Internships are a cornerstone of the Full-Time MBA experience at Rice Business. They provide students with opportunities to explore industries, gain hands-on experience and refine career goals — tailored to each student’s unique journey.

Landing an Internship Doesn’t Have To Be Difficult.

To help students navigate the recruiting process, our Career Development Office (CDO) recently launched the Internship Pacer Group program. While students pursuing internships in industries like consulting and finance benefit from defined recruiting timelines, the pacer group program is specifically designed to guide Full-Time MBA students through the recruiting processes of industries with less structured timelines. The new program helps foster accountability and a sense of community in what can otherwise be a solitary and ambiguous journey.

What Are Internship Pacer Groups?

Much like pacers in a marathon, these groups help students stay on track, build momentum and correct course as they aspire to reach their recruiting goals. Through 11 workshops, the Internship Pacer Group program supports students pursuing careers in high-demand industries such as:

• Corporate finance
• Energy and renewables
• Healthcare
• Real estate
• Tech
• Venture capital
• Private equity

Each workshop allows MBAs to strategize with peers, advisors and industry professionals, empowering them throughout the recruitment process.

Key Benefits for Students Include:

• Expert Guidance: Each group is led by CDO career advisors, with guest appearances from alumni and club leaders who share insights and inspiration.
• Regular Check-ins: Meetings provide a space to share progress, highlight upcoming recruiting events and celebrate wins — all while helping students stay accountable to personal goals.
• Strategic Planning: Students choose groups aligned with their recruiting goals to encourage a concurrent career plan, helping them maximize opportunities in a highly competitive market.
• Community Support: The groups foster connection, creating a space for participants to offer encouragement, share networking resources and learn that they’re not alone in the process.

For many students, Internship Pacer Groups bridge the gap between individual coaching and peer collaboration, offering a structured yet flexible framework for success. By pairing these sessions with one-on-one coaching, participants can craft a robust strategy that balances ambition with focus.

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“The Internship Pacer Group brings in alumni who share their own experiences of being in our shoes, showing that nervousness is normal and success is indeed achievable,” shared Pedro Antonio Morales ’26. “It keeps us accountable and provides clarity on career paths, making it highly valuable.”

Looking Ahead

Our Career Development Office offers a wide range of personalized resources — across all major industries, functions and geographies. And as industries evolve, students can count on the CDO to provide relevant and high-touch counseling to help them reach their goals.

Whether MBAs are pursuing more structured roles or exploring paths in emerging or nontraditional fields, our CDO team works hard to ensure students have the right tools and strategies to succeed. Initiatives like the Internship Pacer Group program strengthen individual career journeys and the Rice Business community as a whole.

Explore Our Full-Time MBA

Based on research by Vikas Mittal (Rice Business), Daniel Fernandes (Catholic University of Portugal), Nailya Ordabayeva (Dartmouth), Kyuhong Han (Korea University) and Jihye Jung (UT – San Antonio)

Key findings:

• Across nine studies, conservatives consistently reported higher satisfaction with purchases than liberals.
• Experimental manipulation reducing belief in free will decreased conservatives’ satisfaction, while focusing liberals on positive past purchases increased theirs.
• Conservatives’ higher satisfaction led to an increase in recommendations and repeat purchases across multiple industries.

Imagine you've just ordered a coffee at that new place down the street. As you take the first sip, your satisfaction with it would seem tied with flavor, drink price and quality of service.

But what if your political beliefs also play a role in how satisfied you are with your purchase? And, if so, why? Until now, answers to these question have been unclear.

Previous studies have examined the influence of political identity on consumer preferences and choices, but its impact on product satisfaction has been unclear. According to new research, liberals and conservatives experience consumer satisfaction in profoundly different ways.

Belief in Free Will Impacts Satisfaction

In a paper published in the Journal of Marketing, a research team including Rice Business professor Vikas Mittal demonstrates that political identity plays a crucial role in shaping customer satisfaction. Across a series of experiments and surveys with more than 760,0000 customers, Mittal et al. demonstrate that conservatives are consistently more satisfied than liberals with the products and services they use.

“Our studies show that because conservatives are more likely to believe in free will and put more trust in their decision-making, they tend to be more satisfied with their purchase choices,” Mittal says.

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To arrive at their findings, the researchers conducted nine experiments — a mix of controlled lab tests plus analyses of real-world data across a variety of industries. The first study asked 412 adults to share their political ideology and rate their satisfaction with a purchase they made over the last two years that cost at least $30. Researchers also measured the participants’ belief in free will and found that that political identity affected customer satisfaction.

In subsequent lab experiments, the researchers aimed to reduce study participants’ belief in free will. They did this by presenting them with scientific evidence suggesting that behavior is determined by situational factors rather than personal choice. The researchers discovered that after this intervention, conservative customer satisfaction declined. Conservatives were also less satisfied when given fewer choices — effectively lowering the perception of free will.

Liberal consumers, for their part, became more satisfied when the researchers encouraged them to focus on a past purchase that turned out well rather than one that went poorly.

“Our findings suggest that customer satisfaction isn’t just about product quality,” Mittal states. “It’s deeply influenced by psychological and social factors like political beliefs. This opens up new ways for companies to think about how they engage with their customers.”

Translating Identity Into Brand Loyalty

These results are important at a societal level. Consumption is an integral part of people’s lived experience. To the extent that people’s political identity affects their satisfaction with consumption, people’s loyalty to brands, their buying patterns and eventual sales may be determined by their politics, not just by the objective performance of products. Most companies believe that the quality of products and services they sell is critical to their success — but this research shows that their success may also depend on who’s buying. 

The researchers validated these results with several real-world datasets, looking at Yelp restaurant reviews, customer surveys from the San Francisco International Airport, healthcare insurer ratings, and surveys on B2B managers’ opinions of their suppliers. Specifically, they showed that customer satisfaction not only predicted actual sales but also how likely people were to recommend their purchase to other people or to buy it again themselves.

To increase the results’ applicability for businesses, Mittal and colleagues inferred political identities from many different measures including county-level U.S. presidential election data, peoples’ news sources (FOX versus CNN), the political party to which they belong and voting behavior.

Their core hypothesis held true across all measures of political identity and in multiple industries: conservatives were consistently more satisfied than liberals.

Satisfaction is About More Than Product Quality

The findings offer practical takeaways on how to improve customer satisfaction, which is essential to having repeat customers, building loyal followers and boosting sales. Indeed, conservatives’ higher customer satisfaction was associated with them recommending products and services more to friends and family and buying more themselves, and ultimately to increased sales.

To boost satisfaction for conservative customers, managers could highlight the wide array of available options, plus customers’ freedom of choice and agency at the time of purchase. For example, “You have many options, and we are proud that you chose us.” 

And for liberal customers, managers could highlight the extent of customers’ prior experience or expertise. For example, “We’re proud to deliver a product that continues to meet your standards.”

Managers could also expect the link between political identity and satisfaction to be stronger in industries that have higher levels of competition and, more options, as well as industries that are more likely to result in unpleasant customer experiences, like healthcare or air travel.

Finally, study results have implications for public policy. To increase participation in efforts like COVID-19 vaccination, policymakers could attempt to appeal to conservatives’ greater perception of free will and of personal responsibility to help motivate them to act.

“Our findings suggest that customer satisfaction isn’t just about product quality,” Mittal states. “It’s deeply influenced by psychological and social factors like political beliefs. This opens up new ways for companies to think about how they engage with their customers.”

Mittal, et al (2022). “How Political Identity Shapes Customer Satisfaction,” Journal of Marketing.

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Tommy Pan Fang, assistant professor of strategic management at Rice Business, has been named to Poets&Quants’ list of 50 Best Undergraduate Professors. Pan Fang was chosen from among 1,000 nominations, and at age 30, he is one of the youngest professors on the list, which represents 43 schools, including five international institutions.

Pan Fang, who teaches classes at the newly named Virani Undergraduate School of Business and the Jones Graduate School of Business, knew he wanted to teach when he observed how research and teaching at the undergraduate level can influence the future of business. “I saw how business research could reveal new insights that excite students and shape the future of business,” says Pan Fang. “During my doctoral studies, I became passionate about exploring the dynamic relationship between technology and strategy. Teaching lets me share these discoveries with future leaders, inspiring them to think critically and make informed decisions that could drive meaningful changes in industry.”

Pan Fang researches novel organizational forms that promote collaboration and innovation. “For example, I’ve studied hackathons — temporary gatherings that tech companies can strategically use to drive platform adoption and recombination,” says Pan Fang. “Hackathons stand out because they blend competition with collaboration. Although teams may technically compete, these events foster an open environment where developers exchange insights, build new skills and observe which tools gain traction within the community.”

Collaboration and hands-on experience resonate with Pan Fang as a professor, and he values undergraduate students' desire to see business theory in action. “My focus is on hands-on learning,” says Pan Fang. “I constantly experiment with different methods to make concepts come to life. I use simulations, business cases and interactive projects in the classroom to help students engage with material in a way that feels real and relevant. By exploring different approaches, I aim to help students understand theories and see how they play out in real business situations, hopefully preparing them to handle the complexities they’ll face in their careers.”

The editorial team at Poets&Quants evaluated each nomination. Every professor was assigned a 1-to-10 score based on both their research and teaching accolades. Tommy Pan Fang is the second Rice Business professor to grace this list from Poets&Quants, joining Minjae Kim, assistant professor of management, who made the list in 2022.

Owl Have You Know

Owl Have You Know is pleased to welcome Twice-Rice grad Will Eldridge – a consultant at Bain & Company and the president-elect of the Rice Business Alumni Association Board.

Will earned his bachelor of science in civil and environmental engineering at Rice in 2017. But after an impactful experience with MAcc program director Ben Lansford, he decided to pivot to accounting. Will went on to work at Deloitte as a senior auditor for oil and gas clients, before deciding to go back to school again for his MBA at Chicago Booth.

Will chats with Owl Have You Know guest host Brian Jackson ’21 about his path from accounting to strategy consulting, the importance of mentorship, and why board service has given him a way to give back to his community in fulfilling ways.

Subscribe to Owl Have You Know on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

Becoming a Rice Business Board Fellow offers MBAs a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience in nonprofit management. Students are matched with local organizations and learn valuable leadership skills as non-voting board members through the year-long experiential learning program.

Meet Jordyn-Marie Dudley, a PMBA student who recently served as a board fellow with nonprofit hair care organization Have Shears Will Travel. She discusses the value in serving others and giving back to the community while reaching for the stars professionally.

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What inspired you to become a board fellow?

I applied to Rice Business Board Fellows for an opportunity to engage with the local Houston community while learning about nonprofit management. I’m also interested in leading my own community initiative someday.

Tell us about Have Shears Will Travel, the nonprofit you matched with.

Have Shears Will Travel is a nonprofit hair care ministry that provides free services to people experiencing homelessness or hardship in Houston. The organization uses a mobile RV salon, allowing them to serve people across the city. This year, they also launched Shear Success to provide barber and cosmetology training to the community with affordable tuition, payment options and scholarship opportunities.

What were some of your primary responsibilities as a board fellow?

During my time with Have Shears Will Travel, I attended quarterly board meetings and offered suggestions for marketing the organization’s activities. I also helped update materials to collect donations and advertise services for both Have Shears Will Travel and Shear Success. This experience allowed me to consider business frameworks from the perspective of a smaller grassroots nonprofit organization, since many of the case studies we review in my MBA classes typically focus on large for-profit companies.

Overall, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience and I have enjoyed working with the founder, volunteers and stylists. The group’s shared commitment to the organization and its mission is inspiring. I recently visited Shear Success after its ribbon cutting in September, and it was so exciting to see the vision become a reality after learning about the work that went into this new initiative.

What is your current role?

I work as a government contractor for Amentum at NASA Johnson Space Center. I am a planetary scientist and project manager supporting the Mars Sample Return Sample Receiving Project, and my team is currently performing research and development to prepare to receive and curate the first samples returned from Mars.

What motivated you to pursue your MBA at Rice Business?

I learn best from hands-on work and real-world applications. Rice Business offers many experiential learning opportunities, like the Global Field Experience, Rice Business Board Fellows and The Washington Campus residency intensive, which drew me to the MBA program. Before coming to Rice, I studied chemistry and planetary science and performed academic research for most of my career. Since beginning my MBA at Rice Business, I have gained new perspectives on organizational strategy, operations, project planning and the intersection between business, government and policy.

What are your post-MBA plans?

I’m starting a new role as section manager for curation collections at NASA Johnson Space Center. I will transition from preparing for Mars Sample Return to leading a team of curators and scientists who help support NASA’s current collections of extraterrestrial materials — including samples from the sun, moon, Mars, asteroids, comets, other stars and space-exposed hardware. I look forward to applying the concepts and skills I learned at Rice Business to my new role!

Any advice for MBAs considering becoming a Board Fellow?

Once you are matched with an organization, think about how your skills and hobbies can best support them. During my fellowship, I applied creative skills from my background as an artist and data analysis skills from my career as a scientist to develop marketing and advertising suggestions, even though they were very different from the projects in my current role.

As a student at Rice Business, you’ll receive many opportunities to foster personal and professional growth. Jordyn-Marie’s experiences with the Rice Business Board Fellows program exemplify the impact you can have in the community.

Learn More About Rice MBA Programs

Remote work lets people live where they want, but ‘time shifting’ can put a strain on team collaboration and communication.

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Remote working tools like Zoom and Slack have been around for more than a decade, but it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that remote work really took off. Since then, work-from-anywhere arrangements have allowed more workers to perform their jobs from the places they want to live, whether that is nearer to friends and family or in a resort town in the Rocky Mountains.  

“Some companies now advertise job vacancies by time zone rather than geographical location,” says Tommy Pan Fang, assistant professor of strategic management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. “In one sense, it is a win-win: Companies deepen their talent pool, and workers have more opportunity. But living in one time zone while working in another can affect the way employees communicate and collaborate.”

The research, “Working Around the Clock: Temporal Distance, Intrafirm Communication, and Time Shifting of the Employee Workday,” by Fang, Harvard University’s Prithwiraj Choudhury and Georgetown University’s Jasmina Chauvin, found that strategically aligning employees along a North-South axis could improve team productivity.

“An East-West distribution of workers could be fine for teams that perform routine tasks,” Fang said. “But when projects depend on synchronous collaboration and communication, a firm might benefit from intentionally aligning workers along a shared time zone.”

The impacts of temporal distance

If team members are distributed across multiple time zones and everyone works standard business hours in the time zone where they reside, the overlap between their workdays will be less than it would if they all worked in the same time zone. Differences in working time are called “temporal distance,” and they limit the hours in which synchronous communication can take place.

Talking person-to-person in a video or phone call can play an important role in collaborative projects — speaking is usually faster and conveys tone better than emails do. If opportunities to talk with collaborators are limited, it could slow work on some projects. But it’s not clear how much this type of communication is being affected or even if synchronous communication is what is affected the most.

To address these questions, the research team analyzed communications data from more than 12,000 employees at a Fortune 100 multinational firm with operations around the globe. Published in the journal Organization Science, the research found that employees do something called “time shifting” to counteract the effect of temporal distance. This involves employees choosing to engage in work tasks or communications to accommodate varying schedules or to meet urgent demands of the job.

Time shifting can potentially impact team communication patterns, work-life balance, collaboration dynamics and project management strategy.

“Working outside of regular business hours has a cost. It can negatively affect work-life balance and has a direct impact on your personal time,” said Fang. “But workers may choose to do it anyway to meet the demands of their job.”

‘Time shifting’ and daylight saving: How workers adapt

To test the relationship between temporal distance and internal communications, Fang and his colleagues designed a study that centers on daylight saving time, a practice observed in many, but not all, parts of the world. Twice each year, clocks are adjusted by one hour — forward in spring and back in fall. But this practice varies widely, even within the same country. For example, in the United States, Arizona opts out of daylight saving, meaning they share a time zone with California for only half the year. These semiannual shifts create an opportunity to measure the difference an hour makes — before and after a time change.

The team analyzed the Outlook and Skype records of the Fortune 100 firm’s scheduled calls and meetings, unscheduled calls, instant message chats and email messages. Its employees were based on every continent except Antarctica, including numerous jurisdictions that don’t adopt daylight saving time such as India, Argentina and Malaysia. The research found that a one-hour increase in temporal distance — that is, when daylight saving time occurred in one jurisdiction but not another — reduced synchronous communication by 11%.

“This was less than we expected,” said Fang. “The loss of an hour from the workday represented a 19% loss in the overlap of business hours. So proportionally, communications went down less than opportunities to communicate did.”

Houston/Chicago vs. Houston/Orlando

The study observed an increase in the volume of communication taking place outside of standard working hours. Workers who have strong collaborative relationships and perform tasks that are not routine were more likely to time shift. The findings raise questions about what type of work is best suited to geographic distributions that span multiple time zones.

“When an employee’s role is collaborative and nonroutine, they place a premium on synchronous communication,” said Fang. “They adjust their workday to get their job done. But not everyone is able to do this, and firms might have lower productivity because of it.”

The study also observed that not all workers time shift equally. Individual characteristics like gender and cultural context may lead to disparities in productivity and engagement. For example, women are less likely to communicate outside of business hours than men are, possibly because of the added responsibility that many women assume in home life. Employees based in jurisdictions with stricter limits on working hours are also less likely to communicate outside of working hours. And if a firm’s management places a premium on synchronous forms of communication, these differences could lead to disparities in pay and career advancement emerging over time. Fang said this suggests that firms might benefit from favoring North-South distributions of their workforce.

Chauvin, Choudhury, and Fang. “Working Around the Clock: Temporal Distance, Intrafirm Communication, and Time Shifting of the Employee Workday.” Organization Science 35.5 (2024): https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17558.

This story originally appeared in Rice Business Wisdom and was lightly edited for Rice News.

Based on research by Daan van Knippenberg (Rice Business), Maartje E. Schouten (Erasmus) and Lindred L. Greer (Michigan)

Key findings:

• “Conflict hierarchy” happens when members of a team have disputes in competing for influence and status.
• Academic literature on the topic tends to assume that self-interest is the primary driver.
• Daan van Knippenberg and his colleagues suggest that hierarchy conflicts can stem from a desire to benefit the team. When driven by such prosocial motives, these conflicts are expressed more directly and with less intensity, leading to more positive team performance.

In every team, there is a hierarchy. And in every hierarchy, there is competition for status.

In hierarchy conflict, team members seek to differentiate themselves to acquire socially valued resources like acknowledgment and influence. Senior members of a team might jockey for leadership roles or to guide the team’s mission. Junior team members sometimes compete for even informal recognition that could set them apart from peers and accelerate their climb up the corporate ladder.

The potential costs of hierarchy conflict are well-established in academic literature. Team members who engage in it might refuse to share their knowledge, reducing the flow of information and inadvertently hindering decision-making — all to maintain an advantage over internal competition.

But research by Daan van Knippenberg (Rice Business), along with colleagues at Michigan and Erasmus University in The Netherlands, challenges conventional wisdom, arguing that hierarchy conflict isn’t always a bad thing.

“It is certainly true that there can be a tension between the interest of an individual and what is best for the team as a whole,” says van Knippenberg, the Houston Endowed Professor of Management. “Actions that serve one team member’s career goals are often not the best way to achieve the team’s mission.”

“When a team member is primarily motivated by this shared outcome, it could create significant differences in how hierarchy conflicts play out.”

When is Hierarchy Conflict Good? 

Hierarchy conflict can potentially serve the collective good, van Knippenberg and colleagues argue in the top journal Organization Science. When conflict is motivated by the broader interests of the team, it could actually improve rather than harm group performance. That’s because, in these situations, individual and team interests are aligned.

“It is a popular idea that all hierarchy conflict is bad and should be avoided at any cost,” says van Knippenberg. “But we argue that hierarchy conflict is not always self-serving, and the motivation for it could have a significant effect on its outcome.”

Consider the case of a company’s team managers competing for resources on an upcoming project. Each of the managers seeks to gain the favor of company executives so that resources will be allocated to their team. It is possible — even probable — that some of these managers are motivated by self-interest. After all, promotions and bonuses are given to people who show they can seal the deal.

But the managers could also earnestly believe their teams will make the most of those resources — that they really are best positioned to perform for the benefit of the firm.

The Motivation for Conflict is Key

To explore why people have different motivations in conflict over status or hierarchy, van Knippenberg and his team used something called interdependence theory. This theory suggests that it’s natural for people to have “pro-self” motivations and act in ways that focus on their own interests. Interdependence theory also argues that people can, at the same time, have “prosocial” motivations and act with the collective good in mind — depending on their deeper goals and values.

“Engaging in hierarchy conflict for prosocial reasons may occur less often than it does for pro-self reasons,” says van Knippenberg. “But when it does occur, it could be a more constructive force.”

The researchers created a theoretical model that predicts how these differences in motivation play out in practice. It predicts that when hierarchy conflict is motivated by a team member’s self-interest, it can lead to intense conflicts that are detrimental to team performance.

“When someone is trying to gain respect and recognition, they might challenge other team members or interrupt their peers,” says van Knippenberg. “Not only can that have a negative impact on team dynamics, it also limits the number of perspectives being expressed and how much information is actually being exchanged.”

But when hierarchy conflict is motivated by the team’s collective interest, the conflict itself tends to be a little more low-key. It is expressed more directly and less intensely, which could have the opposite effect, facilitating an exchange of ideas and increasing the flow of information between team members.

CHECK OUT THIS EPISODE OF OWL HAVE YOU KNOW

Managing Hierarchy Conflict

For management to deal effectively with hierarchy conflict, it’s important to consider motivations so they can anticipate what effects there will likely be. While the study of hierarchy has grown in recent years, it tends to focus on its negative aspects.

“We wanted to add nuance to this conversation, and shift how scholars think about hierarchy conflict,” van Knippenberg says.

“When team members engage in this type of conflict for prosocial reasons, the effects might not be so bad. But it is also not the same as acting out of altruism. In the context of a team, the self is a part of the collective, and every team member benefits when the team achieves its goals. When a team member is primarily motivated by this shared outcome, it could create significant differences in how hierarchy conflicts play out.”

Schouten, van Knippenberg, and Greer (2024). “Hierarchy Conflict: Causes, Expressions, and Consequences,” Organization Science.