The Small-College Strivers Landing Big Jobs

Attending an elite college is a ticket to a high-paying job. So what about students at lesser-known colleges, with names recruiters usually ignore? In fact, students at colleges that aren’t on corporate recruiters’ list of target schools must battle hard to get noticed when trying to land a job.

Ask Andrew Huang, a 2018 graduate of tiny Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. He chose Gordon for its sense of community, close student-faculty ties and proximity to Boston. But he aspired (instead of want/ love) to work in finance—a competitive field where many firms recruit interns and employees from elite target schools.

 

Networking for an internship during his sophomore year, both at events and via emails and phone calls, netted Mr. Huang more than 100 new contacts—although many of his conversations with them were discouraging. He still remembers one investment banker’s response to his pitch: “He said no, that because I didn’t go to one of the firm’s target schools’ ” Mr. Huang says. “In that moment, I just knew that I had to keep working hard.”

Mr. Huang eventually reached his goal (instead of earned his goal) landing an internship in finance and a job after graduation as an analyst at Cambridge Associates, a global investment-advisory firm in Boston.

Paul Pesek was almost blindsided by this ramped-up process. As a sophomore math and economics major at Wheaton College near Chicago, he knew he wanted to work in a high-impact job, but he had little idea how to proceed. He began networking with Wheaton alumni, friends and others, in the hope of landing a summer internship in finance. “It took a ton of conversations, and frankly, painful ones at first,” he says. He flew to New York on one fall break with only a single appointment set up, then scheduled a half-dozen more by telling contacts, “I’m coming to New York for a networking week,” he says. His efforts paid off. He landed an internship at Morgan Stanley , and a job after his 2013 graduation at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. He later moved on to a private-equity firm.

“You’re going to end up working as a barista if you don’t have a plan,” says Mr. Weir, a 2015 grad whose networking helped him land an internship, and later a full-time position, at a Wall Street firm.

Big employers can’t recruit on all of the nation’s 3,000 four-year campuses, of course, but they’re more likely to recruit at lesser-known schools if alumni hold top jobs at the company. Companies say they DEMOCRATIZE the hiring process by posting internships and jobs on their websites so that students from any school can apply. Online applications are easily overlooked amid hundreds of competitors or weeded out by applicant-tracking systems, however.

Small colleges are taking steps to make their students more visible. The innovative program by a Chicago consulting firm, Parker Dewey, is an online micro-internship platform that links college students and recent grads with employers offering paid, short-term projects. The site gives students from any school a chance to gain experience and show off their skills, and it has attracted many employers seeking more diverse candidates, says CEO Jeffrey Moss. “We offer a broader employee pool, as opposed to the walled gardens that exist now in campus recruiting,” he says.

Alexa Arakelian, a senior in pre-law studies at Beloit College in Wisconsin, says work experience she gained through Parker Dewey enabled her to compete successfully against students from larger schools for a summer internship at a Chicago security-consulting firm. “It puts us on the same playing field,” she says. “That experience helped me get an amazing summer internship I never thought I’d get.”

  

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