I’d probably talk about my own first job(s). If I heard about 3 weeks of vacation, I’d say “wow! That’s amazing. I only had to wait 6 months to get any and then it was just 1 week for the rest of that calendar year.” Or if he has a great 401k matching, make comments on how much that will help at the start. Or something. My husband took his first job with the idea that it was a starting job and he’d be there less than 5 years and then move back to the east coast. He has been there 30 years! After a bit, he decided it was a good place to work, live, etc. Before the 5 years was up, he had bought a house even.
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These are good suggestions - thank you! At this point I’m planning to lay low for a bit, see how things go, what he wants to talk about. He’s got some low level stress in the picture at the moment I think - moving to a new area where he knows no one, starting a new job, prepping for the FE exam that he’s going to take in August. Right now my goal is to be supportive and ignore when he’s snappy, because no matter how old he gets, I’m definitely still his safe space to be cranky when everything else is hard. We’re hoping to do a short family vacation in October, that may be time to talk job stuff with him and, hopefully, my younger boy will have a lead on a summer plan by then too so it can be All Family Future Discussions. (Aren’t we so exciting! 
)
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I will say I’m pretty sure that’s what my husband’s issues were at first too. He moved 750 miles from home, didn’t know anyone, etc. That was definitely at play in his thought process of under 5 years. We worked together, and I remember talking to him about these things. I grew up nearby my work, so was already planning a house, etc figuring I’d stay around and he was so unsure. Plus, he went to college near where he grew up, so everything was new to him.
Hopefully once some of the initial stressors are gone, your son will relax and start to look for ways to enjoy where he’s at.
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AI not to blame for job opportunity mismatch
“Why recruiters can’t find workers and new grads can’t find jobs (it’s not AI) Experts say a major labor shortage looms because of population shifts and a mismatch between new graduates’ skills and employers’ needs.”
Recent college graduates complain they can’t find entry-level jobs because artificial intelligence is taking over. Yet, tech recruiter Matt Walsh and other experts say the growth of AI and the struggle to find entry-level work mask a bigger problem: The United States is facing what’s projected to become the largest labor shortage in its history. In sectors such as semiconductor production, the problem isn’t AI or too few jobs, said Walsh, CEO of the Phoenix-based search firm Blue Signal. “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “There just aren’t enough people.” Economists warn that the worsening labor problem, due in part to a skills shortage and population shifts, will be vast and reach beyond tech. It “could hobble the American economy for years to come,” predicts the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Lightcast, a labor market data company, calls it “the largest labor shortage the country has ever seen.” JPMorgan Chase warns of a national security risk from “a pervasive talent deficit that constrains the nation’s capacity to build, compete, and protect its interests.”
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Well, my class of 26 grad starts his “grown up” job today! Let’s all hope it goes well. 
He’s really happy with what he thinks he’ll be doing and what he thinks the company focuses on - so let’s hope he’s got that right. He’s not loving the location (I’m hoping it grows on him), but he’s only been in his apartment for a few days.
Meanwhile, my other child who just finished his freshman year of college has a summer internship at the company that he’d like to make his whole career. The problem is that he got assigned to probably the least interesting to him, and the worst commuting location, arm of the company. So for him we’re crossing the fingers that he does well enough this summer that they ask him back AND let him rank the teams he wants to work with.
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From what my kids shared with me when they were doing internships, the first year interns were typically given the bottom of the barrel locations and commonly the least or at least lower desirable opportunities. Somebody’s gotta do them 
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Hopefully he focuses on this - the positive - and as you note they have other locations and people move through their careers. Congrats to him.
D24 is home this week before heading back for her junior year. She was detailing her MBB '27 intern application journey.
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It really helps to go to a T25 school if you want to work at MBB consulting. When she reached out to folks on LinkedIn for coffee chats, she got twice the response rate from Rice Univ alums.
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The alumni network really helped secure her '27 internship and she plans to pay it forward to other Rice students because all the assistance she received.
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The process is grueling. The non stop networking, coffee chat prep, getting referrals, and case/interview prep. Now that’s off her plate, she can focus on regular school year and not have to deal with it.
Academics, strong resume, networking are baseline prerequisites to securing these type of positions and they all have to click.
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Oddly enough, my son (EE senior) is getting offers in both EE and MechE roles even though he doesn’t really have a complete MechE background; he thinks there must be a lot of demand right now for MechE and not enough people with the skills they want, if they are interested in hiring HIM!
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Congrats to him. I think it goes back to - companies hire lots of different types of engineers. My son’s first summer he had more an IE role (and I think even today, works more in an IE role even though he was a Mech E major). When he went back his second summer, his internship wasn’t really engineering at all. And I asked him - why would they want you. And he said, because they wanted someone who “thinks” like an engineer.
And it makes sense - in my industry, there are a lot of engineers. My old VP os Sales was an aero engineer.
So I don’t think jobs, careers, roles - however you want to look at it - necessarily are pigeonholed to the major.
Great that he’s got such interest in him!!!
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I don’t know about other schools but Rice alums are really caring and helpful 
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I think many alums care about students who attend their university. There is always debate whether attending a highly selective school is worth it. In her opinion, attending a highly selective school helped her in a way that going to our state flagship would not have. That may not be true if she was interested in a different field.
Although she did say that you dont have to attend a target (or semi target) school, but it really helps.
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Management consulting and investment banking (particularly the major firms in those fields) are the remaining fields that recruit primarily from highly selective universities. So for those fields specifically, yeah, it’s your entry point. Everything else, it’s much more questionable—I mean, like you say, alumni care about their fellow alums, and so consider that there are an estimated 120k living Harvard alumni, but Penn State has 802k.
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And depending on the company - a certain high end school might not be a target…or they might take a few…Rice might be one of those as it’s out there. Wash U too. No idea the backing behind this article but…the Peak article below - Rice is 26 and it has UIUC, which tells me it’s likely not all business kids they seek. And then how many were MBAs - I know a Darden MBA who worked at Bain from 2013-15. Before his MBA, he worked with me in a low level product marketing role in automotive.
But it’s awesome that any school’s alum, where they will, are helping kids to the level they can. And it’s awesome @CFP student has an opportunity for next summer.
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The key is to get the interview. Once you get the interview, it’s basically about your case prep and interview skills.
But of course getting the interview can be very difficult (and the case prep requires a ton of work and is very intense, especially in the final round with the partners).
She interviewed at all 3 of the MBB firms so even as a semi-target, it was completely doable.
The entire process sounded exhausting which I guess is the whole point. They run you through the gauntlet but if you pass, it looks great on your resume not only for future business opportunities but also law school admissions (her ultimate goal) , etc
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There is another, very small, field that is not on most people’s radar that primarily recruits from elite institutions: proprietary quantitative trading.
It is distinctly different from the ones you mention above, as well as many others, in one very important aspect: it has no outside customers or shareholders it is seeking to impress. They trade with their owners’ money, and are meritocratic to the bone (some of them are known to be so to a fault).
Their business relies on hiring the best of the best in math and computer science, whatever institution they might be coming from, and their outermost funnel is therefore very wide.
But only single-digits percent of the applicant pool gets to the first-round interview, and of them again only single-digits percent makes it through to the other end of their notoriously challenging interview process to receive an offer.
And so they end up with an employee pool that looks something like this:
(source: Likedin)
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I will add that a lot of those people are not on LinkedIn. So what you see on LinkedIn is probably not fully representative.
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But how many is there and is there ample opportunity?
Given the school list I’m guessing not - that this field is extremely limited with closed doors.
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They have interviewed and offered internships to kids that are not on the target list, but often they tended to have other distinguishing attributes such as an IMO, Putnam, ICPC etc competition honors. The college they were at is incidental if it is too far out of normal. The bigger shops cast a wider net because they can afford to spend the time interviewing kids, and are absolutely compelled to find the best kids globally. Because they think about 10-20% of their (selected) entering class is truly spectacular that will make them nonsense amounts of money. They are motivated by greed to not miss a spectacular kid. This level of hiring effort applies to the trading and research seats. Less so for other seats at the firm.
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To illustrate @neela1’s point - one of the star recruits at S22’s firm went to a low key public flagship in the south (nope it’s neither GT or UT Austin). He turned down Citadel and JS - every tier 1 fund courted him. Why?
He was doing ML research at a top 3 CS program while in high school, was a successful quant trader with verifiable sharpe, and ran a massive discord group for quant trading before even starting college.
A recently hired intern is a freshman who by all accounts is a quant prodigy but goes to a random school. Many such stories but these are high conviction rockstars - think of someone like Palmer Lucky who started working on Oculus VR at age 16.
However the median hire at these firms will match the classical quant archetype - schools, pedigree etc.
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