Observations from interviewing recent college graduates

Data10
Sat, 26 Nov 2016 08:45:24 +0000

What a person working in a normal company doesn’t see are the MIT/Stanford grads that ended up at the most selective companies (companies more selective than those I listed above). And these highly selective companies tend to recruit the most talented graduates from highly selective colleges.

The top half at Stanford either start the companies that the Flagship kids will want to work for in 5 years, or will be swallowed up by big money that most people don’t realize exists. The bottom of the class at Stanford is sitting in a cube at Google, et al.

The larger companies listed above like Apple, Google, and Microsoft cast a wide net. They recruit at colleges all over the United States, as well as at some colleges outside of the US. Such companies generally have more career recruiting events at public colleges than “elite” ones. For example, the pulldown at http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/students.html shows a list of the colleges where Apple has had recent career fair events. Stanford and MIT are on the list, but the vast majority are not as “elite” publics, such as 3 events at Cal Polytech, 2 events at Cal State Sacaramento, CUNY Hunter, etc. LinkedIn suggests that Apple tends to have a larger number of hires from closer colleges, which probably partially relates to a larger number of applicants from those colleges. The top 3 on LinkedIn for Apple’s Silicon Valley location are San Jose State, Stanford, and Berkeley. This is true both overall and for engineering specific positions. Similarly Microsoft’s Seattle location has the largest number of hires from the nearby University of Washington, rather than Stanford/MIT.

This fits with my personal experience as well. I have an EE degree from Stanford. In recent surveys, >90% of job offers received by Stanford EE/CS students have been in the SF Bay Area, so most students probably don’t interview at Microsoft in Seattle. However, I was an exception. While I was a student, I attended a large hiring event at Microsoft, with dozens of students interviewing on the same day for what sounded like entry level engineering positions. Among those I spoke with that made it to the interview round, University of Washington was heavily overrepresented. There were students from a variety of other colleges as well. I was the only person I met from Stanford, although there was at least one person in my EE class who ended up working there after graduation.