Some helpful points made on this thread- but just want to clear up a few things which might be misleading for parents whose kids are not yet at the recruiting stage of college.
Handshake allows a company to specify which colleges they are targeting. So if your kid is at East Overshoe University studying CS, they are NOT seeing the internship or job postings which will appear for Caltech, MIT, Stanford, UIUC. Can they “borrow” the log in from a friend at one of these U’s? Yes. Can the college send a turndown email from applicants who aren’t at one of the U’s they are targeting? Yes.
So sure- Covid, Zoom interviews, technology have all made some things easier on the recruiting front. But other things have NOT changed. When a company is looking for a specific set of skills- fluency in Mandarin for example, or having taken specific college courses( econometrics, valuation, statistics with programming) it’s not because they are being mean and are being “gatekeepers”. It’s because the particular role in question actually requires those skills. So sure, apply even if you don’t have those skills, and then wait for your turndown email.
Rigor- there is NO substitute for rigor for companies which are in high demand. There’s a reason why recruiters love Princeton, Swarthmore, U Chicago, RPI… and it ain’t the weather (most of the time). Rigor matters for many roles. So- your kid isn’t at one of these colleges- are they destined to fold sweaters at Old Navy for the rest of their life? No. Make your OWN rigor, kid. Write a senior thesis even if it isn’t a requirement for your college. Take that grad seminar instead of the easy A studying the gut course that everyone knows is the easy A. Don’t drop Mandarin, Korean (or any of the other strategic languages designated by the State Department) because you’re going to get a B. Push yourself and make it the hardest B you’ve ever gotten- and keep pushing because fluency in one of these languages is VERY valuable in the job market- and not just for the CIA, NSA, etc. Companies expanding their footprint overseas need employees who can operate outside their hotel (where everyone speaks English) and often in rural or semi-rural areas where a large production plant might be located.
Etc. I’ve gotten nasty pushback on CC when I get on my rigor soap box (am I an elitist for suggesting that a kid at your local, non-flagship public U find a way to beef up their educational experience? I don’t think so…) but I’ve sat through thousands of meetings pulling together our “Nifty Fifty” list or our “Must interview” schedule and for the most part- no matter which college, no matter what major, it appears that rigor is the great equalizer.
Who is more valuable- a kid interested in Market Research at a consumer services company who took a two semester statistics sequence, or the kid who has taken advanced analytics, a grad seminar in the psych department on the link between visual / aural stimuli and human behavior, AND wrote a senior thesis which required sophisticated manipulation of census data? Entire industries (snack foods, casino gambling, high end coffee chains, etc.) are predicated on the link between external
stimuli and human behavior, for pete’s sake! And there are very few jobs these days in corporate America where experience with large datasets isn’t helpful… even if folks of our generation don’t quite see the link.
Carry on. Just clearing up a few things…