With corporate recruiting fast approaching for seniors and underclassmen searching for leave-term internships, Career Services could easily be mistaken for a rush-hour metro station.
Director of Career Services Skip Sturman said he thinks about 90 percent of seniors use Career Services at some point in their four years at the College.
"Many students take advantage of Career Services, whether just to come and use the directories or to get help with their resumes or to meet with one of the counselors," Sturman said.
Career Services Student Intern Tim Jezek '98 said there are always at least five students in the Career Services offices at any time of the day.
He said the offices are especially crowded during the end of Fall term, right before corporate recruiting in the winter.
What the office offers
Sturman said more than 600 students participated in on-campus recruiting last year. More than 100 applied to medical schools and 261 were accepted into graduate schools.
Sturman said when a student first comes to Career Services, the receptionist at the front desk "tries to take stock of the student's issues." He said student may then be referred to a counselor or to the manager of the resource library.
"There are all sorts of handouts and a booklet that students can acquire at the front desk on resume writing and cover letters and networking," Sturman said.
Career Services has accumulated a vast collection of resources from Dartmouth alumni, former employees of Dartmouth students and many other people interested in hiring Dartmouth students, Sturman said.
He said Career Services has a collection of more than 1,300 leave-term jobs and internship listings.
Sturman said the World Wide Web and the Internet are useful sources of job information in addition to the numerous volumes and files Career Services has in its libraries.
Aurora Leute '97 said she is looking for a job in higher education -- possibly working in admissions or residential life.
She said she goes to the Career Services office every week to read the Chronicle of Higher Education, which has been very helpful.
"It gives me a good idea of what qualifications I need for certain jobs," Leute said.
The College also offers a new service called JobTrack, which posts job opportunities for students on the Internet.
Corporate recruiting and more
In the next few weeks, many seniors will attend information session after information session trying to differentiate between different types of recruiting and different types of companies.
Sturman said the term "recruiting" refers to "a variety of services that go beyond on-campus recruiting by companies."
He said the process includes on-campus recruiting for internships and entry-level jobs, resume services and job fairs, such as the annual Eastern College Career Day in New York in March.
Career Services prepares students for corporate recruiting in many ways, Sturman said. He said last week there were group information sessions for seniors, and this week marks the start of a series of programs that are either "delivered by companies or organizations that recruit here or graduate schools that visit here."
Some of these programs feature panels of students from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration or law school recruiters, he said.
Companies that will be recruiting at Dartmouth in the winter will give information sessions this term, Sturman said.
He said Career Services also offers workshops on resume writing and interviewing.
Jacob Waldman '97 said he plans to participate in corporate recruiting to some extent in the winter.
He said he went to some of Career Services' early sessions, but did not find them very helpful.
But, he said he went to a panel this week called "What is Consulting" and it gave him "an eye as to what consulting is."
To help him prepare for recruiting, Waldman said he plans to take advantage of Career Services' sessions on preparing for interviews and learning to write cover letters.
He said he also intends to use the Career Services libraries to research companies he hopes to interview with.
Although corporate recruiting is "such a big and successful program that is can overshadow other services" offered by Career Services, Sturman said he is anxious to be of service to all students looking for jobs in any field.
Sturman said there have been several internal changes within Career Services since he became director last February, but the changes may not be "readily observable to students."
He said many of the changes were of "an evolutionary nature" and affected internal procedures, guidelines and policies.
A program called JobTrack was brought in last spring to more systematically acquire information about jobs, Sturman said. He said Career Services also hired a temporary assistant to help with the program.
Future changes in Career Services will involve streamlining and revisiting policies, Sturman said. "A lot of the focus has been to see that we are all in agreement about our mission and what our priorities are."
Advice
Sturman said there are several pieces of advice he would offer seniors searching for entry-level jobs after graduation.
"One of the most important things to do is to step back and try to determine what is important to you next year as far as your own set of needs is concerned," he said. "Is it important to pick a geographic location? Is making a lot of money to pay back student loans the most pressing need?"
He added it is important for students to not lose sight of their academics and to remember they are here for four years to "take full advantage of the rich intellectual opportunities here."
"We know that job hunting and applying to graduate schools takes a lot of time, but we don't want to have students lose sight of the real reason they are here," Sturman said.
He warned against students' focusing their searches too narrowly when trying to find a job.
Sturman said seniors often feel "that the range of options is limited to a very narrow group of fields that seem to be attracting a lot of their classmates and not realizing how many different options are out there and available to them."
He said other seniors feel "like if they don't have a job by graduation, then the world comes to an end."
But many people are not ready to start searching for a job until after the academics have slowed down, which does not close off all their options, Sturman said.
Several non-seniors are already taking advantage of Career Services' offerings.
Aiyana Thompson '99 said she is just beginning a search for an internship in journalism or communications for Winter term.
She said she has looked at the files on record at Career Services from Dartmouth alumni.
Thompson said she thinks choosing a job is the easy part -- writing a resume is what is difficult.
Marc Sikkes '99 said he just went to Career Services for the first time yesterday.
"They have a great variety of things for all sorts of opportunities," he said. "There are a lot of good leads for internships.
Sikkes said he is interested in a general consulting or finance internship or possibly some sort of internship abroad.
