<p>Hello everyone. Currently, Williams is one of the colleges I'm seriously looking at right now. If you were in the same spot as me in anyway, here are my wants in a college.</p>
<ol>
<li>Small undergrad community (2000 students or less).</li>
<li>Majority of classes are small (20 at most), and with the exception of core-classes no large-scale classes. Great staff:student ratio.</li>
<li>LAC curriculum/environment</li>
<li>Need blind admissions and loan-free financial aid.</li>
<li>Great career center/services.</li>
<li>Decent college town (doesn't have to be NY/Boston, but not in the middle of nowhere with no decent town minutes away).</li>
</ol>
<p>Williams I know meets all of those. But my #7 need for a college is having great opportunity for internships/jobs while going to college there. Williamstown is...isolated to say the least. It's 4 hours away from Cambridge/Boston. In reality I can't see Williamstown offering great internship or job opportunities, especially for someone (such as myself) interested in business.</p>
<p>Forbes recently released an article on "Best cities to begin a career" (factoring in cost of living, big companies, and small companies, maybe more?), which I am basing my list off of. If the colleges are more than two hours away from them, then I discarded them from my current list. However, everyone says Williams has among the best top firm recruitment...so I'm not really sure what to think of it.</p>
<p>Do you mean you’re looking for a school located somewhere you could work a strong internship or job during the actual academic year? If that’s the case, no, you can’t really find that at Williams.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I think you may also have a skewed view of how internships and jobs during college work. Most prestigious internships occur during the summer, as do many top summer associate positions at various firms. Williams has an extremely generous program called the Alumni Sponsored Internship program. If one’s application is successful (and more than 50% are), then Williams will literally write you a check for $3200 in order to support you in an unpaid or low-paying internship. And the quality of internships landed by Williams students every year is on par with any other top school in the country.</p>
<p>As for permanent employment, as you probably already know, Williams also has excellent placement. For instance, management consulting has become an extremely popular choice for students graduating from top schools or at the top of their class. Williams juniors consistently land a good portion of the summer associate positions at top consultancies, and those positions usually lead to offers of full-time employment upon graduation. In fact, some of the very top firms will literally only recruit from a short list of top schools, and Williams is almost always on that list.</p>
<p>Yes, I meant in the academic year. I’m interested in going to business school, so the more work experience I have the better, and I know alot of colleges will give me that opportunity.</p>
<p>Other schools may give you more opportunities to work during the academic year. But I would strongly argue that this confers little advantage in terms of applying to business school. </p>
<p>First, working a job of any substance during school is going to be stressful, and it may very well take a toll on your academic performance. This is not something you want to risk.</p>
<p>Second, virtually nobody attends business school straight out of undergrad. It’s a given that a successful business school applicant, especially to top schools like Wharton, Stern, HBS, etc., will have at least 2-3 years of work experience. And the work experience these schools are looking for really isn’t part-time work that one completes while in school, but rather full-time professional positions worked for a few years after graduation. I actually know quite a few people at top business programs. Not a single one of them started straight from undergrad.</p>
<p>Yeah, I second what crnchycereal said. That being said, if you are DETERMINED to have some type of business-related internship during the school year, it is highly doubtful you would find that commuting distance from Williamstown (you could potentially get a job as something educational or research-related through the school, or art-related from an area museum, but that is basically it). </p>
<p>By the way, several of my close friends from Williams went to b-school – all of them at top-five MBA programs – and not one had any sort of school-year internship of the type you describe. Rather, they focused on activites and classes during college that made them more desirable to employers (and more interesting as people), got great summer internships and jobs out of college, and that was more than sufficient (along with high GMAT scores, of course) to gain acceptance into essentially any MBA program they wanted – even without super-high GPA’s.</p>