that they can use from day one at their summer internships or full-time positions.
As a prospective student, this focus on intellectual capital jived well with what I was looking for in a business school and made a lot of sense to me in terms of what I was seeing out there in the rankings. While rankings deserve a much lengthier treatment in terms of where they come from and how useful, scientific, or relevant they are, I did notice that Tepper performed exceptionally well in the Wall Street Journal rankings, which are the only ones I know of that are based entirely on recruiter measurements of success as opposed to donations, faculty perceptions from other schools, prospective students, etc. I think as the world becomes increasingly complex and quantitative, you’ll see more schools modeling themselves after Tepper in terms of preparing their students to be successful in that world.
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