Looking for guidance

Many students instead pursue jobs like Tim Koby ’11 does — by striking out on their own.

“I did not apply through Career Services,” said Koby, who applied for a summer internship in investment banking. “I didn’t really know that much about Career Services.”

The experience today mirrors that of recent alumni.

“Outside of word of mouth or sharing information through peers, I never really got a sense of companies [from Career Services],” said Nathan Harbacek ’07, who works as a consultant for Oliver Wyman. Harbacek added that he learned about opportunities at Oliver Wyman from a friend.

Like similar services at peer universities, the University’s Office of Career Services brings recruiters to campus each year and offers assistance at many steps along the job search. While some students and recent alumni praised Career Services as a valuable resource, others said its offerings were too limited in scope.

Career Services offerings, here and elsewhere

Seung Nam ’12 said that students who do not make use of Career Services overlook valuable resources.

“Not many people use Career Services to its full extent,” said Nam, who applied for internships in investment banking and computing. “When I show up to walk-ins or ... appointments, often the schedule is surprisingly bare compared to the number of students who, in my opinion, should be working on their resumes.”

“The people there are definitely very knowledgeable about what they do and have a very good standard view on what your resume or cover letter should be and how you can improve it,” he added.

Beverly Hamilton-Chandler, director of Career Services, said in an e-mail that the office assists students in the job and internship search through interview preparation, resume-building and more than 200 career fairs and programs each year.

“Resources such as our TigerTracks online job posting and on-campus recruiting system, the UCAN Internship Exchange and Career Search can help students identify and apply for opportunities quickly and easily,” she said. According to the Class of 2009 Survey Report from Career Services, 56 percent of the members of that class who accepted full-time job offers found their jobs through TigerTracks.

For investment banking and consulting, these services are mirrored almost exactly at peer institutions. But often, career guidance offices are not an integral part of entering these fields.

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The basic application process for many such positions starts with application submission through an online system such as Experience, which the University uses. Companies then choose candidates among these applicants for on-campus interviews, explained Robin Mount, director of the career services office at Harvard. Second-round interviews, she added, are given off-campus.

“You’re going to see that it’s almost identical on every campus for investment banking and consulting, because it’s really ... driven by the company’s schedules ... and of course the academic year,” Mount explained.

The number of recruiters varies based on the size of the institution. Hamilton-Chandler declined to release the number of recruiters who come to the University.

Mount said that Harvard brings roughly 300 recruiters to campus each year.

The University of Pennsylvania has “hundreds of companies that come to campus each year,” a large fraction of which is from consulting firms and investment banks, said Dennis Ross, associate director of career services at the Penn’s Wharton School.

Williams College hosts about 100 recruiters each year, half of whom are from consulting and investment banking firms, said John Noble, director of the office of career counseling at Williams, in an e-mail.

“Our recruiting numbers are somewhat modest, being situated in the lone, northwest corner of Massachusetts,” he explained.

But Noble stressed that the most important factor in the job search for Williams students, especially for those in the consulting and investment banking fields, is alumni connections.

“I think it is important to remember that at most liberal arts institutions, the alumni play a key role in connecting students to the real world because there is very little correlation between one’s major and one’s career choice,” he said.

Looking back

Alumni not only provide connections for colleges but also use their career services offices after graduation.

“We find that we’re pretty highly utilized for the first five years out of school,” Mount said of Harvard’s career services.

“I actually used Career Services a couple months ago to just have them look over my resume and some of the cover letters,” Howard Yu ’08 said.

Ross said that while alumni using Penn’s career services office are often recent graduates, some alumni also turn to the office for help later in life when switching careers.

Princeton alumni expressed mixed sentiments about the usefulness of the University’s Career Services.

“I think Career Services does an excellent job, and I’m saying that from two different perspectives, having been both a student and recruiter [for J.P. Morgan],” Brian Danielewicz ’02 said.

“Seeing all the jobs that do get posted, they do a very good job of maintaining relationships with corporations and having them post job offers on campus,” he added.

But other alumni said Career Services should provide information about a broader range of career options.

“I feel as though Career Services could do much more in helping identify non-finance, non-law-oriented careers,” Meg Nakamura ’05 said in an e-mail. “Princeton graduates are very bright and could be branching out into other interested fields. Unfortunately, because of the lack of options, many default into finance or law.”

John ’06, who used to work in consulting and was granted anonymity so he could speak candidly, said he thought Career Services’ offerings focus too much on jobs in the financial sector.

“For those of us that weren’t absolutely 100 percent sure that we wanted to go that route, Career Services wasn’t outrageously helpful in helping me find other things that weren’t financial services-related,” John said. “And then looking back, there were a ton of other good options that I could have pursued, and they just didn’t know about them.”

He explained that he felt certain firms were overrepresented because most places “don’t have dedicated recruiters or an ordained amount of money to spend on slick brochures and career fairs and all that other stuff.”

“Firms like Bain and Goldman Sachs spend a lot of money recruiting people like us,” he said. “Some of these other choices don’t spend that kind of money on recruiting a hundred people ... I think Career Services could have been better at giving me the tools and some starting suggestions to go find that perfect one-off job, had I wanted it.”

Rebecca Yu ’11, who applied to several investment banking internships, said she thought Career Services did not necessarily play a key role in the job search.

“I think you do it [the application/interview process] equally well with a friend or a mom or someone else,” she explained. “I think Career Services is a great resource, but whether I absolutely need to go [to] it, that’s a different question.”

Erica Che contributed reporting.

This is the second in a three-part series on careers in investment banking and consulting.