From media to real estate to consulting, members of the MBA class of 2012 have been particularly diverse in their career choices since leaving Penn earlier this year.
This month, the Wharton School released its annual MBA Career Management Career Statistics report, which contains information on graduates’ industry choices, compensation and geographic preferences.
This year’s report revealed several trends within the most recent MBA class.
Like in previous years, financial services and consulting continued to be the most popular industry choice among graduates, with 41 and 26.7 percent, respectively, going into the two fields.
In addition, this year’s report featured an increase in opportunities in technology, with 11.6 percent of graduates entering the industry.
Director of MBA Career Management Maryellen Lamb noted that this year’s results met her expectations.
“I was really pleased with the results,” she said, adding that 95.5 percent of job-seeking students reported receiving full-time job offers already. “My team put a ton of work in really trying to meet student and employer needs.”
Engineering sophomore Bharat Nagaswami, who plans on getting an MBA after graduating and pursuing a career in real estate or the financial industry, said he found the increase in the technology sector noteworthy.
“I thought it was interesting that the technology industry had one of the largest increases in any sector, even a bigger increase than the financial sector,” he said. “I think there are more engineers now who want to take on managerial roles in their jobs, and you need an MBA to achieve that.”
Overall, the annual base salary of 2012 MBA recipients ranged from $20,000 to $250,000, with a median of $120,000. Additionally, the median signing bonus among the graduating class was $20,000.
For second-year MBA student Steven Dildine, the results from the career report are not very surprising, especially for the number of students who entered the consulting and financial industries upon graduation.
“That’s what I’ve seen forever, and that’s what I saw coming to graduate school, so I’m not surprised by it,” he said. “Consulting and investment banking is definitely going to be higher. They hire quite a bit from our school.”
However, there were some surprises for Lamb — notably the slight decrease from 2011 in students who went into consulting.
“Last year and the year before that, consulting firms hired a lot, so they had a lot bigger classes,” she said. “While it’s down since the last year, it’s pretty normalized historically.”
Data collection for the report is a year-round process. MBA students can report their offers through a career search portal that they use to search for jobs or by phone if they receive a call.
MBA Career Management is independent from Penn’s Career Services, although they “share the On-Campus Recruitment facility and from time to time may collaborate, but for the most part everything is separate,” Lamb said.
The next MBA class report is due to be released in fall 2013.
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