I will be majoring in Computer Engineering and Financial Math at UC Santa Barbara. What is the recruiting like there? Since it’s pretty far from Silicon Valley, does that mean that big companies like Google and Apple won’t come to recruit at Santa Barbara? Also, do banks from San Francisco or LA recruit at Santa Barbara as well?
@amaayezing Congrats on becoming a Gaucho! There is a very strong presence of Gauchos in Silicon Valley (across industries). I have friends that I graduated with working at both Google and Apple, among many other tech companies in the valley. Very few seniors secure full-time professionl employment through on-campus interviews and career fairs (although engineering and finance/accounting/consulting have a higher %). You’ll receive emails from your departments and the on-campus career center is great, however you’ll likely end-up securing interviews by tapping into the alumni network, using Linked In, etc. Congrats again!
@Amaayezing As a side note, the smaller % of recent college grads getting hired through on campus interviews and on-campus career fairs isn’t specific to UCSB-- it’s a national trend, as social medial has made it much easier for recruiters to identify applicants and internal recruiting departments have cut-back recruiting directly on-campus. Of course there are still plenty of employers that do, but I caution seniors not to rely solely on on-campus interviews to gain employment. I recruit for a F100 company and we recently cut our on-campus presence completely across universities. Having a strong alumni network has become a very strong component of job hunting and fortunately UCSB’s alumni network is incredibly strong!