<p>GFG- I try to post when relevant but get weary of folks telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. There is a poster on this very thread who has accused me of being too stupid to know what a competent CS student looks like for example (on previous threads) so I don’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest.</p>
<p>That being said- we tell every student that their school is a good one. It’s just a way to kick off an interview. </p>
<p>But it’s no mystery who hires from where; most of the time the career development website at a college will have the recruiting calendar online and you can see when “Dog and Pony show” from various companies take place, when the resume drop occurs (the deadline by which students who want an on-campus interview need to have their materials to the company for review,) etc. It is harder to get an interview with a company that doesn’t recruit on your campus- not impossible, but harder, and it is also hard to get an interview with a company which does not have a university relations/campus recruiting team (but not impossible.)</p>
<p>Geography is a huge variant for some companies and irrelevant for others. If I’m a giant consumer products company and recruiting for production management or sales management programs, geography isn’t important. My company likely has manufacturing facilities all over the world, and regional locations for sales people across the US. If I’m a bank with a mostly regional footprint in the Southwest, I’m not going to be shlepping a team to Middlebury to find kids who want to start their careers in Austin or Tuscon. </p>
<p>So it depends. Happy to answer specific questions if I can. The overall hiring targets for 2013 appear to be up in the US (this is across industry and function and geography… just the national numbers from the folks who compile corporate hiring projections of new college grads) but since the numbers have been down so dramatically since the 2008 downturn, take the stats with a grain of salt. We are not yet back to 2005/2006 levels.</p>
<p>No, I believe that some schools also offer computer science. There is a world of difference between a math major (my daughter is one) and a high performing math student. So maybe you should humble yourself and not pretend to know all about all math people.</p>
<p>
I suggested no such thing. I quoted lookingforward and her use of the term “top scorer”.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Your exasperation suggests that maybe you should be done with this discussion. Or perhaps even better, you could express yourself in such way that I am more willing to see your point of view. People who write in a thoughtful and even tempered manner are the ones who are more likely to convince me.</p>
<p>Thanks for the contribution, blossom. And yes, I know you’ve tried in the past as well and your input was not always appreciated.</p>
<p>But ARE their schools actually good ones when you say they are? Were they pre-screened for quality of school? Would you have selected those candidates to interview if their schools weren’t “good,” all other things being equal?</p>
<p>Boileau once said, “Cent fois sur le metier, remettez votre ouvrage.” A more understandable variance could be “if you at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”</p>
<p>Exasperation on these shores comes from having (or choosing) to address the same argument over and over again. First with patience, then with growing impatience, and finally with exasperation. </p>
<p>The price one pays for getting into the posting five digits.</p>
<p>Since I may be partially to blame for bringing the topic to Putnam (although I also mentioned in the same post multiple other fields and accolades), it may be good to veer back as to why the elites are elite and if there is any difference between CHYMPS and the next tier. For the Joe Sixpack maybe it doesn’t but it is germane to the discussion about whether there any real differences between Yale and UM. </p>
<p>There may be, but UM still does reasonably well on lists like these. They also do well on other similar lists, even if not to the same degree as Yale, say.</p>
<p>If we’re talking about recent recruiting practices - I don’t have a lot of experience, beyond that of my own D (and her friends). She graduated from a school unknown to many northeasterners but pretty well-known to those in the large midwestern city where she now works. Almost every one of her interviews started out with something along the lines of “Hey, did you have Prof X for Intermediate Y?” The next topic of conversation began with “That’s an amazing GPA you have…”</p>
<p>So - everyone seemed to know her school (despite its lack of national recognition), but they were more impressed with her GPA and school acitvities. She had multiple job offers.</p>
<p>In my own past, I helped interview for scientific staff positions. We rarely cared WHERE applicants went to school but used it as an icebreaker. We DID care about grades and research experience (mostly the latter).</p>
<p>As for a more global answer - I defer to Blossom. She does know what she’s talking about. And I do agree that so much of recruiting is local; in my neck of the woods a UMich degree is golden.</p>
<p>It’s not, but they don’t appear as insufferable and they don’t seem to view “contest winning” as the meaning of life.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree completely. I’m just reflecting back that the point was made that these contest winners are All That and should be protected / coddled / admitted into the programs of their choice because they Could Change The World. Well, are they? Or are they, at the core, like most people – not changing the world at all – just going on with their lives, working hard, loving others and taking care of their families. So let’s not put them on pedestals. </p>
<p>Sometimes on here I get the sense that within the world of elite / excellent colleges (take your pick), that some on here value the uber-super-duper-genius students most of all.</p>
<p>Exactly. Which is what the prestige-seekers seem not to understand. It’s not that the bank in the Southwest scoffs at Middlebury – but it’s just irrelevant. The problem on CC is that so many people are Northeast-based that they think that’s the only place where someone could actually get a job. They don’t seem to have a clue that really, the bank in the Southwest could be just as good of a job as the bank in Boston or Manhattan.</p>
<p>I want my kids to think expansively about jobs all over this country (or the world). If they choose to limit themselves, that’s their prerogative, but it won’t be my doing.</p>
<p>I presume these are standard corporate interviews, not on-campus interviews? It would seem to me that when a company chooses to invest resources to recruit on a given campus, they already find the potential talent worth the effort?</p>
<p>Do headhunters do on-campus interviews? Or are they exclusively engaged in pilfering currently-employed workers?</p>
<p>I wonder how you would react if you had a child who wasn’t particularly strong in math, but who was great in the humanities – really loved history, was a strong creative writer, and so forth. Something not measurable. How would you know how much he would be “worth investing in” if you don’t have the equivalent of the AMC8?</p>
<p>LI - no, headhunters don’t do on-campus interviews. The client of a headhunter is ultimately the company for whom he / she is trying to find a candidate – not the employee / applicant.</p>
<p>Being highly interested in a pursuit, and greatly valuing it, does not equate to thinking it’s the meaning of life. Once again, PG, you paint others as having an extreme or all-or-nothing position there’s no evidence they have. Then you proceed to criticize it. Extreme views, by nature, are over-the-top and therefore easy to pick apart. The problem is that no one on here has shown themselves to be a dangerous math contest extremist (well, maybe quantmech LOL)</p>
<p>I would suspect that a majority of “prestige-seekers” do live in the northeast. Prestige and pedigree probably matter more here. The fact that it matters much less in Texas or Michigan doesn’t make the non-prestige seekers from those states smarter than the prestige-seekers from CT and MA. We adapt to our own environments, as we should.</p>
<p>GFG- every large company that recruits on a particular campus does so because they have analyzed past trends at that school (and benchmarked the school to others for comparison) and know (or believe) that they can hit their targets for the year by doing so. It is not a random list of schools-- and although the list is often unchanged year to year, at other times schools get dropped or added for reasons that are probably unclear to the outside.</p>
<p>An industrial company (let’s use GE as an example) is going to have different schools on its radar for its highly regarded FMP program (for new grads being trained for finance roles in different subsidiaries), vs new grads being hired for various engineering roles. The schools aren’t randomly selected- hence they are “good schools” in the context of what the students will be hired to do or for which training program they are entering. GE isn’t making a value judgment that Rose Hulman or Purdue aren’t as good as MIT or CMU, even though it may be hiring for both finance and engineering training programs at MIT and CMU vs. just engineering at Rose Hulman. (I am making these schools up as I go along- I do not work at GE so am making some educated guesses. Anyone who knows specifics and can call me out that my guess is incorrect is free to do so. Just being illustrative.)</p>
<p>Recruiting is extremely expensive. My company (nor any other place I’ve worked) would never send a team “just because” or out of curiosity. If we were curious (Hey, anyone ever hear of High Point University?) we would do an analysis of the student body, the curriculum in various majors, learn all we could about their faculty in a particular discipline, etc. before we spent a penny recruiting there. If we got a strong resume from a student from a school none of us has ever heard of (which is hard. we’ve been doing this for a long time) we would check out the school- or conduct a quick phone interview with the student- before making a judgement. We are not likely to hire engineers from non-ABET accredited programs (we don’t have to). We often learn about schools off the beaten track when we have a problematic geographic issue-- I’ve worked for a company which was an early corporate presence at several colleges with a large LDS population for example. (Not just BYU although that was our flagship). The male students are two years older than the typical undergrad (the men did missions after Sophomore year) so we got the maturity of a grad student but the experience of an undergrad. Virtually everyone was fluent in at least two languages besides English. Virtually everyone expected to live far away from family and friends for at least part of their career, didn’t mind moving a lot, were thrilled to hear about a rotation overseas for example.</p>
<p>So although I’m probably using a bad example, there were schools that might not have cracked your personal top 20 list, but which were “terrific schools” if you need to hire 30 new college grads who are fluent in Spanish and German and won’t mind being sent to Lima, Peru for 6 months when you need them there.</p>
<p>Now that is a very interesting question. Does the threshold for being granted an interview vary significantly between colleges? Do marginal applicants at some colleges get the benefit of the doubt when arranging that first interview?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That much I know. But not every company has the budget to directly solicit workers on every campus. It is thus logical that some of them may seek out intermediaries, perhaps those closely tied in to certain campuses or alumni networks.</p>
<p>I will re-read Chapter 8 of “The Arts: Spotlighting the Creative Applicant” and Chapter 9, “The Humanities: The Scholar Every College Wants” of the book “What High Schools Don’t Tell You” by Wissner-Gross. She discusses contests and summer programs for such kids.</p>
<p>I think it’s interesting that you say “own environments.” That implies that a student from Northeast should assume he’ll return / seek employment in the northeast, the student from Texas should assume he’ll return / seek employment in Texas, the student from Michigan should assume he’ll return / seek employment in Michigan, and so forth. And see, that’s exactly what I think of when I talk about “provincial.” The assumption that you’re bound by the region of the country that you grew up in.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, it may stun you to know that my kids got into generally-regarded-as-elite schools, never having won any kind of competition of any sort. Ok, D was on her school’s math team that did go to state - but they didn’t win. It’s just not the be-all-and-end-all marker of any sort.</p>