MBA Class of 2008: Careers Back on Track

Andrew Storey considered himself one of the lucky ones when he graduated from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University in 2008. Even though the economic downturn had made it tough for many MBAs to find jobs, he landed a plum position as a London-based consultant with Booz & Co., where he’d interned the previous summer. But like many consulting companies at the time, Booz was hit hard by the economic downturn, and Storey says recent hires began to worry about their jobs as project work began to slow. Says Storey: “It was one of those things where you could see the writing on the wall.”

His worst fears were realized in the fall of 2009, when he and about 100 other workers in the London office, many also recent MBA graduates, were laid off. Rather than flounder around in the job market looking for a similar gig, Storey chose to reinvent himself, taking a job with the Clinton Health Access Initiative, where he had volunteered in the past. “When things were going bad at Booz, I didn’t sit back and say, ‘Why is this happening to me? I’ve done everything right,’ ” says Storey, who has since been promoted. “You roll with it and see where it takes you.”