MIT Sloan Tech Trekkers "Bullish" on Prospective Job Market

Yesterday, I shared some insights from my conversations with a few MIT Sloan first-year students who are currently visiting the Bay Area for the school's annual Tech Trek. The students have spent the week calling on potential employers in the tech sector, from startups to the big guns of the Silicon Valley. We found out yesterday that, despite all of the talk about what needs to be done to fix the MBA degree, students and employers alike still place a lot of value on it.

But will that necessarily translate into jobs when these students graduate in 2011?

Jason Costa, who hopes to find a product management job with a small consumer web services company, is optimistic.
"I feel very confident about having the opportunity to come back here and being able to contribute to one of these companies or potentially even start one of my own. I think MIT Sloan and my previous experience in the technical space has put me in a good position to do so," he says.

Jackie Loo, a Honolulu native who worked in the tech industry in San Francisco prior to attending Sloan, wants to make an impact on her home state. "If you're not looking for a career in tourism or hospitality, a lot of my classmates and I found that we had to go to the mainland to find the right opportunities. So what I'd like to do is take what I've learned from the Silicon Valley and from MIT Sloan and bring those back to Honolulu and try to change up the industries back at home."

Loo is also confident that she will have the opportunity to fulfill her career goals.

"A lot of us on the trip right now are part of the entrepreneurship program at MIT, and I think entrepreneurs are optimistic by nature. Regardless of how the economy is, there will always be a need for people who can find creative solutions to common business challenges."

Marc Piette isn't completely certain that he'll need to embark upon a job search when he graduates. With a few fellow students, he is working on a company that will find alternate avenues of funding for startups that don't have the equity to secure VC funding. However, having worked only in large companies previously, he's considering logging time at someone else's startup before pursuing his own business full time. If he takes this route, he believes the outcome will be positive.

"If you look at the worst time for MBA graduates, which was last year, the vast majority had no problem finding a very good job. For many who did not find jobs, it was because they had an ideal job in mind that they were still pursuing. So my class is very confident that we're actually on the upswing and that the economy is turning around. Given that we'll be interning next summer and graduating in 2011, we're very bullish about our job prospects."

Silicon Valley image courtesy of Flickr user Revolweb, CC 2.0.