Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Posted
8 August 2006 @ 10am

Job Opportunities

In the world of a col­lege stu­dent, jobs are either in abun­dance, or are more rare than three-winged butterflies.

I’d like to flat­ter myself and say that I had a few chances for intern­ships for this sum­mer. There was GE Ener­gy, which I took; Van­guard Invest­ments, who I had to turn down before start­ing the final round of inter­views; a cou­ple of pos­si­bles in the Leesburg/Sterling/NoVA area; and a whole slew of pan­icked emails in late April of com­pa­nies who did­n’t get enough bod­ies in the first pass to con­sume their budget.

For next sum­mer, I have goals. I want to work for Van­guard in Char­lotte. I regret not hav­ing gone to Char­lotte for the on-site inter­view: it would have been great prac­tice for this spring. How­ev­er, I did­n’t have it in me to go: I had all ready accept­ed GE, and fur­ther “lead­ing on” Van­guard struck me as wrong. Hope­ful­ly, some­one else was extend­ed an offer to come down for on-site inter­views in my place.

My pipe dream for post-col­lege runs the spec­trum. GE has the IMLP pro­gram, where you get four six month rota­tions between dif­fer­ent IT/IM (Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment) posi­tions and sites through­out the GE busi­ness. Van­guard has their own take on IMLP, with three eight month rota­tions between dif­fer­ent con­cen­tra­tions. Impor­tant dif­fer­ence: Van­guard keeps you in one phys­i­cal loca­tion, while you usu­al­ly move for GE.

Then there’s Apple and Google. Com­put­er sci­ence majors dream of work­ing for Google, and Apple fanat­ics would love to be assim­i­lat­ed into the moth­er­ship. Google has amaz­ing career oppor­tu­ni­ties, but they’re all but impos­si­ble to even secure an inter­view with. Apple is a com­pa­ny so secre­tive, they may not even have an offi­cial hir­ing process for col­lege grad­u­ates, and they’re at the point where they don’t both­er recruit­ing: peo­ple come to them; why go out and look for bod­ies when they line up like sheep?

We’ll see where the winds of col­lege degrees and job expe­ri­ence take me.


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Updates are coming! | Inert Detritus
9 August 2006 @ 10am

[…] [Update: 10:50 AM, August 9th] See, told you I’d have (http://blog.christopherbowns.com/2006/08/08/job-opportunities/)[some­thing posted]. […]