Source: wsj.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the college-admissions scandal is any guide, attending an elite college is a ticket to a high-paying job. So what about students at lesser-known colleges, with names few people even recognize?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many find themselves on the wrong side of a recruiting gap, where students at colleges that aren\u2019t on corporate recruiters\u2019 list of target schools must battle hard to get noticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ask Andrew Huang, a 2018 graduate of tiny\n Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. He chose Gordon for its sense of \ncommunity, close student-faculty ties and proximity to Boston. But he \naspired to work in finance\u2014a competitive field where many firms recruit \ninterns and employees from a cadre of elite target schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dogged networking for an internship during his sophomore year, both at events and via emails and phone calls, netted Mr. Huang more than 100 new contacts\u2014although many of his conversations with them were discouraging. He still remembers one investment banker\u2019s response to his pitch: \u201cHe said no, that because I didn\u2019t go to one of the firm\u2019s target schools, it would be too much of an uphill battle for me,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Huang says. \u201cIn that moment, I just knew that I had to keep working hard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Huang eventually reached his goal, landing an internship in \nfinance and a job after graduation as an analyst at Cambridge \nAssociates, a global investment-advisory firm in Boston. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Small colleges do have major strengths, of course. Students \noften seek them out for a well-rounded liberal-arts education and a more\n intimate campus experience. They also tend to have cohesive networks of\n alumni who go to bat for current students seeking internships and jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, students from elite colleges and universities such as the Ivy League and Stanford, or big, highly regarded state schools such as Penn State and the University of Michigan, are far more likely to see corporate recruiters on campus. Fewer employers are now sending representatives to colleges in the first place\u2014about 72% compared with 89% in 2006, says Edwin Koc, director of research at the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Students from elite schools, however, are also more frequently the target of online recruitment ads. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Getting on recruiters\u2019 radar as a sophomore or junior is more important amid a trend toward employers assessing potential candidates earlier. Recruiters in competitive fields expect students to start gaining internship experience by their sophomore year. That means hiring decisions that used to be made in students\u2019 senior year are now taking place two years earlier\u2014a fact easily missed by the average 19-year-old. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paul Pesek was almost blindsided by this ramped-up process. As a \nsophomore math and economics major at Wheaton College near Chicago, he \nknew he wanted to work in a high-impact job, but he had little idea how \nto proceed. He was shocked into awareness by a venture capitalist who \nspoke on campus about how to land challenging jobs in finance, \nconsulting and technology. The message: \u201cThis ship is taking off and you\n need to get on it now,\u201d Mr. Pesek says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He began networking with Wheaton alumni, friends and others, in the hope of landing a summer internship in finance. \u201cIt took a ton of conversations, and frankly, painful ones at first,\u201d he says. He flew to New York on one fall break with only a single appointment set up, then scheduled a half-dozen more by telling contacts, \u201cI\u2019m coming to New York for a networking week,\u201d he says. His efforts paid off. He landed an internship at Morgan Stanley , and a job after his 2013 graduation at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. He later moved on to a private-equity firm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To help other students, Mr. Pesek co-founded a mentoring organization in 2016, Vocational Capital. A friend, Evan Weir, founded a chapter at his alma mater, Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga. Mr. Huang, who was mentored at Gordon College by a friend of Mr. Pesek\u2019s, is helping run a third chapter there. They\u2019ve enrolled 91 students in the program so far, Mr. Pesek says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Their message to other students: \u201cYou\u2019re going to end up working as a\n barista if you don\u2019t have a plan,\u201d says Mr. Weir, a 2015 grad whose \nnetworking helped him land an internship, and later a full-time \nposition, at a Wall Street firm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Big employers can\u2019t recruit on all of the nation\u2019s 3,000 four-year campuses, of course, but they\u2019re more likely to recruit at lesser-known schools if alumni hold top jobs at the company. Companies say they democratize the hiring process by posting internships and jobs on their websites so that students from any school can apply. Online applications are easily overlooked amid hundreds of competitors or weeded out by applicant-tracking systems, however. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Small colleges are taking steps to make their students more visible. Furman University, a liberal-arts college in Greenville, S.C., flips the recruiting model by taking groups of students to meet college-relations managers at New York financial-services and media companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gordon College creates internships in-house. Neema Kamau, a senior \nthere, says experience she gained as an assistant to the college\u2019s CFO \nhelped her land an internship this summer as a global markets analyst \nwith Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another innovative program by a Chicago consulting firm, Parker\n Dewey, is an online micro-internship platform that links college \nstudents and recent grads with employers offering paid, short-term \nprojects. The site gives students from any school a chance to gain \nexperience and show off their skills, and it has attracted many \nemployers seeking more diverse candidates, says CEO Jeffrey Moss. \u201cWe \noffer a broader employee pool, as opposed to the walled gardens that \nexist now in campus recruiting,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alexa Arakelian, a senior in pre-law studies at Beloit \nCollege in Wisconsin, says work experience she gained through Parker \nDewey enabled her to compete successfully against students from larger \nschools for a summer internship at a Chicago security-consulting firm. \n\u201cIt puts us on the same playing field,\u201d she says. \u201cThat experience \nhelped me get an amazing summer internship I never thought I\u2019d get.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
* <\/strong>Begin as a freshman to plan internships or other work experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * <\/strong>Update and polish your LinkedIn profile to reflect your experience and goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * <\/strong>Tap your college career-services center to practice mock interviews and other skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * <\/strong>Build your network of professional contacts via email, phone calls and events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * <\/strong>Consider asking administrators at your college to shadow or intern for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Source: wsj.com If the college-admissions scandal is any guide, attending an elite college is a ticket to a high-paying job.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":633,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[346],"tags":[553,502,763,760,759,762,761,758],"class_list":["post-632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-college","tag-admissions","tag-college","tag-internship","tag-jobs","tag-landing","tag-networking","tag-scandal","tag-strivers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":634,"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions\/634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gurukulgalaxy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}