Interview season hits swamped seniors

But for some, this fall presents even further challenges in time management, as seniors struggle to balance their lives at Princeton with job interviews and preparations for life after graduation.

“It’s like another class,” Kathleen Li ’10 said of the time commitment associated with interviewing for software engineering positions. For the past several weeks, the computer science major has had seven to eight interviews per week that “typically range from half an hour to one hour.”

“They sort of just keep coming right now,” Li said. She traveled to Washington, D.C., last Thursday and Friday for final-round interviews, after having first- and second-round interviews locally.

Similarly, Wilson School major Chris Xu ’10 said in an e-mail that he has “10 to 15 [interviews] per week” and sometimes “one to three per day,” and Ashley Schoettle ’10 noted that she has had four to five interviews a week for around the last two months, sometimes as many as two a day.

And like Li, Schoettle and Tom Blair ’10 have also traveled to other cities for final-round interviews, further increasing scheduling difficulties. “Generally for second-round [interviews] I travel to New York or Boston,” Schoettle explained. Blair, an economics major, even got up to catch a 7:30 a.m. flight to St. Louis on Tuesday for a final-round interview with a program at Anheuser-Busch.

Li noted that “other things are definitely suffering” because of her tight interviewing schedule. “But it’s a job,” she said. “I need to do this right now ... I kind of feel like I’m just barely holding on.”

“There’s a lot of joking around about how we have to let our grades slip right now,” she added. “When we get hired, people won’t care about our GPAs as much.”

Schoettle also noted a sense of camaraderie among fellow seniors dealing with equally busy and stressful schedules.

“I feel like they’re probably feeling the same as me,” Schoettle said. “A lot of the seniors I’ve talked to are feeling pretty anxious.”

When asked how his peers were handling their stretched schedules, Blair said, “Better than I am.” He holds an on-campus job and a position as an eating club officer.

In addition to the time spent in the interviews themselves, some seniors devote even more time to preparing for them.

“Usually I just do research about the firm online and prepare questions to ask,” Schoettle said. “And for the case studies I did practice online and rented a few key study practice books.”

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Li, on the other hand, said the benefits of preparation at this point are limited. “The way I see interviews, you kind of know your stuff, or you don’t, so I got myself down there and made sure I slept the night before,” she said.

Yet Xu doesn’t use his interviews as an excuse to scrimp on his other responsibilities. “Even with my interviews, I always put academics first no matter what,” he said. “It motivates me to get my studies done quicker so I have time to work on my interviews.”

“My extracurriculars are always at the back of my mind,” added Xu, who participates in the Princeton Pre-Business Society and Princeton Admission Links, a group that organizes student outreach programs with the Office of Admission.

“Because I knew this was going to be a busy year, I kind of cut back on extracurriculars,” explained Schoettle, who also said she chose to take three courses this semester instead of four. “It’s been quite challenging this year, mainly because I have my thesis to work on.”

Schoettle said she will be finished soon with all of her interviews since her schedule is rather “condensed,” but she added that, for her classmates “applying for a more diverse range of jobs,” interviews may continue until January or February.