Editor's Note: This is the first article in a term-long series profiling three seniors as they work through the corporate recruiting process.
It's the process that everyone loves to hate, that annual ritual that inspires seniors to don their best suits and tote their most professional-looking portfolios: corporate recruiting.
Every year, a little less than half the senior class enlists for that grueling process of resume and cover-letter writing, high-stakes interviews and uncertain futures.
Some of the roughly 450 students who have signed up with Career Services this year know what they want. Others figure they might as well. Some do it for the high corporate salaries. Others because the business world is what they truly enjoy.
What follows are the stories of three seniors, each with different interests and aspirations, who for one reason or another will have finished off their application materials by the end of the work day today -- the first Career Services deadline.
All three want a job, but none knows what the results will be. Throughout the next few months, The Dartmouth will chronicle their experiences as they seek to determine once and for all where and how they will spend the next year of their lives.
"What do you want?"
A computer science major, Mindy Pereira '03 is looking for a job either as a programmer or software design engineer, an area where she has several off-terms of experience.
She is also a senior member of the undergraduate society Amarna, a web maven at the Dartmouth Free Press and a contributor to the Women in Science Project.
Pereira said her demands for a job are not too high, but important: she wants free time, people her age to work with, job security and the feeling of "being paid what I'm worth."
When The Dartmouth spoke with her, she was just getting over a cold and looked as if the time and energy that recruiting demanded of her was a bit too much.
"It's very, very stressful," Pereira said.
"If I could just get a recruiter in a room and say 'what do you want?'" she said. "But not knowing ... it's like applying for college."
A glance at Pereira's schedule shows that she has every minute filled this week. She's even considering dropping her third class this term to make more time for her job hunt.
Pereira has been attending employer seminars "just for that one piece of information that will give me an edge."
A friend told Pereira that her first job would be what employers would look at from the time she got out of college onward. "My first experience will say a lot about what I can do," Pereira said.
When asked how soon she expects to find her ideal lifestyle, she was not immediately sure how to answer. "A job's supposed to take care of that," she said. "It's not much."
If a corporate job doesn't come through, Pereira has a backup plan -- a year working for a non-profit called Geeks for America that recruits technical staff for other non-profits.
But the salary there is not as good as the jobs she would prefer at Microsoft and two technical consulting companies, and it would take longer to pay off her student loans. She also wants to spend longer than a year at her first job.
Pereira made clear that the stakes for her are very high and that she can't afford to give up the corporate recruiting process altogether. "No. I can't do it. I have to get a job."
Stepping stone
Vinny Ng '03 is confident about everything -- everything, that is, but his chances of getting a consulting job. He speaks straight to whatever topic he approaches -- a style he said took some corporate recruiters by surprise.
For Ng, a psychology major, a corporate job is the necessary stepping stone for the work he really loves.
"When I say I'm doing corporate recruiting, the first thing I feel like I have to do is justify it," he said.
This is partly because of Ng's non-profit work -- his job last year was as the Career Services intern planning the not-for-profit career fair, which helped him find an internship at a micro-finance firm in Nicaragua.
He is a transfer student from Boston University and came to Dartmouth partly for its smaller size. He will go abroad for a third term in the winter, on a language program in Italy.
Ng is charismatic -- he ran for '03 class council vice-president and said he only lost by four votes. His long-term goals are working as an international development consultant or starting his own non-profit. He sees a job in consulting as "a training ground."
"The one mistake I didn't want to make was to do my own thing without experience," he said.
Ng said he has sympathy for idealists, but that idealism alone can't accomplish the goals of most non-profits -- they "have to be run like businesses," he said.
Ng has mastered the job hunt. He did practice interviews and case interviews with his two roommates, conducted "informational interviews" where he grilled recent alumni who had joined firms to find out whatever he can about the companies and read several books about the job search process.
He has come to believe in the power of networking.
"You have to think of it as a fourth class," he said of the recruiting process.
"It think if you're dreading it, it's not right for you, or you haven't thought about it enough, or you haven't done enough for it."
Ng is concerned about the job market. He has set his expectations low, at one or two offers at second-tier consulting firms -- a prospect he would rather decline in favor of his backup plan of getting a grant to carry him for the summer, then trying again next year.
Even with all his preparation and confidence, Ng does not know if he will get a job at all. A third of his classmates are probably looking at a lot of the same jobs he is, he said. "And a lot of them are not going to get what they want."
Giving up music
Glenn Jacobson listed the things that set him apart from other candidates for the financial service jobs he was applying for: "I have a pretty good GPA. I interview well. I get along with people."
Jacobson also mentioned his experience -- a unique job working at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York this past summer -- but he is aware of "how many kids are like me."
Jacobson, who is a member of Chi Gamma Epsilon fraternity and plays piano for The Barbary Coast, is applying for a job at about 15 top investment banking firms, but he said he sees corporate recruiting as a way to postpone making any major life decisions.
"If I like it, good," he said of a corporate job. "If I don't, I leave my options open."
Money and experience were some of the other reasons he wanted a corporate job.
Jacobson said he enjoys economics, his major, but that it is "not his first love" -- music is, but he does not think he could bank his future on it.
He is ready to give up what he said was a lot of time and energy looking for a corporate job -- so far it's been about an hour a day since classes started.
Jacobson said he will be better prepared once he knows which firms offer him an interview.
Like the other seniors, he said that he would be more optimistic if today's job market resembled that of the 1990s.
When pressed on his chances, Jacobson said that he expects one or two offers.
Although he does not have a backup plan yet if a job does not work out, Jacobson said had no illusions about what a financial services job would require -- that he would work long hours and "completely give up music."
