Thank you! You’re professional knowledge/experience and by keeping things real in the forum has been helpful to me. S didn’t care less what random people on CC said or thought, lol.
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I wondered about that too. So many of D’s cohort (class of ‘23) accepted co op or internship offers before senior year even started. Technically that means zero applications. There were big bonuses for signing contracts if you committed before 9/1.
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Yes, but as has been noted there are many contributing variables. For example, I’d expect you’d see a different type of distribution curve for different types of jobs and different types of job searches. The anecdotal examples I hear of students who applied to hundreds of employers usually have several common themes including shotgunning applications with low effort and applying to higher salary tech jobs.
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Congratulations to you S!
Our S21’s experience was also different. He was an EE major. His junior internship got cancelled due to COVID and he was the president of the FSAE club in his senior year. He was heavily involved for 4 years, but he had more to manage due to new COVID rules and was really stressed how to keep the momentum moving when there were so many things outside of his control. He didn’t spend the 100s of hours in job search, but luckily the internship that got cancelled extended a full time job. He knew immediately it was not the role or company for him and found a new job within a year where he is still currently employed and have been promoted several times.
There are so many paths to job searching. One thing I think is of value to future students is getting involved in clubs in their majors that allow them to explore different paths and get hands on experience. Current graduating son was involved in a software engineering club and a quant club.
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Extremes seems to suggest employers in that category hire mostly connected (or hooked in college admissions talk) applicants, with huge numbers of unconnected (unhooked) applicants trying for the few remaining spots.
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Just as an fyi- many colleges (not all) require that any company which is recruiting/interviewing on campus and maintains a “by invitation” list, must also allow “open interviewing”. So Career Services is often working behind the scenes to make sure that the process is less “exclusive” than it may seem.
However, this doesn’t change reality that if a company is targeting civil engineers, and therefore is inviting 50 civil engineers to interview, the students who majored in CS or math are going to be at a disadvantage in the assessment process.
One other helpful (I hope) suggestion- for students who don’t like to network or don’t have an effective way to network, many professional associations and organizations (often with “Society” in their name or acronym) have student memberships. And sometimes a college will subsidize or pay for a membership for a student. These are easy ways to quickly gather a pile of relevant contacts for a kid in job search mode. The membership directories are “closed” (i.e. open only to other members) but members are usually very responsive when they get an email from a fellow member- student or working professional. The job boards are often NOT the same as a kid will see on Handshake. And if a kid is in a city with an active chapter- bingo. Attend a “lunch and learn”, introduce yourself to the moderator or speaker, and ten minutes later the kid could have an invite to “come see me in my office and I’ll show you around”.
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Our D23 found her job through something like this, more specifically a student run association for her major in Industrial Design in the college of art . She was the president of her senior year and organized a couple of firm crawls in Chicago. (For a few years the firm crawls were not held due to covid!). She fell in love with one firm but didn’t think she had enough experience under her belt to apply. Before graduation, that firm reached out to her after viewing her portfolio. She’s still there! I would like to think she was offered a job because her portfolio showed her natural talent for design and illustration, but her organizational skills were valued through the firm crawl events.
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One of the biggest indicators of multiple offers is an early internship in a target firm during or after freshman year. This may not be relevant for all majors but at least for CS if someone landed a freshman focused internships that many companies have then that gets a huge leg up. A kid we know landed an Amazon co-op freshman year (he’s at UW), and then led to outreach by Uber who gave him an internship and that triggered an outreach by Meta where he interned and then was headhunted by Citadel. Starting early is now a must do for CS grads.
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My impression is that CS starts the internship rat race earlier than other tech majors because CS students already get a reasonable start on their major during freshman year (and many students already had relevant experience in high school too).
Most engineering majors don’t even get started on courses specific to their major until sophomore year; before that it’s just foundational math & science at most universities (and at many schools, such as UW that you mentioned, freshman engineers don’t even have a major yet).
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It is a good time to be an ED major. The starting salary is higher that it has ever been and there not too many candidates. If you interview well, you will have the job. The number of candidates applying for an opening are usually 2-5, compared to 20+ 15 years ago.
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We called the post freshman summer internship the “soft skills” job. My D and many friends ended up taking jobs at their schools that first summer in engineering labs or with the schools engineering summer programs. Money was terrible but many schools will subsidize housing in dorms and feed them.
My D worked that first summer with the honors engineering dean and honors professors scheduling company visits, lab tours, shuttling rising HS seniors to events, sitting on panels, acting as a mentor, and doing all kinds of social media for the program. Zero engineering but she expanded her network, was on a first name basis with those dean and profs, and it greatly helped her communication and organizational skills.
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Yes, that’s the summer my son spent working for admissions as a tour guide. It was great public speaking experience for him, but nothing like the Amazon internship his CS major roommate was able to land 
(Aforementioned roommate is graduating early this year and will be working at Amazon but is apparently salty about that as he hoped for something different… in the end his only full time offer was the return offer from Amazon)
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By default all Berkeley kids going to amazon are doing so with a note of caution and regret given their recent waves of layoffs and anecdata from other Berkeley new grads who were laid off from amazon.
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All that you said, yes, but then again, you have to deal with the micromanagement and hyperpoliticization of the job.
So you win some, you lose some.
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In this case the person simply doesn’t want to work at Amazon due to its corporate culture and told my son he hopes to get laid off! I think he’s a bit overconfident about being able to easily get something else right now!
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well in that case it’s a pretty sweet deal if we treat it as a paid job search for 3-6 months with good severance and unemployment $$. Neither of which is available to a jobless new grad.
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3-6 months is probably optimistic for finding a new job if not hooked, given the 5% admission rate after very lengthy multiple round processes that seem typical these days.
Also, even if one is willing to relocate to commonly less desired locations, employers may not believe that one has a high enough level of interest, as described previously.
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its definitely not going to be a 5% chance for someone from Berkeley CS/EECS with an Amazon internship + Amazon FT on their resume. Also, this student can keep searching for another role even today leading up to their start date and keep looking selectively while getting paid and if they do get laid off eventually take that severance to the bank + live off unemployment benefits for 26+ weeks while they keep looking.
I’d rather have a job than have to find a job without the support of being a new grad.
Of course, one doesn’t have a choice. Severance - who knows - you just started - is it ample ? Every company is different. It might just be a few months.
Unemployment doesn’t equal salary.
It’s sad that someone has a bad attitude about their job before they start. But it’s unlikely everyone is getting laid off.
Let’s hope this student doesn’t - unless you are retiring or have a formal transition plan like grad school, it doesn’t seem a good thing to hope for.
Like most comments on this thread, I think the answer is “it depends.” One can create hypothetical scenarios where a faster or slower time would be expected. An example of a slower time could be a person trying to find a job in a specific location that has few available jobs within his field, such as a job within driving distance of primary home or nearby family. A slower time could also involve holding out for a higher salary associated with a narrow subfield or holding our for specific conditions, such as working 100% remote. A slower time could also involve simply performing a slow or ineffective job search. A slower time could also involve a candidate who has a key problem on resume or interviews, such as not performing well on tech questions. Similarly a faster time could involve a well qualified candidate who performs an effective job search utilizing existing connections and is open to a wide variety of different types of positions, including ones that may have lower salary than previous job. As such I don’t think one can give a simple answer that generalizes to everyone, such as unlikely to find a new job within x months, or expect a 5% acceptance rate.
As a more personal example, I work in tech. Since my initial hire, I’ve only applied to one other job and received an offer so 100% acceptance rate. I don’t find this surprising because it was with a similar company that had many former employees from my existing company. One of the former employees I have worked with referred me to the position, which was similar to my previous position and well aligned with my skillset and experience. And other employees at the company I had previously worked with gave me strong references. It’s a very different expected acceptance rate than I’d have from shotgunning my resume to every job I found on LinkedIn/Indeed/… that had a relevant keyword.
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