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It’s a scary time to be an MBA student, given the diminished state of the financial industry. But there are worse places than school to ride out major economic chaos.

Stephen Holliday, associate director of placement for the Flores MBA Program at LSU, says investment banking isn’t a field he would guide students toward these days.

The program recently placed four interns with Goldman Sachs. Whether they’ll be offered jobs after those internships is an unanswered question. Students at places like Harvard and MIT are increasingly finding job offers disappear as Wall Street titans go to their knees.

“My counterparts at other schools I talk to are extremely concerned about where their master’s students are going to go,” Holliday says. “We’ve tried not to be in that position.”

Does anybody really have a choice? Yes, if, like the Flores program, you’ve diversified your offerings. While a career in finance is often topmost in the minds of new MBA students, Holliday is encouraging students to take a close look at fields like supply chain management, internal audit and human resources—areas of which LSU is known and recruiting is still strong, despite the bloodbath on Wall Street.

There’s still demand for things like competent entry-level credit analysts in the financial services industry. But still.

Supply chain management, for one, is a high-demand field during tough times since it’s the last place you can “squeeze a competitive advantage out of an organization,” Holliday says. The period of soaring fuel prices, before the economy sank, was a perfect example.

He recommends students develop skills that allow them to meet a variety of demands—especially important in a gloomy economic environment, but a good idea any time.

“We tell the student, ‘Find your transferable skills,’” Holliday says. “‘What can you do to bring a competitive advantage to whatever you do?’ Companies are always looking for employees that are willing to work hard and bring value to their organization.”

He hasn’t heard of any job offers rescinded so far. The last corporate recruiting and hiring period happened before the major meltdown. Come the next cycle, it’ll be clearer where things stand, Holliday says.

“Even though the mood is it’s a tough time, our students still have opportunities if they know where to look,” Holliday says. “The schools that have the most successful placement rate are those that have diversified.”

LSU grads have the petrochemical industry—right in LSU’s backyard—as an alternative. Graduates who might not have given a thought to working in the petrochemical sector are doing so now.

Emily Halphen is one. She just entered the program in August, and will graduate May 2010. Her undergraduate degree was in marketing, but she wanted to concentrate on finance for her master’s degree to get closer to the numbers side of business. Halphen found such a shortage of finance internships, she added an HR component.

“Coming in, I wouldn’t have looked at HR—not that I wouldn’t want to do it, but I wouldn’t have even looked at it if I hadn’t had so much trouble with finance,” she says.

Halphen admits she’s disappointed, since she was keen on a finance career. She did land an HR internship with ExxonMobil, which she hopes leads to a full-time job. It looks promising, since the company does hire a good portion of its interns full time. Many MBA students are turning to the oil-and-gas sector these days, she says.

“It kind of feels like there are not a lot of internships in general right now,” she says. “Those who are getting callbacks for finance internships are those who as undergraduates majored in finance or accounting.”

Halphen says she went straight into the MBA program because she didn’t want the kind of low-level job she probably would have settled for if she’d gone to work with only a bachelor’s degree. She’s feeling pretty smart about that decision, and she can’t imagine that anybody graduating this May wouldn’t want to go right into grad school.

“Now I feel like you have to have that extra piece of paper, because the job market is getting flooded with people,” Halphen says.

Ashe Yigletu, director of Southern University’s MBA program, says he’s detected no symptoms from the crisis so far in the program, and he isn’t worried long-term about the impact on the program in terms of enrollment. MBA programs are often a haven in rough economic times when people are losing their jobs, he notes.

“I don’t think this crisis will dramatically decrease our enrollment,” he says. “In fact, we may have the reverse impact.”

From a scholarly standpoint, the crisis offers a historical opportunity to re-examine the foundations of the global economy and whether the bodies charged with regulating it are up to meeting the economic challenges of the 21st century, Yigletu says.

“We have to not only try to solve this financial crisis, but I think we have to go beyond that—into fundamental things,” he says.

Ryan Schneider has a year and half to go in the Flores MBA program. He wants to concentrate on finance or management, depending on where things go after his internship, which he just finalized with Chevron as a land representative. The job would normally go to a law grad, though Flores is trying to expand internship opportunities for its students.

Schneider, unlike Halphen, went to work right after earning his bachelor’s degree, but he decided to go back to graduate school until the economy is straightened out.

“I read a lot of the Wall Street Journal,” he says. “There were several articles about how during this rough time, when jobs are scarce, advancing yourself in school is very good idea.”

Schneider hopes the crisis ends by the time he graduates, and credits Holliday and others in the program with attracting recruiters, such as from the petrochem industry, that might not have looked at Flores students in the past.

“I’ve only been here three months, and I’ve already got an internship lined up seven months from now,” Schneider says. “They’re stepping up. I think they’ve got it figured out.”