Howdy all. When I started college, I knew 0 about "big business" jobs, I thought desk jockeying was for losers, and I thought all internships were unpaid and therefore only for rich kids. Not so, friends. If you're in college, about to start college, or have kids in the aforementioned life stages, I'm here to give a short guide to my experience getting a high paying job out of college. I went to a good school, but not an Ivy, and while I went to a one-year grad program, most of my work peers did not. I'm not in HR, I just went through the typical undergrad recruiting process 4 years ago and I now participate in my company's recruiting for undergrad students from my alma mater. Anyone with more recruiting experience than me should feel free to add on.
Which jobs am I here to talk about? Full-time "Business Analyst" roles or summer internships at
big tech companies and consulting firms. Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc have plenty of "analyst" jobs that aren't for programmers or data scientists. Also banks like Amex and Capital One, and maybe bigger "startups" like Uber or Doordash. Example: Google's got a whole "jobs in business" category on their
student career page. Anyone from any major could be a good fit for these jobs.
Why should you want these jobs? Well, they pay pretty great (yes, even the summer internships!), if you do well in your internship you may get a full-time employment offer before your senior year even starts, and even if you don't like the job, you've got a great, recognizable name on your resume forever. Many of the summer internships are super cushy because they want you to come back full-time. I know of at least two companies who have sent their interns to Disney for a week during the summer just because. The full-time work ain't bad either, and benefits (401k, travel, insurance, vacation) at big companies can be fantastic.
What's a consulting firm? F*ck if I know. Just kidding, management consultants are hired by everyone from Google to the federal government to work on all kinds of hard problems that those organizations might not be staffed to solve themselves. Examples of the big national consulting firms: McKinsey*, Boston Consulting Group (BCG)*, and Bain* (*aka MBB or "the big three" aka super exclusive and demanding), Deloitte, Accenture, IBM, Grant Thornton... I'm sure I'm forgetting tons. If hired at one of these, you'll probably get to hang out with a lot of other young people, which is nice. You will probably also be expected to do a bit more networking, a lot of client-facing work, company politics ("up or out") and required travel (maybe less after Covid) compared to the tech companies.
Step one: Get an interview. Your grades matter a lot. This is true for any career, I think, but at big companies it's different. At top companies, your resume might be automatically filtered out if you fall below a certain GPA cutoff, which could be as high as 3.5 or even higher. Full disclosure, I took some hard ass classes in college, too many credits, and a lot of part-time jobs, and I was a solid 3.3 student. So I had to do a one-year Master's in my field for my second shot at academic success.
Don't overload yourself on classes like I did just because you love school and got good grades in high school. You only have so much time in a week, and college will be very demanding as you're making new friends and learning how to take care of yourself on top of your coursework.
If you go to a top school, your major might not matter. As long as you are challenged and successful within your studies and extracurriculars (see below), you might have enough name recognition from your school that recruiters will assume you are smart and hard-working, which is the important part. Many of my peers at work were engineering majors, but some were art, English, or politics majors. This may even be true even for non-top schools but I don't have enough experience to confirm.
Whatever your major, keep your math skills sharp. You don't need calculus, just super sharp arithmetic and maybe a little algebra. Why? Because math is helpful and important in life. But also, case interviews. We'll get to that in a minute.
Join some extracurriculars. Pick ones you can get excited about so that you can get involved in leadership roles. Even better, look for opportunities that are both good on a resume
and pay something (examples: resident advisor, teaching assistant, research assistant). College is so freaking expensive, and I think it's pretty lame that being president of the ~outdoors club~ or being co-captain of the ~club polo team~ looks better than being a waitress at the Frat Boy Tavern, but them's the breaks. Again, just pursue your natural interests when possible and try not to overload yourself so your grades won't suffer.
I highly recommend looking into student entrepreneur clubs if you're interested. You can get easy funding to start your own business that might both a) make money and b) look GREAT on a resume, especially if it makes money.
Use the career center and go to career fairs and other events. You don't have to "network" at these places, but they can often get you a lot of helpful practice with being in a professional environment. Career centers can review your resume and maybe give practice interviews. Career fairs can help you find out who's recruiting and help you practice acting like a professional, even if you don't want to talk to anyone there. But you
should talk to people there, because they're just former students like you, and they are there to help. Bring a career fair wingman. Especially if you're socially anxious like me, you just gotta get those reps in, and learn to be positive and confident (or at least calm) in social situations with strangers.
Hopefully your school has these events; if not, seek out all of the aforementioned companies'
careers pages for students on their websites instead of just going to LinkedIn or Glassdoor. Also stay on top of any info sessions or events that might be going on at your school (
Google example again). I might come back and add some links (if you want to recommend any companies with student recruiting plz reply). I've also seen people ask for resume reviews on these boards.
Step two: Case interviews. Case interviews are a really important and specific feature of these jobs. The jobs I'm talking about here require
business acumen. All that means is you can take some information about a business and make a rational decision about where to go next. It's not hard, but it does take a certain mindset and some practice. I could go on, but honestly, just
pick up at least one book from the library or the career center, and work through all of the practice cases in that book to get a sense of what they're like. Ideally, get a friend you can trade practice cases with, so you can actually try asking questions and talking through your thought process out loud (very important skills for both interviews AND real-life business).
Pay attention to your life. LOL, right? But this can be hard. Self-awareness is important in your career and in interviewing. Take time to reflect on your biggest challenges. Either in life or just in your classwork. You'll be able to speak to the way you overcame these challenges in many interviews.
You can study for specific companies' interviews. Use
Glassdoor, it's free and it helped me prepare for specific questions in some of my interviews.
Presentations and public speaking in any of your classes are helpful practice. Pick up analysis skills on the side, if you can. If you're in a non-technical major, this can be helpful to feature prominently on your resume. If you can get practice with any of the following, it's a plus: basic python or java, Tableau (a data visualization software), SQL, or R. R is a statistical analysis language. SQL is
kind of like a relatively easy programming language, and it's commonly used by business analysts.
Learn it for free, it's fun and easy and will help set you apart. I'd recommend trying Comp Sci 101 or Stats 101 at your college if you're up to it. Maybe your school even has Big Data 101.
Apply to a LOT of companies. Apply to all of them. Ultimately, a lot of the recruitment process comes down to chance - how you get along with your interviewer, which questions they give you, how tall the stack of resumes is that the raters have to get through... Just do your best. Don't stress too much. Showing up is the hardest part - just meet the resume submission deadlines for all of these companies and hope for the best. At best, you'll have some job offers to decide between. At medium best, you'll have some valuable interviewing experience to prepare you for other interviews. And at worst, you'll have good grades and fulfilling extracurriculars, which is never a bad place to be.
Interview tips: Try to be...
- Confident. You don't have to put on a macho business-man show, just act like you deserve to be there, which if you got the interview, you probably do.
- Relaxed. Anxiety is a b*tch. For me, pretending as though I already know a person helps. Don't panic, it's just a conversation. Take your time to respond thoughtfully to questions. Don't be afraid to share "unimpressive" details about your hobbies - it shows you're passionate about something, and it just might spark a conversation. I spent a couple of wonderful interviews talking in-depth about cooking and cleaning techniques.
- Curious. Again, this is important in the real world of business. Don't be afraid of asking questions or looking stupid. Interviewers want people who know what they don't know. It helps keep the conversation light if you're genuinely curious about the interviewer's life and their work experience, too.
- Humble. When you're telling stories of your past experiences, don't be denigrating your peers or anyone else to make yourself sound like a hero. It's a bad look, friend. Acknowledging the people and external factors who helped you along the way shows strong character and teamwork skills.