Interviews

My search for post-college employment is progressing nicely. I have no offers yet but I should hopefully be hearing back from places soon regarding 2nd rounds. I don’t really want to comment on the firms with which I am interviewing, but I have a few observations about the general process I’d like to share.

1. Interviews are fun. People have said a good interview should be a conversation rather than an interrogation, and I’ve been striving to make that the case, and it makes it far more interesting at least from my perspective. I Think about it this way: I’m interviewing them to see if I want to work there just as much as they’re interviewing me to see if they want me to work there. Which brings me to my second point:

2. I’m not a fan of on campus interviews. Crazy, right? They are super convenient and on familiar territory. However, I much prefer getting to see the office of the company I am interviewing with. That allows me to get a feel for the atmosphere and in some cases meet potential coworkers. On a shallower note, it gives me a feel for the ambiance of the work space: I’d rather not working in a dark, cramped office if I can avoid it.

3. Career Services. Meh. Kudos to them for setting up on campus recruiting and some of the events they do, as well as the online job portal. Their advising is not so great though: I set up an appointment to lay out an approach for applications, and basically they told me I could wait until January to begin applying for jobs. False. In their defense, they did say to focus on the companies recruiting on campus this semester, although there are companies I want to work for that don’t recruit on campus who have early deadlines. They missed that one.

3a. There is a definite distinction among my peers of those who are applying for jobs now, and those who are heading career services’ advice. That said, the latter group may also be applying for jobs that don’t open until later. Still, it is very amusing to see the same faces over and over at all of the networking events.

4. Depending on how many offers I get, deciding will be tough. I’m only applying to places I would want to work. Some people I know are applying EVERYWHERE. Okay, not literally everywhere, but they certainly seem to have a lot of interviews. And maybe they do want to work at all of these companies. Compared to these people though, I have a fairly narrow scope for my job search.

At the risk of getting too wordy, I’ll leave it there for now.