Getting an Edge on Your Career

4/09/2012 by Douglas Cooper

"Interviewing for an internship or a fulltime career is an art. You have to practice your craft to continually improve." says the head of Morehouse College’s Director of Career Services.

Ivy League alumni had better watch out for Morehouse College business majors, says Douglas Cooper, Director of Career Services at Morehouse College. Undergrads at Morehouse College realize the competitive nature of the labor markets and the need to work that much harder because of it. Coming from an HBCU and competing with students and graduates from the likes of Harvard University, Columbia or the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Cooper says students have to focus on and find a balance between their interpersonal and quantitative skill sets. Morehouse students’ intellectual skills, leadership focus and networking abilities — emphasized in the college and in the career center — help to give them an edge.

Mr. Cooper has held his current position since September 2007. Before that, he was the Director of Career Services at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. He earned undergraduate degrees in economics and psychology from the City University of New York and studied for his MBA at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business in New York City. Mr. Cooper recently returned from a Career Tour during the first week of January 2012 to New York’s Wall Street and the Advertising Industry where he escorted a group of sophomore and junior Morehouse College Business Students. The Tour is a component of a program Mr. Cooper directs at Morehouse College called CLI (The Career Leadership Institute). The Tour included visits to firms such as Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Barclays, American Express, Moody’s, CITI, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Macys, Ogilvy Advertising, Alliance Bernstein and CB Richard Ellis Real Estate.

Mr. Cooper has shared his thoughts on a number of career related issues as follows:

In which fields is internship experience most vital?

Finance and accounting. It’s also important to get an internship in consulting or marketing, but it’s not so important that the internship be in those areas.

In consulting, recruiters look for people who can solve problems and think analytically. You can develop those skill sets from a myriad of different experiences. In finance, you need to have very defined and hard skills.

What’s your opinion of interning for a small vs. a large company?

For the most part, I don’t know that, as an intern, the level of responsibility will be dramatically different from a large to a small company. If you can get an internship with a firm that has name recognition, then that’s going to help you on your resume. That being said, you can still be competitive even without working at a company with a well-known name. But it becomes as — if not more — important to define a specific task you did that would add value when you’re competing.

How helpful are the mock interviews the career center offers?

Interviewing is an art. You have to get familiar with it. You have to get past some of the nervousness that you might have, and you also have to start to anticipate the types of questions that may be posed. Some firms focus more on the behavioral types of questions, and others focus on the case-interview process, particularly in the consulting world. We conduct simulated cases, which tests the students’ ability to think logically and solve problems. There’s typically no single right answer. The issue that we’re trying to help the students understand is how to logically step through and frame a problem and then be able to present their solution in such a way that’s clear and coherent to the recruiter.

With which companies does Morehouse have the best relationships?

We have a professional forum within the Division of Business Administration and Economics at Morehouse College called the Corporate Partners Program. The member firms have made a financial and time commitment to our division focused on student development programs and activities. These programs include Case Study Symposiums, International exposure, Academic Awards Banquet and social events to name a few. It’s safe to say the firms in the program are those with whom we have the best relationships and the firms are as follows:

American Express

Cummins

Accenture

Deloitte

ADP

EMC

Bank of America

Geico

Barclays

J.P. Morgan

Baxter Healthcare

Liberty Mutual