If you’re a first-year MBA student, chances are better than even that you’re currently in the midst of internships interviews. And, although negotiating a job offer is normally a topic of consideration for full-time positions, I’ve increasingly encountered the question with regard to internships too. And the short answer is “no,” internship offers (with the exception of a fundamental question such as whether the internship is paid or not) are not negotiable; they tend to be standardized, and all MBAs who summer at a particular company are paid the same amount, a fact which does not necessarily hold true when it comes to full-time offers.
For ~8 to 10 weeks of summer work, the question is not how highly one can be compensated, but whether the effort leads to a full-time offer. The compensation should be enough to bridge the gap, financially, between the first and second year of school for those enrolled in two-year programs. Whether or not to negotiate the terms of a full-time offer then becomes a more interesting question, but not in the ways that most students necessarily expect.
Primed by the skills and strategies acquired in MBA negotiation classes, conscious of unfair gender-based wage gaps, and all too susceptible to the feeling that someone else out there might be driving a harder bargain, many of the MBAs I meet feel they are short-changing themselves if they don’t bargain for more favorable terms. The focus for most students, thus, is on “how to” negotiate a job offer, and the act of negotiating itself feels like a foregone conclusion and a necessary part of the process, not least because many MBA recruiting guides list “negotiating your offer” as simply the last, inevitable step in a job search process that begins with research, leads on to applications, interviews, and offers, and culminates, inexorably, with trying to extract a better deal.
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