I know I haven't posted for the last 6 months.  Hopefully, I can provide you with an insight into he hectic life of an MBA, during an economic melt-down.

When you start at Columbia, you're told to go through a particular process to find an internship... any internship, not just the on-campus-recruiting variety:

It all seemed quite superficial, but for recruiters in the MBA hiring process, this is what they're expecting. Believe it or not, this methodology really works... up till step 5!  It is relatively easy to get an interview for one of the on-campus recruiting jobs, if you follow this formula.  The trick then is to translate that into a job.

What I found was the following:

• In these times of economic turbulence, international students have an even harder time.  In fact, even though I'm an Australian and am eligible for the E3 visa (much simpler than H1-B and similar to the Canadian TN visa), companies were uncomfortable with hiring non-Americans.
• Normally, an MBA allows you to branch out into parallel fields or complete career changes.  Not now!  Companies are now looking for EXACT MATCHES for people they want. You need to "mould" your resume and your interview experiences to EXACTLY MATCH what they're looking for.
• With so many former investment bankers floating around, many companies are specifying their requirement for investment bankers for everything from business development through to marketing roles.  It seems that former I-bankers are better than the rest of us!

As a result, I've had to go through many more rounds of interviewing than I expected and landed internships that weren't an exact match for what I was looking for.  Nevertheless, they do provide me with some amazing experiences and interesting talking points for future interviews.

If you're interested, I landed (and took) three internships for the Summer:

• IMAX Business Development
• Hakia.com - A Start-up, focused on semantic search
• Klickable.tv - Another start-up, focused on interactive online video