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<p>lol</p>
<p>Connections are truly important, especially family connections. No question about that.</p>
<p>cbreeze - It was 25 years ago I work there, I no longer know anyone there. The person who invited D1 is the head recruiter for the firm, who is also an alum of her school. While D1 was interviewing for her internship this year, she did it on her own. It was all through her school’s recruiting program.</p>
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<p>Cbreeze’s comment was a question, and I was happy to answer. But the statement above is an unnecessary assumption. Frankly, with a smell of jealousy, no?</p>
<p>Maybe…will you adopt me, OF?</p>
<p>Jealous? I don’t think so. My college kid has a paid internship this summer. I don’t know if he LOVES it but usually no news is good news with him. I am realistic in acknowledging that connections - including family connections - are invaluable in this tough economy. As it happens, this particular internship came about not through his campus recruiting office. I’m friends with the mom of a girl who graduated from his high school a few years ahead of him and who also attended his college. This girl has a similar combination of interests. Her mom told me about a very cool internship she had one summer, I mentioned to son, son applied, the girl - now quite solidly launched in her career - put in a good word for him.</p>
<p>Networking makes the world go 'round. Especially in this economy.</p>
<p>Your daughter sounds like a dynamo, Oldfort, and you are justifiably proud. I just think a touch of humility along the way is called for when so many are having a really tough time getting a foothold in the workforce. I also think that my own child may have a pretty good gig this summer but it’s going to be a very tough road ahead.</p>
<p>If someone were to say “my kid is going to Harvard,” would it be polite to say, “Nice he got in because of family money.” D1 has had enough knocks along the way, and the same goes for my family, I do not need you to teach me humility. Thank you very much.</p>
<p>Ahhh . . . there is certainly jealousy afoot and I think we now see where it resides.</p>
<p>The title is if the the job market is really that bad? If everyone is here to report only bad news, then it would be skewed. D1 is not the only one who has a good internship this summer. Most of her friends are working in NYC at paid internship. They are all anxious about getting an offer at end of this summer. Some of her friends got their internship through schools and a handful through family connections. IBs tend to be a leading indicator when it comes to economy recovery. From what I am seeing, some of those firms will be competing for resource, and salary will go up for those new employees. D1 maybe dynamo, but there are people who are just as good. If they are already reaching out to her, they are doing the same to other interns. There was just another thread recently by jym that her son was interviewing at multiple companies and received multiple offers.</p>
<p>Sewhappy, family connections help, but they are only one factor and don’t exist in all cases. Oldfort indicated that the connections aren’t current – if its a large company, no one is going to care that the applicant’s parent once worked for the company years previously.</p>
<p>My kids are both employed at jobs relevant to their careers, and both got their jobs immediately out of college. My son graduated at a time when the job hunt was a little easier, but my d is spring 2010 grad who started in June. Both I and my kids’ father are and have always been self-employed and/or working with very small companies (less than 10 employees). Neither of us have any contacts with any sort of influence related to the areas that my kids are interested in. </p>
<p>My offspring have developed their own network and contacts. Right now they each “know” people far more influential and important than anyone their parents know.</p>
<p>That’s why undergrad work and internships are so important – at least for the unconnected. It’s where you develop connections as well as work experience. Facebook & LinkedIn are wonderful tools, because they make it very easy to maintain the connection without having to go through a lot of social niceties over the years. (Not that the social niceties are a bad thing – its just that Facebook provides an easy short cut). </p>
<p>Of course anyone who has a family connection should use it, if appropriate – but they don’t cut it at all in a lot of fields or organizations, where hiring is done pretty strictly through the human resources department --and sometimes it can backfire by giving the wrong impression. Some companies specifically avoid hiring people with family connections because of a variety of drawbacks – including the fact that it can be tough to fire or discipline that employee if the work isn’t up to snuff. (The more valuable the contact, the less you want to run the risk of offending them by firing their offspring.). Outside of small, family owned businesses, its a mistake to assume that people are getting jobs because of “connections.”</p>
<p>The one thing I observed that seemed most significant about the jobs my kids got was that they were uniquely well-qualified for the positions they were offered – and they did not get so much as a reply email or phone call when they applied for positions that they weren’t strongly qualified for, in terms of experience and skill level as well as education. So maybe a family connection can help bridge a gap somewhere – but its not the end of the story.</p>
<p>Calmom,</p>
<p>Do you really thing there are college seniors out there who don’t know that internships are important? Or that applying to jobs that match their qualifications is a better idea than applying for reaches? I guess I consider these insights to be fairly obvious to students and parents alike. What can be hard is to get that work experience in the first place. And realistically some fields of study really don’t equip the student with readily marketable skills. Thus the need to be very engaged in networking.</p>
<p>What I think can be hard for graduating college kids is to understand that this is a moment in their lives when they really need to activate their “village” be it parents, family friends, or school/work network. I know my kid who will be a senior this coming year likes to think of himself as Mr. Independent. He had two other options for the summer - one working for a professor again which he did not want to do and one working in the financial industry which he really did not want to do. At first, he didn’t want to pursue the one I heard about through a mom friend. It had my finger prints on it and thus was not what he wanted to do, of course! That one turned out to be very much the right fit for him.</p>
<p>You mention that you have a small family business. I’m not sure you really understand how hiring works at large corporations. Believe me, it is not all run by HR.</p>
<p>It sounds as if your kids have done wonderfully upon graduation. Congratulations!</p>
<p>No, I didn’t say I have a small family business. I said that I’m self employed and don’t have the type of “connections” to help out my kids, and yet, miraculously, they are both fully employed, working at what they each consider to be their ideal or dream job. Among other skills that have worked to their advantage is excellent reading comprehension skills.</p>
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<p>Glad they can read well. Hope they display better writing style than their mom.</p>
<p>^^ Wow, sewhappy, what’s come over you? So many of your recent posts have been awfully snarky. I don’t recall you being like that before. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.</p>
<p>At any rate, You obviously misinterpreted calmom’s post. She never said she had a family business.</p>
<p>Patsmom,</p>
<p>She said she and her hubby are self-employed and work for very small businesses. The point is that she clearly has no direct experience of the HR workings within large organizations. And I don’t think I’m misinterpreting her - or your - tone here. This is about resentment of people with kids at “elite” schools.</p>
<p>Enjoy your weekend!</p>
<p>She did not say her hubby. She said her kids father. CalMom is divorced and I think from past posts has been almost the sole supporter of her kids college education.
Sewhappy regarding internships- I think many of us who spend time on CC think all college kids are like the kids on CC. Most of my son’s friends have not had internships and they are all hitting 21 yrs of age. Also many of the kids of my friends have not felt the importance of internships. I kids I know fall into two camps- those who need to work and make the most amount of money possible. They can’t afford unpaid internships or to intern even for pay if it means having to spend the summer away from home. And those who see the summer as a chance to relax and come back home and hang out with friends. I live in a community that has a lot of wealth. I have seen many young people with great grades who go to great schools who have never held a job. They see their job as getting good grades and if they do that the parents pay for everything they want. Those same kids graduate and find most of the jobs they find will not support them in the style they have been raised. Off hand I know of at least 20 kids who have graduated in the last few years who work in humanitarian field jobs whose income is supplemented by their parents. Not all of the world is like CC. Or they don’t want to live in the Midwest or the South. They want to live where the weather is good and they have friends so take jobs that aren’t great paying.</p>
<p>My son and I are apartment hunting for him in the city where his job will be (starts in a month). He got together for drinks with a couple of the people in the department he will be in (not new hires) and then went out last night with several of the new college grad hires. He had met them on the recruiting weekend last fall when they were all brought in for a final round of interviews/cuts. He got a lot of information this weekend and I asked him some questions. The range of schools these kids came from is moderate- there are engineering grads from CU, Purdue and Baylor. There are 3 hires from Vanderbilt and my son from Penn (but the company did not come to Penn-my son found them through Vanderbilt), several from UMichigan and a couple from UVA. (Another Penn kid was offered a job after my son put him in touch with the interviewer but decided to hold out for NYC.) The jobs offered range from HR positions, operations, engineering and business strategy. It’s pretty interesting and I’m very impressed with the program. My son said the new hires he has met so far are all very bright and motivated and were willing to move from all corners of the country to this (very desirable) city. The company gives them a lot of information on where to live, bank, buy furniture, etc. and a modest moving allowance. They have already had a really neat group activity (the ones who started already) where they climbed a mountain. My son is thrilled with the opportunity he has with this company and in this city. I do not for a minute take this for granted and I am so grateful that he has landed this and I hope he will make the most of it. He earned it and has really good work experience, but these kind of opportunities are few and far between in recent times. I was afraid he was going to change his mind a couple of weeks ago because his employer in Phila offered him a very large amount of money to stay there. It would NOT have been the right decision, and, he realized that. None of this had anything to do with any contacts of mine, by the way.</p>
<p>The State of New Jersey is hiring. You can find the link at the New Jersey Division of Taxation web page. Closing date is 7/30/2010.</p>
<p>General Job Announcements (Open to the Public)</p>
<p>Closing Date
Auditor Trainee
July 30, 2010
Information Technology Specialist
July 30, 2010
Investigator Trainee
July 30, 2010
Taxation Representative Trainee
July 30, 2010</p>
<p>My older s (mech E) is starting a new job in a week or 2. He did 2 internships, one after soph and one after junior year. Younger s is doing an “internship” of sorts this summer in psychopharmacology, but decided to change his major, which will require him to take classes next summer in order to graduate in 4 yrs, so wont have an internship in his new major (chem E). I can only hope the job market will improve in 2 yrs and it wont matter that younger s didnt specifically do a chem E internship… and the fact that he wont have had an internship after junior year wont severely hurt him. Then again, who knows- he may change his mind again and apply to med school. Hopefully the job market changes as much as his mind does!</p>
<p>** and sewhappy, calmom’s dau went to Barnard. Don’t think this is about “elite envy” either.</p>
<p>Yeah, exactly. I would say Calmom has less elite envy than almost anyone on these boards.</p>
<p>Agreed alumother-- And oldfort’s dau is at an ivy too. I don’t see any “jealousy”, sewhappy.<br>
As oldfort said, my s (who went to a top 20 but not an ivy, and no, I am not “jealous”) had multiple job offers before he took is first job, and again, 2 yrs later (after his first employer unfortunately became a victim of the economy) this go round. He is fortunate, and it wasn’t through “connections” that he landed the multiple job interviews and offers (though yes, parenthetically, my H does happen to know someone at the co whose offer my s accepted, but that was more of a “small world” thing , and in totally different departments.) Methinks you are starting to sound like the poster of old…</p>
<p>My D took the Praxis II today and told me that the room she was in for Lit majors was fairly full- she estimates 15-20 test takers. She said some other rooms for elementary ed were really full and had at least 2 rooms booked. The math and science rooms had multiple subjects combined to fill the room and the Spanish Language test only had 3 taking the test.
In NJ teaching jobs will be tough unless they get a wave of retirements. Even so I believe it will be a tough year. Glad D has 2 years left. I had tried to convince her to major in accounting or be a math teacher.</p>