Watch Out, MBAs! Ph.D.s Are After Your Jobs

Els van der Helm tried to sign up for a corporate recruiting event through the University of California at Berkeley’s business school last year, but she was turned away. “I got the response, ‘Oh, actually this is just for the MBAs,’ which makes sense,” says Van der Helm, who graduated from Berkeley last May with a Ph.D. in psychology and now works as a junior associate for McKinsey. The MBAs “pay a lot of money to get their time with the recruiters,” she says. “Everything is very nicely laid out for them. For Ph.D.s, it’s not.”

Van der Helm and some of her classmates organized Berkeley’s first career conference last year for Ph.D.s looking for jobs outside of academia. Business schools have long given students exposure to a variety of employers through internships, on-campus recruiting events, and company visits, but Ph.D. programs at Berkeley, Princeton University, and Duke University are just starting to get into the game. Ph.D.s haven’t “been tapped into the way that MBAs have,” says Karen Jackson-Weaver, associate dean for academic affairs and diversity at Princeton’s graduate school.