Editor's Note: This is the second article in a series profiling seniors as they work through the corporate recruiting process.
The past month has been a roller coaster ride for Dartmouth seniors seeking jobs through corporate recruiting.
First was the stressful process of submitting resumes and cover letters through Career Services to potential employers. Then came the even more tense period when employers either called students for interviews, or did not.
As seniors advance in interview rounds and even snag job offers, some are reconsidering what they really want next.
Ups and Downs
Just over a month ago, Mindy Pereira was overjoyed. She had just gotten an interview with Microsoft, several days before the deadline for the company's response deadline.
"I'm bubbly," she enthused. "You can talk yourself into believing you really aren't going to get a job, you aren't qualified." A corporate response "snaps you out of it."
Previously, Pereira, a computer science major, had been sick, tired and burnt out. The early interview seemed to have given her new life.
"I'm in a much better place than I was when I started this process," she said at the time. "If nothing works out from here, I did it, I made it this far. I'm obviously qualified to do something."
Pereira's plan was to prepare thoroughly, from doing mock interviews with friends to trying on the clothes she would wear.
Now, Pereira is not doing as well.
She has not gotten first-round interviews with any other companies, and her interview with Microsoft went badly because of confusion over which job she had been applying for and some basic jitters.
In a recent interview with The Dartmouth, Pereira was unsure about her chances again, but nowhere near as much as she had been before she started the recruiting process. She planned on using the Internet to find other places to apply, essentially removing herself from Career Service's corporate recruiting until Winter term.
Late last week, Pereira said she had spent her time since the Microsoft interview "networking" -- looking into companies that might provide the job opportunities she wanted.
Free of corporate recruiting deadlines, Pereira is focusing more attention on her difficult, project-based classes -- she just finished debugging an operating system she had been building, for example.
Pereira has also applied for five positions already through Internet job sites. That's the same number of spots she had applied for during corporate recruiting -- but her second job search is less stressful, although Pereira said it was "more of an effort" to apply for jobs on her own.
She is no longer "horribly disappointed" by her poor interview with Microsoft, seeing it instead as a learning experience.
Through all this, it did not appear that Pereira's goals have significantly changed. "I want a job before I graduate," she said.
She still thinks she will get one.
Changing Priorities
Vinny Ng '03 was so good at corporate recruiting that his friends were asking him for advice. By now, though, his priorities have turned upside down.
Ng, a psychology major, landed five interviews from the recruiting process early this term, one by obsessively checking Career Services' website so he could be the first alternate to answer back if a spot opened up. All in all, he ended up with 10 invitations.
"I think a big part about why I got offers with the ones I did is that I knew the firms pretty darn well," said Ng. He had made something of an art of preparing by approaching recruiters, getting information from alumni and doing mock interviews. Ng attacked corporate recruiting with discipline and confidence.
"I feel good going into these interviews," Ng said during the peak of recruiting season. He said he felt his first interviews had gone well -- they were the same kinds of conceptual questions he had prepared for, but "easier."
"The best thing you can do is seem like you're having fun with the interview," he said.
Ng didn't seem to have many doubts. Asked if he felt that the corporate recruiting process was fair to those who didn't prepare as well as he had, Ng admitted that it required preparation.
"It's intense. It's not for people that aren't type-A," Ng said.
Although he admitted to being a bit concerned about his GPA, Ng was evaluating his chances as better than he did when he first began the process. However, he still only expected a handful of offers by the time he finished, and not at what he described as at top-tier firms.
Then Ng attended a diversity workshop that he said "helped me put things in perspective."
"I realized that we all have this common humanity and I came to this spiritual realization that definitely put the whole corporate recruiting process in a new light," he said.
Ng had been confident about using a corporate job as a stepping stone, gaining the skills he would need to pursue a career with a non-profit organization later on. Now he talked about taking a year off to travel and teach English, or to go to a monastery in France.
The workshop he attended was run by Charlie Kreiner, founder of the Institute for Diversity Education in America.
Kreiner presents models of human interactions that conceive of people as assuming the roles of oppressor and victim. The effect was an "emotional catharsis," Ng said -- people in the discussion groups emotionally opened themselves up to each other.
The upshot was a re-evaluation of Ng's worldview. "I definitely saw that I was becoming part of this capitalist system. I honestly saw myself as a cog in the machine, and that it didn't have to be that way."
Ng felt he may need the year off to get a better understanding of himself and "a better understanding of this whole concept of common humanity and inherent human nature."
Ng insisted that he did not believe this turnaround came because of his being rejected by a few of his top-choice companies. He still has second-round interviews with three companies and did not rule out the possibility of accepting one of these jobs. He did not begrudge the corporate recruiting process, either.
What about the goals he had before this weekend? "They haven't vanished. I'm thinking if I can figure out myself first ... then I might even take that to the next level."
