The mingling never ends...
On the second day of orientation, we had the opportunity to meet the whole crew from the Office of Career Management and learn how they plan to help us meet our end goal of landing that sweet job once we graduate. For me, I was really impressed that there was a full time staff of 6 people working to help us find jobs, but not too shocked given that I already knew the Fisher MBA program has one of the best placement ratings among top MBA programs (I want to say 2nd best, but I couldn't find the actual stat).
As they continued into their talk, we heard a lot about what they could do for us but two things they said really stuck out. First was that only 40% of internships and jobs are found from on campus recruiting, while the other 60% come from student initiated contacts outside of Fisher. Second was the amount of focus that was put on mingling with alumni or other people in the industry we might be interested in to get job connections.
Now, as I think about it, the 40/60 number gives me a good push to go out and really find my dream job and not limit myself to whoever comes on campus, but I figured the mingling advice had to be a stretch. I've heard all kinds of stories about getting jobs through a series of contacts in the industries and even got a job offer that way when I graduated from undergrad. But my problem was around where we'd meet these contacts in new industries and when we'd have a chance to get out to do so amidst the huge workloads we kept hearing about.
Now skip ahead 2 weeks and I find myself in the third organized alumni event through Fisher where I'm surrounded by 50+ alumni of the program who are eager to help. This particular event happened to be the 2010 Dean's Dinner and Alumni Awards where they honor 5 Fisher Alums who have gone above and beyond the already high expectations that have been set for Fisher alumni. These awards include Young Professional, Community Service, International, Entrepreneurship, and Lifetime Achievement, and this year awards went to graduates young and old, but all very deserving. It was a first class event from start to finish, and was hosted at The Blackwell, the hotel within Fisher's campus.
Over the course of dinner, I shared conversation with a previous award winner, a faculty member who will be teaching at least one of my future classes, and two other MBA alumni who were less than 5 years out of school. Not all of them worked in areas I'm interested, but every one of them was more than willing to help me out in my future career search efforts. One of them even forwarded my name onto some of his old classmates who were in similar situations to where I am now. Needless to say, I'm no longer worried about whether or not I'll be able to make necessary contacts out in industry.
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Now a new feature to the blog:
Best Part of the week: My fellow classmates; I've never been around a group of people with such ambition and drive who are also so much fun. Spending the next two years with this group is going to be amazing
Worst part of the week: 100 pages of reading for one Econ class. Yikes, looks like the amounts of reading weren't exaggerated.