Many seniors are finding that the road to the world after Bowdoin runs through the Career Planning Center. With commencement only seven months away, students are visiting the CPC's office to explore both job and internship possibilities, and the CPC is armed with encouraging statistics and programming geared toward making the job search process less stressful.
While the national unemployment rate stands at 5.4 percent, CPC Director Ann Shields said that students should not worry, provided they have taken the right steps to make themselves marketable in today's workforce. "The national unemployment rate is really irrelevant to us," she said. "When looking at people with college degrees things are a lot different."
Shields also said that according to a new survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers expect to hire 13.1 percent more new college graduates in 2004-2005 than they hired in 2003-2004.
"Getting internships and starting the job search early relieves much of the tension of the whole process," Shields said. "More competitive employers hire up to 80 percent or more from their summer internship pools. If you haven't done an internship, you're at a severe disadvantage."
Shields said that students should come in as sophomores to look for internships and find what they are truly passionate about.
Associate Director for Employer and Alumni Relations Tamara Kissane agreed. "Internships give you the luxury of time. You can find out what your interests might be so that during your senior year, you make more of a deliberate choice rather than a forced one," she said.
In addition to helping students with internships, Kissane helps organize recruiting events that bring a pool of employers together to read applications and select students for interviews. This fall's recruiting event, which was held in conjunction with several other liberal arts colleges, attracted 17 employers. Twelve employers attended a similar event last year.
"The employers are increasing in number. Many that we haven't heard from are contacting us. When the recession hit we lost recruiters, but now they are coming back along with new ones," Kissane said.
Shields downplayed criticism that including other schools in recruitment events may put Bowdoin students at a disadvantage.
"This might initially seem to disadvantage our students, but we are able to get access to employers who would never come up to our school because we can't generate enough top applications to make an employer come all the way out here," she said. "When we join with colleagues, we are able to attract a wider range of industries."
Shields also said the competition of the job search has a different flavor from the last highly competitive process students have likely faced, that of college admissions. "This process isn't like the college admissions process, where colleges deliberately try to get a diverse group of students," she said. "Some employers look for a pipeline school where they have gotten good employees in the past. They know this school produces reliable employees so students from the same school are really not competing against one another."
According to the Career Planning Center's "One Year Out Survey" from the Class of 2003, most seniors sought jobs directly out of Bowdoin. 394 members, or 89 percent, of the class responded to the survey. Of these, 304, or nearly 70 percent, were employed by the end of their first year out of Bowdoin. Business proved the top choice, with 78 students, followed by Education, science and medicine, non-profit work, and law and politics.
Sixty-one students responding to the survey said they continued their education after Bowdoin within a year of graduation, either going on to graduate school, completing pre-med coursework, or seeking certification/licensure training or a second bachelor's degree. The most popular fields for advanced degrees were the arts and sciences with 27 students, followed by law and medicine with 17 and 9 students respectively. Twenty-four students reported working in a non-career related position, and a small group either joined the military or took time off to travel.
Despite these numbers and the CPC's programming, Shields sounded a word of warning. "Even though employers are increasing and students might have more options," she said, "it is still a competitive process."
-Adam Baber contributed to this report.