Mechanical
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My s’s are both engineers. While their experiences are a few years back, both took job offers from the career fairs offered on campus in the fall of their senior year. Both did not plan to work at their internship sites.
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I’m hopeful for a successful career fair this fall! He would be interested in going to where he interned in 2025, but they didn’t have space this summer. He will apply there and follow up with the people he knows.
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There is nothing better than knowing in the fall of your senior year that you have a job after graduation!! Plus a signing bonus!
Both schools also had spring career fairs, which fortunately weren’t needed.
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What a relief that is! For everyone, really!
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One of my s’s is a MechE, the other a ChemE
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It depends on the kind of position. If it’s an entry level role, I’d assuming they were looking for next year.
I don’t think it hurts to apply no matter what because the worst that happens is that they say they are looking for someone to start now.
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If companies are hiring interns or recruiting at college job fairs, they know they have to wait until the student graduates in December or May. That doesn’t mean the same companies don’t also hire as needed, posting jobs through conventional means, with the expectation an open position will be filled shortly after the interview process.
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look around, there are plenty of examples of that. let’s not dump all that responsibility on 21 year olds trying to optimize career outcomes in the face of such an uncertain economy.
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My youngest son was hired in the spring of his final grad year (MechE) and was scheduled to defend his thesis 9 months later in early December - his future employer expected him to graduate with a thesis. He did and his job was waiting for him after graduation.
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I’m sure he’ll end up doing that. Hopefully it just works out and he finds something early. We’ll see how it goes!
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The context is that the referred-to cycle includes employers reneging on job offers, so it is not just employees reneging on job offer acceptances. Of course, each justifies not keeping their word because actors on the other side do not keep their word. But is a generally lower trust environment desirable to either employers or employees?
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Sample size of one - my son graduated last month with a MechE degree and has a job lined up that will start in a few weeks. He did most of his applications in late August, September and October. He had a handful of interviews in late October and early November, then there was radio silence, so he kept applying through November, December and into the first week of January. He got a job offer that first week of January for after graduation.
In the case of engineers, I think it really depends on firm size. The large companies - like if your son wanted GM or Boeing or similar - they seem to hire starting in the very early fall. They are trying to fill a class of new hires. The smaller companies are trying to backfill people leaving or fill spots that are newly funded, those tend to be posting and needing someone soon.
He was able to find the difference sometimes by searching with the term “summer” or “2026” (since it was fall 2025 at the time) or “new/recent graduate” or similar. But sometimes it was just opening and reading every posting to see if it gave clues to whether it was for winter grads, immediate hire, or spring grads. Good luck!
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There are so many signs that we are in a different job market. This cohort doesn’t have a lot going their way right now. Hopefully the pendulum will swing and their lifetime earnings won’t take too big a hit.
“The executives who preached job-hopping and the career coaches who built careers around hacking your way to more money were describing a market that genuinely rewarded those behaviors at a specific moment in time. But that moment appears to be passing. …. For now, the most counterintuitive career advice of 2026 is also the most data-supported: stay put.“
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Maybe we should encourage job hunters to resist the temptation to use AI for their cover letters and resumes.
““In just a few years, tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have commoditized the production of cover letters and resumes. Large shares of job applicants are using generative chatbots to polish their language and summarize their accomplishments—raising the average quality of these personal documents, at the cost of “compressing” and “homogenizing” the information they convey, as one Columbia Business School paper put it. In Silicon Valley, the phenomenon is sometimes called “signal collapse.” …… Now everyone looks better and everyone looks the same ….”
“What should a person looking for a job in this AI hellscape do? Nobody I spoke with was certain. But being yourself in a cover letter and dropping it off in person doesn’t seem like the worst idea.”
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Anyone who shows up in person with a resume is guaranteeing I will never hire them.
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I cannot imagine a workplace in 2026 other than your local dry cleaner and podiatrists office where a kid can even gain access to a decision-maker to drop off a resume.
In an era of workplace shootings no company of any size allows strangers to wander the hall asking “where do I drop off a resume”.
There are buildings now that no longer allow Uber eats or any delivery service past the security team in the lobby. Spouse sent you flowers? Go downstairs to retrieve. The boss ordered fresh panini’s for everyone for a team lunch? Designate a shlepper and a helper.
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I don’t think “drop off a resume” is a real thing any more… not sure what that writer was thinking. But I do wonder however if hiring through personal referrals may have increased. My son was hired for his internship through a referral (because of the project team he is on), and has already been asked in the first week of the summer to refer other students for internships and jobs. His friends seem to be working through referrals a lot now, too.
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