Gelf Magazine: A Good Run Spoiled

A Long Island writer takes a trip to the bottom of the world. To run a marathon.

Marathons are everywhere. And hundreds of thousands of marathoners each year travel to run their 26.2 miles. Completing a marathon far from home has become a common journey. But it's one that few decide to finish on the world's most isolated continent.

Writer John Hanc (rhymes with Lance), however, decided his 50th birthday in 2005 would be an appropriate occasion to run and write about this "last marathon," the Antarctica Marathon. His story, told in The Coolest Race on Earth: Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the Antarctica Marathon, is part travelogue, part runner's diary, and part history lesson in one package.

BNET: What Now for MBAs?

In the wake of the economic crisis, applications to business schools are on the rise, as college grads and business professionals seek shelter from an ugly job market. Some are re-tooling for the rebound; others are plotting alternative career tracks, now that Wall Street — which typically absorbs 30 percent of new MBAs — has retrenched, and as top companies in almost every industry are slashing headcount and budgets.

Where, then, are the best opportunities for aspiring business leaders? BNET talked to b-school professors, recruiters, and companies and identified four career tracks where demand for management talent is likely to remain strong through the recession and beyond.

• The Finance MBA: Life Beyond Wall Street
• The Healthcare MBA: One Fast Track in a Slow Economy
• The Energy MBA: A Career Path in Transition
• The Social Entrepreneur MBA: Resilient in a Recession
• Jeffrey Pfeffer: The State of B-Schools Post-Financial Crisis

BNET: The Social Entrepreneur MBA

Long before the economy tanked, MBAs were in hot pursuit of alternative career tracks — instead of running investment firms, many have aspired to invest themselves in business with a social cause — from nonprofit organizations to overseas startups in developing countries. Top-tier schools like Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and Yale’s School of Management responded by creating programs to prepare so-called "social entrepreneurs.”

BNET: The Energy MBA

The recession hasn’t yet slowed demand for management talent in the energy sector — though the opportunities aren’t all coming from traditional oil and gas. As the industry confronts potentially transformative changes in everything from government policies and economic models, to the very sources the country will tap for energy, MBAs are leaning into careers in alternative energy and clean technology. “Energy used to be hidden in the ‘other’ category of job placement,” says Mark Friedfeld, a career advisor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Now the energy industry takes up its own slice of the overall placement pie — more than 5 percent. “We haven’t seen the erosion [in jobs] that we’ve seen in other sectors — it’s a solid area.”

BNET: The Finance MBA

For years, finance — and more specifically, investment banking — has been the single most popular career track for MBAs. In fact, top schools like University of Pennsylvania and New York University typically send at least 45 percent of graduates to financial services and investment banking firms each year, with Wall Street absorbing the vast majority of those MBAs. That was then. This year, the sector is wheezing from the collapse of at least five major financial institutions and the loss of more than 200,000 jobs — 60,000 in New York alone.

BNET: The Healthcare MBA

The healthcare track for MBAs has never been a hot one — until now. Believe it or not, healthcare companies can’t find enough MBAs to fill open positions in this $2.26 trillion industry, says Marjorie Baldwin, head of Arizona State University’s School of Health Management and Policy. Hospital administration and healthcare practice management may still lack the glamour of top consulting gigs, but the opportunities now go beyond just hospitals — B-school grads can find roles in everything from biomedical startups and e-health ventures to consulting and pharmaceutical R&D.

Business 2.0: A Microsoft Legend's Next Great Adventure

This fall the business world will see the first tentative release of a product that Charles Simonyi has been working on, in one form or another, for most of his professional life. No, it's not word-processing software, which the Hungarian immigrant developed at Xerox PARC and then took to Microsoft in 1981, and which helped build him a fortune estimated at $1 billion. It's more audacious than that.