Your D22 sounds great, done all that is possible.
May be difficult to see a long term plan. There will be new opportunties for her that we may not be able to see now.
Peace be with you.
My D22 is interested in social sciences, grad school. Enjoys on campus jobs. Might look to get a staff job on campus after graduation if academia doesn’t pan out.
Still alot up in the air, but, looking forward to the semester, working with a professor.
Can’t believe how fast summer has gone, I will miss her.
I agree. Sounds like she’s done more than most with her time in college and used it wisely. The world is changing so quickly these days. It’s possible that a full year from now, our kids will be entering a much more positive job market. Fingers crossed for all of us!
My S22 didn’t find an internship for this summer but continued working in the office of the intramural league, which at least has some relevance to one of his career possibilities, sports management. He’s going to finish his degree in December, a semester early. As with our D19, who did the same at her school, our deal with S22 is that we’ll continue covering his major expenses during what would have been his final semester to ease his transition to work. (He’s thinking about a partly international graduate program, but we’re not covering grad studies, so he’ll need a job if he wants to do it.)
He’s been dating a fellow student in his program, an international student on a visa, and she’ll also finish in December. She’ll then have 90 days to find employment with sponsorship or she’ll have to leave the country. Apparently that would only be a short-term commitment anyway — S22 surprised us by saying his girlfriend doesn’t want to seek permanent residence in the U.S., and he’d like to end up in London (where we lived for four years of his childhood) or elsewhere with her. We’ll see!
Big congratulations to all who have been able to secure a return offer and have a job lined up.
Lots of luck to everyone looking. It can be a hard and humbling process these days. Be open with your children that it can take hundreds of applications to get a job and the process may feel quite depressing at times. It isn’t them. It’s the current situation. If you have any connections, use them. Ask around, talk to your friends, colleagues, etc. S20 graduated last December with MS, so we have quite a recent experience. He ended up getting a return offer, but that didn’t happen till November, so he ended up sending hundreds of applications and getting mostly ghosted in the meantime. He is well aware how lucky he is to have a job in his field.
S22 spent the summer doing research abroad. He is back on campus, helping with a prep workshop for ULA. He will again teach recitations, his third year doing so. S22 will be applying for grad schools (math major), but he is yet to complete his grad school list! With all the research cuts and funding losses, it seems even more complex and more unpredictable than in previous years. He won a major research scholarship in his junior year, has taken quite a few grad classes, did research every single summer and has a few papers, so perhaps he will have some reasonable options. He is currently applying for grad school scholarships though his chances are likely slim.
Looking back now, the year when they applied to colleges seemed so simple compared to the current job market and grad school funding uncertainty. We all knew that our kids would get somewhere reasonable, but I don’t think we expected the next step to be so uncertain and difficult. I am sure our children certainly didn’t.
Good luck to everyone. They will all find their place eventually. It may just require much more effort for those graduating next year. I hope they all enjoy their final undergraduate year!
let’s all keep our fingers crossed that you are correct 
Hey all - I haven’t really been a poster here, mostly because I hadn’t found this board when my S22 was applying to colleges. It was only really when my now freshman S25 started kicking off his search that I really found CC. Anyhoo, I’ve lurked on your thread some and, now that the anxiety and emotions of getting S25 launched and off to freshman year is over, I’m starting to get the emotions of senior year for S22 and anxiety for his job search ramping up, so I figured maybe I could horn in here on the Class of 22 thread a bit late, in hopes to find some commiseration.
So since I’m new to this thread, I’ll do a little intro. S22 is at WPI, where he’s double majoring in Civil and Mechanical engineering. We are from VA, and we still have people ask “he’s going to where?”. I used to skip the name and just say “he’s going to a STEM/Engineering school in Massachusetts” until one snarky neighbor was all “It’s ok, you can just SAY MIT!” And I had to reply with “uh, but it’s not MIT???” 
Anyhoo, he’s had a great three years, and it’s hard for me to believe it’s coming to an end. Today’s Facebook memory was pictures he sent me from the “bridge crossing” ceremony all the freshmen do before classes begin, and then that the repeat, in the opposite direction, as graduating seniors. I think I’d been so focused on managing emotions associated with sending my baby off to freshman year, that I hadn’t thought really about what it means for my big guy to be almost graduated, but those bridge crossing pictures really knocked me for a loop, and I wasn’t expecting that.
In terms of post-college stuff, he’s hoping to get a job. He’s had two solid internships the last two years, and both provided him offers, but both jobs were also places that he learned he didn’t want to work permanently. They were good learning experiences, and he learned not only the day to day work but also learned some things about himself and what he does and doesn’t want to do. Part of what I think it making me emotional at the moment is that he’s made it clear that he really doesn’t want to move back to the area where we live. He wants to stay in New England, if possible. He loves the weather, his friends are there, he feels comfortable in the community. And it’s just really hard for me to sink my brain around the thought that if he’s that far away, it will be hard to see him very often. I think * I’m * not really ready for that aspect of him adulting.
We’ll see if that works out, because the initial challenge is, of course, finding a job. He’s being a little particular in setting parameters for what he wants and I’m not confident that it’s going to be available. We’ll see I guess. There’s still plenty of time between now and graduation.
Welcome! Welcome!
I can relate to so many parts of your post.
Well, right now, I just want my son to get a job.
–
Vent:
Do your children share with you about the job application process?
I just learned (after how many OA online assessments/Hackerranks, etc that my son has completed) just how crazy long and challenging these OAs are?
Last week, he did an OA that was 170 minutes long!
That’s almost 3 hours.
And he received a rejection!
(well, at least they close the loop. Often you don’t even hear back from the companies).
Also last week, he did an OA that scheduled a BREAK in the middle because the OA was that long.
(waiting for that rejection).
Because my next part of the vent:
The OA questions are topics from ALL over!
He’s being tested on topics from stuff that were covered from his sophomore year of High School AP Computer Science Principle all the way to his Machine Learning class from Junior yr college. How does a kid prep/review for all these different topics?
That’s like someone doing a History OA and being tested on ALL topics of history since history was first recorded in 3400 BCE!!!
Thanks for the welcome! I have heard of these horrific sounding interview testing events and, I’ve just gotta say this is the time I’m glad my kid isn’t a CS or CE kid, because they just seem brutal. Good luck to your guy navigating through all of that!
My D’s company just implemented a data/presentation test for their engineering candidates - 30 minutes to analyze data and put together a quick powerpoint to give to the interviewing team.
I guess this is coming everywhere. It’s not the testing idea that seems like a lot to me, it’s the time. Just being “on” for as many hours as some of these things take when you already have the adrenaline and nerves running in an interview situation just seems exhausting to me.
tbf, he is still targeting quant roles, right? If that’s the case, I am not surprised by the length and difficulty levels of that OA. I could probably even guess the name of that Chicago trading company 
One company sent S22 the same OA multiple times after acing all of the previous ones. After scoring 100% on 3 OAs the same firm sent him the OA again - like are they trying to verify if his 99th percentile score is legit after 3 proctored attempts? I do think some of these are over-engineered purposefully to weed out the casual “I will submit an application” type candidates and to manage the often 4-digit applicant pool for perhaps a single digit intern/new grad class.
CS OA can be quite brutal. I remembers some of the OAs S20 (MS in machine learning and artificial intelligence, BS in CS and statistics) did. One of his internship OAs was testing specific HTML layouts, something he never did in the past nor was the internship related to.
There are companies that offer OA to everyone. He had OA where he got 100% just to get rejected or a company with “You have passed the OA, but all our interview slots are full”. At least it’s a good practice and somewhat better than being completely ghosted or rejected by an automatic system within minutes of applying.
My daughter said that they added the test because they were getting more and more candidates who greatly embellished their resumes. Possibly AI?
When my oldest was applying to grad school, she was surprised to see several schools ask applicants to list their foreign language capabilities and then explicitly stated that every applicant brought in for interviews would be tested on every language they listed (she was applying to programs that required foreign language fluency).
CV/Resume inflation is everywhere. 
Good memory.
But after my son’s great summer internship in AI and ML, he’s switching away from quant and into AI/ML/SWE (so many initials).
It’s still ‘early’ in the process, so my son’s attitude with each OA is that they’re good practice/review.
That’s crazy that your son rocked his OAs and company still didn’t believe him.
@beebee3:
son hasn’t been tested in Spanish yet; he may have a better chance with that than these crazy Hackerranks.
Good thing he didn’t put elementary Chinese on his resume - hahaha; he hasn’t taken Chinese in 8+ years.
i was just joking. It’s just that some firms have onerous and non transparent process. for instance S22 had applied to 2 roles but has so far got 4 OAs with no indicator whether it’s role specific or stage specific (some firms have multi stage OAs).
Good luck on SWE recruiting - unlike Quant things haven’t picked up speed and there should be plenty of opportunities for an MIT student.
I don’t know if there’s a thread about this, but with all the new growth w/ AI/any new discovery, how do you/your children feel about the risks of working for start-ups, or companies with fewer than 50 employees, that have only been around for 1-5 years?
My 1st job after my BS was with a huge established world-wide company.
My 2nd job, after my MBA, was another established 22yrs old company.
So yeah, I’m highly risk-averse.
I’m having some trouble with my son pursuing jobs with companies that just got seed money (a large amount, but still…
my friend works for a bio company that is going to run out of money next month because they blew through all their 2nd round of investment money).
The competition to get a job with the more established companies such as Jane Street or OpenAI are just impossible (without knowing someone in the company). So he’s looking at the alternatives: starters who would give him a chance.
Son says nothing is off the table.
I would think about the BATNA in this situation — if the established/marquee firms’ doors are all closed, it sounds like he’s exploring the best possible course available to him? I do agree with the general premise that it’s best to go with the largest firm you can when just starting out after college — larger firms often have the infrastructure in place to support a new grad’s development, and will likely have better name recognition down the road — but, again, if those aren’t available, it sounds like he’s working it as best he can.
Also, it’s worth noting that even big firms will thrash in a crisis. That is, even if he were hired by an Anthropic or a Jane Street, if the economy tanks and they need to shed bodies, they’ll likely go LIFO, and he’d be looking again. (Flashback to Enron (20,000 employees) imploding and taking down Arthur Andersen (28,000 employees) within a few months; even established firms can fall apart catastrophically.)
To put a positive spin on the startup bet, a first job can often set neural paths in your brain for what “work” looks like, and a small firm might help him “default to action”, as opposed to an enterprise company where “default to permission” or “default to political coalition-building” might end up being a more common practice. If the values of the company and the people in charge align with his own, it could be a great experience.
It’s rough right now; good luck to him.
I’ve ran, worked for, and hired for startups that meet your criteria. My thumb rule is to focus on either startups post Series B raise because at that point the business model is relatively derisked and there is plenty of capital to drive further.
Also it’s very important to evaluate founder quality. if they previously exited a startup and got repeat backing from top notch investors I would take the plunge even at the seed stage provided the market is interesting.
Good news is if your son takes the risk with a SF based startup and they go under it’s the kind of thing that other companies in this region rate highly and will not penalize. On the other hand if the startup up succeeds then it could also really accelerate career progression.
So long as the pay is pretty good and the product/market is interesting it’s a relatively lowish risk step.
When you are young and can take chances, a start-up can be attractive - typically you don’t have a wife/kids/mortgage so if things go south you aren’t facing financial ruin. Of course, not every start-up is going to result in an epic payday (which many kids imagine) - I’ve got a good friends that has been at one for a few years (she’s very senior - 3rd person in the door) and while the pay has been good and the work is interesting, there has been a lot of stress about funding. She’d love to pursue something else, but the market has been very tough even for experienced software engineers (she’s a double Ivy grad as well).