A Farewell to Summer: The Pre-MBA Internship

A few weeks after she got admitted to Columbia Business School, Cristina Benitez Sacasas started cold-calling dozens of companies in the hope of landing summer work at a consulting firm. Like many MBA students, Sacasas was a career switcher with no previous consulting experience. She worried that her four years as a sales associate in the private wealth management division of Morgan Stanley wouldn’t impress recruiters from top consulting firms visiting her school that fall.

Her determination paid off when a recruiter from Deloitte told her about a new summer internship program the company was starting called the Deloitte Consulting Immersion Program, geared toward students like her about to enter business school. She was accepted to the program, and by July she was working on a restructuring project for a manufacturing client. When she got to (Columbia Full-Time MBA Profile) last fall, she had a leg up on many of her fellow students, as well as a coveted offer from Deloitte to return the following summer as a first-year associate.