I am not the first person to write about corporate recruiting woes and probably will not be the last. As a student currently going through this process for summer internships, however, my struggles reflect a phenomenon that belies our academic culture as a whole.
The nature of Dartmouth's finance-heavy corporate recruiting process starkly contrasts the College's self-proclaimed identity as the top liberal arts school in the country.
The entire recruiting process disproportionately favors economics majors. When using recruiting to decide what you want to do for the summer -- or for full-time employment after graduation -- you essentially have two choices: finance or consulting. It seems that even jobs that "encourage all majors to apply" still mostly seek applicants who have a minor in economics or at the very least have taken several courses in that department.
While I understand the relevance of economics experience to internships in the financial world, it is the lack of opportunities outside of Wall Street that I find disturbing.
The most disappointing part is that I am just coming to terms with these realities now, as a junior. I propose an addition to "things I wish I knew as a freshman": If you aspire to land a competitively paying internship, you'd better major in economics.
Dartmouth cannot control the type of candidates that finance and consulting firms seek. What Career Services can and should do, however, is attempt to attract companies to recruit at Dartmouth in fields outside of those that require a background in finance. While these opportunities do currently exist, they are few and far between.
Nearly all internships and entry-level jobs offered through Career Services' recruiting program look for candidates with exceptional quantitative ability. This makes sense for large banks looking for people to crunch numbers and perform regression analysis all day long, but I wish I had known that "Intro to Statistical Methods" is perhaps the most important class anyone at Dartmouth hoping to land a job through Career Services can take.
Additionally, the majority of companies who recruit on campus are looking for students with exceptional grade point averages. It makes sense that elite firms seek to attract equally elite candidates; it should also follow, however, that firms which typically recruit top students at lesser schools would consider more average students from a top institution such as Dartmouth. Where are these companies in our recruiting process? Not all of us have the credentials to work for Goldman Sachs.
It is true that some job opportunities are technically available to Dartmouth students in diverse fields outside of the recruitment program. These listings, however, are posted to Career Services' affiliated MonsterTrak page infrequently and remain there indefinitely, making it difficult to know whether or not a position is still available.
I have applied to numerous jobs through MonsterTrak and have never heard back about a single one; surely if the positions were still available, one of the employers would have at least contacted me to turn me down.
This fall I completed an internship in Boston after having been spurned by all of the places at which I had sought employment through the recruiting program. It was a government internship, and although it was a valuable experience, there was no salary; it actually cost me money to work for them.
Slightly more disconcerting was the fact that apparently -- and I don't mean this to be self-aggrandizing -- they considered me to be some sort of "super intern" compared to all my predecessors. This was all well and good, except that it left me wondering why I wasn't able to land a better gig.
I encourage Dartmouth and Career Services to better accommodate students seeking paid internships outside of the finance world.
Don't limit students who initially had other dreams to taking jobs in the finance and consulting fields; I can recount many stories about older friends who came to Dartmouth with diverse aspirations only to wind up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
For those who have a genuine ambition to work on Wall Street, Dartmouth is perhaps the best school in the country. For those who don't, the top liberal arts college in America leaves a lot to be desired.
