From your experience, do the folks in the Cornell Engineering Career Center try hard to help individual undergrad students get paid summer jobs, co-ops, and future real jobs? Do they practice interviews with kids, improve their resumes, and work with them one on one to find job placements? Do they help find international summer study or work abroad opportunities for the engineers too?
With over 3,000 undergrad engineers at Cornell, I am just concerned that the Career Center employees may not have a lot of time for personal attention? My son is quiet and introverted. I’m worried how he will do in interviews and get a job. He will be a freshman engineer this fall.
We did like a Career Center manager we met on campus one day, but does the need for career counseling exceed the supply of experienced counselors. Does the same office serve the graduate students as well?
Your son will need to proactively seek out services he needs. Both of my kids got their summer internships and jobs through Cornell career center postings. Cornell has strong alumni network, and the career center is helpful in general, but they are not going to help a student find a job. He is going to have to do it on his own.
Cornell is a big red machine, everything is there, but one needs to proactively figure out where everything is to get the most out of it.
Almost all of my kids’ friends from Cornell had a job upon graduation, especially engineer students.
@oldfort That is kind of the answer I was expecting…I guess I was hoping for a slightly different answer.
Am worried about the “proactive” part and the interviews. Maybe he will make a few friends who are more proactive about getting help at the Career Center and he will follow by example. He is 100% self-motivated academically, but I haven’t seen him be assertive about getting jobs and taking leadership roles in outside activities. His shyness holds him back a little, I think. Making close friends may be a problem, but hopefully being surrounded by lots of engineer types will help him find his niche.
Part of why I was OK with Cornell for him was that I knew he would be have peers who might be good role models and set the bar high for him. But, $70K a year will be somewhat wasted if he doesn’t get internships and a job at the end…
Thanks for your honest assessment.
By the way, I wonder if there are any fraternities that might take introverted engineers? That would be a good growing experience for him, but I know he won’t pursue it unless a friend happened to push him to rush.
This maybe a bit helicoptering…If you are afraid your kid may not be as proactive as he needs to be, you can get access to Cornell’s career center website to find out when there are job fairs, and what jobs are available for him to apply. My older kid was going into a very competitive field. I helped her quite a bit with her job search process initially.
Cornell’s career center has a fairly strict guideline on using their services, for both employers and students. Your son should be familiar with it or he may be banned from using it. https://www.career.cornell.edu/students/jobs/recruiting/upload/StudPolicies15-16.pdf
One thing I want to point out is that a lot of current students and alumni recommend their friends for jobs at their company. CS/engineers are in high demand from Cornell. As an example, a student is doing an internship at a company, he/she is graduating to take on a permanent job, the manager may ask if he/she knew of anyone from school that may want the internship next year.