“You’re too impulsive.” “You’re scattered.” Throughout college, Kaori Freda had been hearing such scoldings from well-meaning adults. Six months after graduation, it was impossible to argue with them. She wasn’t holding down a respectable corporate job. She wasn’t even circulating her résumé or scanning employers’ websites for opportunities. Instead, she was standing on a pier in Tokyo, about to board a ferry that would take her more than six hundred miles south, to the Ogasawara archipelago.
After twenty-five hours on the open seas, her boat docked at Chichijima, a remote Pacific island one-tenth the size of Martha’s Vineyard. Its population: a mere fifteen hundred souls. There, Freda began working part-time at an eco-lodge in exchange for room and board. She expected to stay for the better part of a year. This would be a great chance for her to explore her Japanese heritage. (Her mother was born in Japan; her father was an American of European origin.) During the mornings, she would feed the chickens and wash the lodge’s floors by hand. In the afternoons, she could explore coral reefs, steep cliffs, and beautiful beaches.
Admit it. Somewhere deep within our ids, we all harbor a momentary fantasy of running away from responsibility and loitering on a Pacific island for as long as we dare. Even so, we keep such dangerous thoughts under tight control. We’ve got bills to pay, deadlines to meet, and family expectations to uphold. Responsible people don’t take such exotic sabbaticals until their careers are secure, if ever. As respected author Jeff Selingo puts it in his book There Is Life After College, “The longer wanderers drift through their twenties, the harder it becomes to catch up.”
Or maybe times are changing. Kaori Freda opens this chapter because she found a way to enjoy her escape—and land a great job too. She didn’t hurt her career prospects one bit by spending seven months in the Ogasawara Islands. Instead, this Reed College graduate (BA in studio arts, 2015) qualified herself for new work at Nike and an Oregon start-up while experiencing life on her island.
Freda’s success is part of a liberating new direction that’s shaking up the way people find good jobs. No matter where you start—even somewhere as outlandish as Freda’s termite-infested hut—you are closer than ever to a network of career allies. It’s remarkable what you can accomplish with a laptop, a Wi-Fi connection, and a willingness to ask for help. Get enough people pulling for you, and the bumpier parts of your résumé stop being so ruinous to your future. You can win fresh hearings on the basis of your greatest strengths rather than being forever penalized for your stumbles. Thanks to Skype, WhatsApp, and the like, you can build career connections with a speed and ease that earlier generations couldn’t have imagined. It’s as if you are stretching spider silk between the world you currently live in and the one you want to join.
Your greatest allies: thousands of alumni from your college who can help you at each stage of your hunt. No matter where you are or what job you might be seeking, these partners are more approachable than ever. Alumni understand what little-known fields are booming, who is hiring, where you can get an interview, and, the most important skill of all, how to get a job. They know what insiders’ secrets will help you make a strong impression. Whether you’re hanging out on a Pacific atoll or marking time in a coffee shop in Perth Amboy, you’ve got allies. You just need to take the initiative and get comfortable with seeking out new acquaintances.
To connect with alumni who can help you, start with software tools such as Graduway, Switchboard, and CampusTap, or simply make energetic use of LinkedIn. Directory searches will help you identify alumni who are working in the industries and geographies that intrigue you. Reach out to Jessica in banking or Arturo in design with a short e-mail or message describing your common background. Propose a twenty-minute get-acquainted call in which alums can share insights about what their industry is like and how you can become the strongest possible candidate to get hired. Keep the note short and focused but inject just enough details to make the message feel personal. Most alumni want to help. They are especially eager to help students who come across as likable and authentic. If your first call goes well, don’t hesitate to propose follow-ups that can include an in-person meeting, a quick review of your résumé, or introductions to other people who can help you. Even if only one in five e-mails leads to a useful conversation, you’re opening doors.
Often the most helpful alumni graduated just a few years before you and thus are early enough in their careers to remain keenly plugged into entry-level hiring. You need not bite your nails about whether a famous alumnus trustee has time for you. You’ll fare just as well—probably better—with someone from the class of 2011 or 2015.
In Freda’s case, her journey to a better job started with an overseas hunt for personal meaning. After graduating from Reed, Freda wanted to explore her Japanese roots. She bought a one-way ticket to Tokyo and vowed to live on a hundred dollars a month, covering living expenses via whatever ad hoc internships she could find. Family visits in Nagasaki went well; a stint in a Japanese kindergarten didn’t.
When Freda heard that a remote island resort, Eco-Village Pelan, would offer free room and board to volunteers willing to help with chores, she decided it sounded perfect. “This is the place where my heart and soul will blossom,” she wrote on her blog. Once she arrived, she found the islands as enchanting as she’d hoped. She made friends with kayak instructors; she donned snorkeling gear and chased baby octopuses in the warm, shallow water. She became close friends with her host family, teaching their little girl how to paint.
As for her obligatory chores… well, that got complicated. “I liked feeding the chickens,” she told me a few months later. That had the purity of simple manual labor with an obvious reward. Tidying up the self-composting toilets was nastier, yet it took only a few minutes and could be seen as stoic service. What her hosts needed most, however, was extensive help on the construction of a goat shed. Nobody used bulldozers or backhoes for such tasks. Instead, everyone shoveled dirt by hand, week after week after week.
“I got tired of digging ditches,” Freda said. Her hands blistered. Her skin got sunburned. The work was monotonous, and she found herself plunged into the despair of anyone approaching a major construction project for the first time. The more you do, the more you realize the unacknowledged vastness of what lies ahead. Each week, it’s easy to believe that you’re not making any progress at all; in fact, you feel like you’re actually slipping backward. Meanwhile, she was getting calls and e-mails from her father, urging her to rejoin the responsible world. It wasn’t clear what to do next, and the private dialogue inside her head was getting complicated. Is this why you went to college? Really? How many more ditches do you want to dig? Acting on a thin hope, Freda used her eco-lodge’s Wi-Fi connection one evening to hunt for job openings at a U.S. company that intrigued her: Nike. As a freshman at Reed, she had met a few Nike employees at a networking event sponsored by her school’s career center. She’d stayed in touch ever since. Now, browsing Nike’s website, she saw an opening for a tech analyst at the company’s Oregon headquarters.
That position turned out to have been filled, but other opportunities arose. Nike might need a resident artist or a short-term specialist working on security breaches and software automation. She was on the hunt.
Her contact couldn’t make the final decision to hire her, but he could encourage Nike colleagues to interview her via Skype and reach their own conclusions. She should know, however, that these would be tough interviews. If she came across as unprofessional or poorly prepared, Nike would kick her application aside. It would take about a week to get the interviews scheduled. Did she want to proceed? Yes, she wrote back.
“I really wanted the job,” Freda later told me. She needed interviewing tips, fast. No one on her island could help her, but with a single online request, she could become visible to as many as twelve thousand Reed alumni. She logged on to Switchboardhq.com, a student-and-alumni career networking site. There, she posted a three-paragraph plea that concluded: “If you’ve ever worked for Nike in any capacity and know what they like from interviewees, please get in touch. I could use all the guidance I can get.”
A few hours later, tips began streaming in. A member of Reed’s class of 2009 replied: “My former boss is good friends with someone who is well-placed at Nike. I’ll ask him about putting you in touch.” The next day, a member of the class of 1991 messaged her: “Get in touch. I have a contact who might have some insight.” All told, 195 people saw Freda’s query. At least a dozen engaged via Skype, e-mail, or message boards.
Each exchange brought a deeper understanding of the big-company norms that seem so obvious once you know them and so mysterious when you don’t. One responder explained how to sound excited about Nike without seeming fawning. Another helped her bone up on technical issues, such as the different capabilities of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, so she wouldn’t be tongue-tied if interviewers wanted to probe her design skills. A third shared tips about the best ways of navigating the company’s bureaucracy and internal politics.
Could Freda convey a proper professional tone from her island retreat? She looked around her cabin and saw ugly termite trails on the floors and walls. They had to be concealed! With a white sheet borrowed from her host family, she transformed the background into a serene backdrop that approximated a conference-room wall. Then she rearranged her lights until the webcam’s video image made it seem as if she were settled into a mainstream office.
Her Nike interlocutors never caught on. “We had a great interview,” Freda told me. Six days after the anxious Reed graduate had posted her call for assistance online, she broadcast a triumphant update. “Reedies never fail to amaze me,” she wrote in an online forum. “I’ve received awesome advice and overwhelming community support. I’m excited to share that I will be working at Nike headquarters with an incredible team, one of whom is a Reedie and a longtime Nike expert.” A few weeks later, she boarded the Ogasawara-to-Tokyo ferry, the first stage in a triumphant return to the United States.
Even though her Nike project work lasted for only part of 2016, future employers now saw her in a different light. She had migrated into the eminently hirable pool of people with big-company experience and a bachelor’s degree from a well-known college. Shortly after wrapping up at Nike, she joined an Oregon start-up specializing in office-productivity tools—a job well suited to her explorer’s taste. At the start-up, Accompany, she is part of a customer advocacy team, researching the ways Americans get their work done, and how that can be improved.
There’s a bit of Kaori Freda in all of us. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, college graduates do the most job-hopping between ages twenty-two and twenty-eight (5.8 jobs on average). The comparable figures for people with associates’ degrees or only a high-school education: 5.2 and 4.7. When you collect your diploma, you don’t yet know what kinds of jobs you do best, what type of work satisfies you the most, or where the best career opportunities reside. You need to experiment. Only after a few years of poking around does everything become well aligned. That’s how you eventually settle into a winning career. No matter what your parents tell you, the great advantage of a college education isn’t long-term stability; it’s flexibility.
The past chapters have been packed with testaments to the effectiveness of the meanderer’s path. Create your own luck, and the opportunities for a productive, satisfying career after a bumpy start are vastly better than most people realize. That’s true whether you want to join IBM’s blockchain team or become the sassy voice of Viking Range’s social-media initiatives. At the start of the postgrad job hunt, however, it’s all a mystery. You don’t know how anything will turn out. Partway along the zigzag to success, it’s easy to veer off track and never make it back. What if that temporary job pouring coffee or doing office chores never leads to anything better?
Being in the midst of the great postcollege job hunt can be as scary (or thrilling) as rafting your way along a class IV river. When things go well, you’re blessed with an intuitive feel for where the current will take you next. When boulders loom, you change course or bounce off them, using momentary obstacles to achieve your necessary course correction. Getting splashed doesn’t bother you; each burst of cold spray passes quickly. The whole experience makes you feel incredibly alive. You’re moving fast—and about to move even faster.
The rafting metaphor applies to bad experiences too. When everything goes badly, you slam into the rocks and end up overwhelmed by a solid wall of water to the point that you can barely breathe. In the worst case, you’re thrown out of your raft. Before long, all you can do is struggle for survival. You’ve got nothing in common anymore with the happy adventurers in the other rafts. They’re roaring in triumph while you’re careening helplessly through rapids with no ability to control your path. All you can do is spit out water and strain for shore before rocks or undercurrents do you in.
It helps to have a guide. Here are three powerful ways that alumni connections can improve your odds of a winning career.
Defining Your Search
Every college has at least a few alumni like Polly Washburn. She’s a 1990 graduate of Oberlin College (BA in law and society) who never totally left. Even though she’s been out of college for more than twenty-five years, memories of undergraduate life remain a huge part of her identity. She organizes her class reunions; she serves as a trustee of the Ohio college’s alumni association. Washburn is living in Denver now, but her alma mater remains dear. On weekends, you may see her wearing an Oberlin sweatshirt. You can spot her on the highway in the Versa hatchback with the Oberlin sticker.
As Washburn explained to me: “I started out as a bookworm in a large high school in Baltimore. Everything changed in college. I had much more of a social life. I became president of our dorm. I started to feel confident about myself.” The farther she races ahead in life, the more of a debt she feels to the college that made it all possible. As she put it, “I’m so grateful for my liberal arts education. It’s allowed me to fit in everywhere.”
Traditionally, colleges regard such hyperloyal alumni as feedstock for each new fund-raising campaign. Graduate from college, and you’ll soon be bombarded with opportunities to be a friend ($250) of your alma mater, a patron ($1,000), or perhaps even a benefactor ($10,000). The more you give, the more you will be wooed by the development office. You will be invited to dine with the deans; you will get mailings that tell you about the most successful students’ achievements. Unless you break out of this cocoon, you will forget how bewildering it is for many seniors to contemplate life after college. You will become part of the campus elite, with only the haziest awareness of the jitters and self-doubts that leave some students too scared to know where to begin. That’s unfortunate, and it’s starting to change.
Private colleges such as Oberlin, Reed, Mount Holyoke, and Amherst now realize that their most valuable alumni aren’t always the ones writing the biggest checks. With the college-to-career pathway for liberal arts graduates in constant upheaval, even the most progressive career-services departments can’t solve every student’s needs. Tapping into alumni’s unique expertise becomes essential. Make the rounds at public universities, and you can find a similar awakening at schools such as Michigan, Minnesota, and New York’s Binghamton University.
Oberlin, for example, has drawn more than eighteen hundred students and alumni into an online community that invites current undergraduates to ask for whatever help they need while alums offer whatever resources they feel like sharing. Matches happen dozens of times each month. One notable service promotes face-to-face chats with alums across the country in a format known as Coffee and Conversation. Suppose you are an Oberlin student spending a few weeks in New Orleans, Boston, St. Louis, or any one of a host of other cities, either for an internship or a family visit. You needn’t be alone. You’ve got a standing invitation to network with a well-connected alum.
Peggy Washburn started the Coffee and Conversation program in 2015. At first, she expected current students would be most interested in her vast network of job-related contacts. She’s enjoyed seven distinct careers since leaving Oberlin, and in each one, she’s made hundreds—perhaps thousands—of useful acquaintances. Since graduation, she has tried everything from legal research to newspapering, nonprofit fund-raising, television production, public relations, independent filmmaking, and web development. Now she works for the Denver Post as a digital producer. “If you tell me what you’re interested in,” Washburn says, “I probably know someone.”
For all the splendor of Washburn’s network, her greatest value involves something more fundamental. She knows that the meanderer’s path can work. That’s an unexpected—and sometimes shocking—insight for students to hear. She’s the living, breathing antidote to society’s constant urgings that college graduates steer themselves toward the safest, most predictable jobs that can be found.
Horizons widen. Life becomes full of a wider range of possibilities.
Because alumni like Washburn keep making it up as they go along, they provide a realistic sense of what’s challenging—and what to do about it. Spend an hour with Washburn, and you will gain reassurance that you needn’t find a perfect first job in order to enjoy an exciting life. She knows when to stick with a stormy job and when to move on. She also knows what it’s like to chase success with one-tenth the amount of money you might want. In 2009, she set out to make a low-budget film about life on a Canadian farm in the 1850s. She scrounged for old lumber in order to create a weathered barn on the cheap; she got lots of advice about how far you could stretch a dollar before it was time to give up.
Could alumni provide this same sort of mind-stretching guidance about career possibilities even if it weren’t so easy to establish connections online? Yes, to some extent, but everything would be harder and less egalitarian. Without Skype, e-mail, or chat, people would be reliant on whatever mingling did (or didn’t) happen at campus reunions, corporate retreats, private clubs, and shared vacation spots. They’d be back in a stratified world where the most successful and best-connected people took care of their own—and everyone else was stuck on the wrong side of the moat.
Nearly twenty years ago, Mara Zepeda, the daughter of an immigrant painter, left her family home in New Mexico and headed to college in Oregon. She graduated from Reed College in 2002 with a degree in Russian and a great deal of uncertainty about what lay ahead. Over the next decade, she found work in higher education, radio journalism, and professional calligraphy. She built her own network of career advisers as briskly as she could. When she posted a list on her website (MaraZepeda.com) of all these allies from New Mexico, Reed, and beyond, her list totaled more than two hundred names.
On vacation in Italy in 2012, Zepeda finally realized the unifying theme to her eclectic jobs and her ever-growing circle of friends—she was unusually good at connecting people and making them glad to be part of her circle. Perhaps she could create a specialized social network that would allow thousands of alumni to help one another’s careers. Zepeda couldn’t engineer such a site herself, but that was an easy problem to solve. After a few e-mail exchanges with friends, she connected with Reed alum Sean Lerner, who lived eight time zones away. He listened to her animated, almost breathless pitch—and then delivered the perfect techie reply. “Yeah, that sounds interesting. I’m not doing anything too exciting this evening. I could get started on it.”
A few months later, the two of them launched Switchboard, a software service that makes it easy for students and alumni to connect. Since then, Zepeda has been pitching her services to colleges across the country. I first met her at a trade show in Chicago, where she was striking up conversations with career-services specialists who might want to install Switchboard. We talked about her early work with Reed and Oberlin as well as her success in introducing Switchboard to more than a dozen other schools, including Williams, Denison, and Kenyon. When I asked Zepeda why she and Lerner built this service, she had a deliciously simple answer: “It’s something that we wish had existed when we were students.”
Opening the Door
As a political science major at Binghamton University, Kevin Greer dreamed of becoming an influential global analyst, working in Washington, DC. That’s a tough path to pursue, no matter where you go to college. In Greer’s situation, the odds of success grew even steeper. Attend a public university in upstate New York, ten hours by train from the nation’s capital, and nobody expects you to become the Henry Kissinger of your generation. You’re an outsider even if you graduate summa cum laude. People in government don’t see you as a player. Nobody rushes to help make your dream come true.
Undeterred, Greer headed to Washington anyway in 2012, right after college graduation. What he discovered in his first month nearly sank him. “The jobs I wanted required five to seven years of experience,” Greer ruefully explained to me. “I hadn’t done the kinds of internships you needed to have on your résumé.” His new peer group consisted of well-connected graduates of more famous schools, who had been cycling in and out of Washington’s summer-internship scene since they were college freshmen. They had worked on Capitol Hill; they had spent time at leading think tanks; they had badged in at well-known government agencies. On Greer’s bio, a single stint as a congressional intern was surrounded by many college summers sitting in a toll collector’s booth counting quarters at Jones Beach, on the southern shore of Long Island.
In Greer’s words: “I needed to broaden my experience in a hurry.”
Four years later, Greer returned—via Skype—to the Binghamton campus with a proud story to share. He had caught on with the State Department in a big way. For the past two years, he had been working full-time as part of the executive secretariat staff, traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry on various overseas missions. He got to see world leaders up close; he helped sort out the planning details needed to make each trip as successful as possible. Some of his work was cerebral, some of it was menial, but with that much proximity to power, before age thirty, he had made it onto State’s fast track.
If Greer had wanted to, he could have turned his entire hourlong Skype session with Binghamton students into a personal brag-a-thon. That wasn’t what his audience craved, though. The thirty or so students on the other end of the Skype connection were trying to sort out their own career options. They had a distant, hazy sense of the State Department as a fascinating place to work. They knew that senior-level jobs were enviably exciting. What baffled everyone in the audience were the mechanics of turning a Binghamton degree into a storybook career. How did you get your first few internships? Who helped you along? What job-hunting rituals were a waste of time? How could you gain experience when nobody was hiring you? The more Greer could take people through the crucial, scrappy, mundane details of getting a foot in the door, the better.
After all, career guides and employer websites may explain how your journey into the workforce is supposed to proceed, but they don’t tell you how to improvise your way to success if your first few attempts come up empty. There’s usually a hidden path or an alternate route somewhere. Your liberal arts training makes you temperamentally well suited to such approaches. You just need an inkling of how it’s done. The right place to look for insiders’ tips: alums who have made such transitions and can explain in vivid detail how you, too, can pull it off.
Since starting in 2014, Binghamton’s career-services director, Kelli Smith, has been building such bridges as fast as possible. Weeks after taking office, she told a campus journalist: “It’s clear we have a significant number of successful alumni with incredible loyalty to their alma mater, who are willing to help our current students.” Her vow: to make the most of that resource. As she explained to me, with nineteen thousand students to serve, her twelve-person department can’t do everything. As a result, she keeps looking for ways to turn career support into everyone’s priority, including alumni’s and faculty’s.
Each February, more than five hundred Binghamton students head to New York City to be part of a carefully structured series of twenty-two visits with alumni working at well-known organizations that are in the midst of their hiring cycles. The students who want jobs at such businesses as Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley, and Ziff Davis learn how to make the best possible applications. As for the ones who are simply curious about what banking or city government might be like, they come away with hands-on knowledge.
Meanwhile, Binghamton brings high-achieving alumni to campus more than twenty times a year for in-person talks or Skype sessions. All these talks occur as part of a program called Cool Connections, Hot Alumni. Within three weeks of Kevin Greer’s appearance, Binghamton students also heard from a sociology major who had risen to become president of the Sierra Club, a history major with a rich career in community service, and an English major who cohosted a morning television show for ABC. Opening speeches are kept short; the core of each session involves the back-and-forth of students’ questions and practitioners’ insights.
In Greer’s case, the best parts of his story involve his scrappy, two-year struggle to establish even the tiniest toehold in Washington’s power structure. Ostensibly, he was in Washington to learn Persian and pursue a master’s degree in conflict resolution at Georgetown University. Even before classes started, though, he embarked on a nonstop hunt for useful job experience of any kind, paid or unpaid.
For him, the crucial goal was finding work at the State Department, no matter how transient or low-paying it might be. “I applied for a bunch of different positions,” he told me. “It’s hard to tell from some of the job listings what’s involved, but that didn’t bother me. You apply for as many positions as you can, as fast as you can.” Rejections didn’t faze him; neither did an inability to evoke a response.
“Every interview has the potential to turn into a job,” Greer kept telling himself. “You never know who’s looking for what.” Eventually so many copies of his résumé were in play that they achieved the diplomatic equivalent of geosynchronous orbit, circulating on their own within the department’s Foggy Bottom offices.
One afternoon, Greer got the call he’d been awaiting. State’s Office of Cuban Affairs needed someone to help file paperwork for six weeks. Could he start right away? “I’m pretty sure I never interviewed for that job,” Greer told me, with a chuckle. He didn’t speak Spanish, and the job didn’t pay much. Even so, he said, “Yes!” A few months later, more work in a different section. He befriended any State employees he could find, including an HR specialist who promised to keep an eye out for anything good. A little later, he locked into the opportunity that he really wanted: a chance to join the executive secretariat staff.
Simultaneously, Greer kept looking to nurture his emerging Persian-language skills. In his first year at Georgetown, he applied for a two-month scholarship to study Persian in Tajikistan—and was thrilled to be chosen. After he got back, he coaxed his Georgetown professors into picking him as a teaching assistant for beginner and intermediate Persian classes. Next step, a part-time, unpaid gig helping Foreigncy.us, a language-learning start-up, build out its Persian-language section.
Why stop there? The University of Arizona had custody of some beautiful NASA images of Mars that had already been captioned in English, and as a gesture of international friendship, an effort was afoot to translate these captions into dozens of other languages. Greer got word Arizona needed a volunteer to carry out the Persian translations. Mastering Persian terms for English words such as rock formation seemed highly obscure. Even so, Greer said yes. The more versatile his Persian skills, the stronger his candidacy for future jobs. Two years out of graduate school, he might be moving so rapidly on a different track that he wouldn’t need Persian after all. Or perhaps another career twist might call on his language skills in a big way. If so, he would be ready.
Greer’s ultimate advice for any liberal arts graduate trying to break into a highly competitive field: “Be an advocate for yourself. There’s a fine line between being annoying and persistent.” A lot of his success has come from operating just a few inches on the good side of that line. As Greer pointed out: “No one else cares about your next job as much as you do.”
Go around to other schools such as Colgate, Clark, and Vassar, and you will find similar efforts to make alumni connections a much bigger part of career services. That’s especially true in fields such as the creative arts, political policy, and nonprofit advocacy. There, the most interesting organizations often employ fewer than two hundred and fifty people, and they don’t have the time or money to send recruiters to massive campus job fairs. Yet niche companies hire college graduates too, especially if candidates show up at the right time and are exquisitely attuned to such businesses’ needs at that moment. All it takes is a word to the wise from alumni to make those connections happen.
At Clark, for example, graduates of the university’s renowned theater-arts program have wrestled for decades with the challenges of getting connected to big urban job markets. (Theater jobs are scarce in Clark’s hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts.) With Clark’s alumni online, it’s much easier for theater graduates to find that first small gig in the big city that can rapidly lead to something better.
“If the Metropolitan Opera needs an assistant wig maker for a new production, that’s exactly the kind of situation that’s right for one of our graduates,” says Michelle Bata, an associate dean at Clark who oversees career-related initiatives. Such projects may last only a few months and pay modestly. They aren’t likely to be advertised extensively. Yet they represent the classic first step on the ladder, creating the name recognition and contacts that soon lead to bigger assignments. As career counselor Liz Ryan once observed, good jobs in many fields often start with a “brief consulting contract.” Once employers discover how well you can solve their most pressing problem at that moment, it doesn’t take long for them to come up with more enduring work that needs your attention too. Negotiate well, and you are on the road to higher pay and higher prestige.
Making the Journey Smoother
When Evelyn Perez-Landron wrapped up her junior year at Mount Holyoke College, it seemed as if her overseas adventures were finished. She had completed six months of intensive French study in the Mediterranean university town of Montpellier. She was running low on cash. It was time for the French and international relations double major to return home to Boston and get started on whatever summer job she could find. Never mind that wealthier classmates might spend the summer traveling for the fun of it or doing volunteer work in far-flung communities. She couldn’t act as if money didn’t matter.
But Perez-Landron wasn’t ready to go home yet. Partway through the spring, alumni connections in Montpellier had won her an introduction to Yasmine El Baggari, a globally active entrepreneur who grew up in Morocco. Making the most of this new opportunity, Perez-Landron asked about the possibility of working in this French-speaking North African country for the summer. The answer was encouraging. A start-up incubator and a Girls in Tech program in Casablanca (Morocco’s capital city) could each use a summer intern. Perez-Landron could look forward to plenty of work in Morocco, but no salary. Was she willing to be a volunteer?
A few years ago, Perez-Landron would have been stuck. Like most schools, Mount Holyoke helped students find paid and unpaid internships, but it didn’t sweeten the terms of any engagement. Starting in 2012, however, Mount Holyoke alumni and parents began underwriting as many as four hundred internship stipends a year. This new initiative has opened the door for students like Perez-Landron to take advantage of career-boosting opportunities they might otherwise have had to refuse.
The Moroccan summer turned out to be everything Perez-Landron had hoped for. She helped Girls in Tech prepare for its formal launch; she also served as a junior analyst at New Work Lab, assisting with grant proposals and creating a database of the incubator’s participants and contacts. In Morocco’s multilingual environment, her French was strong enough for business settings, while her Spanish came in handy in some marketplaces. She picked up enough Arabic to be able to hail a taxi and indicate her destination.
Mount Holyoke’s stipend of $4,500 stretched far enough to ensure a safe, exciting summer. Through Airbnb, Perez-Landron found a host family that took her in on affordable terms. Generous exchange rates meant that meals out seldom cost more than eight dollars. When everything seemed too jarring, Mount Holyoke alumni in the United States and Europe were just a Skype call away. They encouraged her to think of cabdrivers as potential allies; they primed her on haggling rules for outdoor markets. “No matter where in the world I went,” Perez-Landron later explained, “Mount Holyoke was with me.”
When Perez-Landron returned to campus for her senior year, she found even more benefits from her Moroccan summer. Talking with Mount Holyoke alumnae that she knew, she discovered one woman at Accenture, the global consulting firm, was combining her professional goals with a personal interest in helping emerging economies. Would Perez-Landron be interested in an opportunity to do the same? Yes, indeed. An introduction to the right people at Accenture soon followed, as did interviews and a full-time job after graduation.
The broader lesson of her story: Alumni aren’t just job boards cloaked in human bodies. They can improve your college-to-career migration in all sorts of indirect ways too. That’s especially important in your first few years out of college. When you’re trying out different cities and jobs, everything is new, and the risk of getting it wrong feels greatest. You haven’t yet found your rightful role in the workplace. In fact, you’re likely to feel very vulnerable at some point. If an alum can help you regroup quickly, you sweep aside much of the risk associated with a zigzagging start.
Let’s go through a few common situations.
If you want to explore a new direction without looking foolish, a well-connected alumna like Ashley Introne can be your trusted guide. She’s a 2011 Drew University graduate (BA in economics and French) who has thrived as a human resources specialist. She knows the banking and advertising sectors extremely well, and her network of business contacts extends into many other industries. Each year, about fifty Drew students or recent graduates seek her out for advice—either individually or in groups—and she tries to oblige in each case. If you’re completely at sea, she will take you through a short list of questions to help you determine whether you’re better suited for start-ups or big-company life. If you’re unhappy in your current job and want some quiet advice about what to try next, she can help there too.
As Introne explained to me: “I have a knack for understanding what it is that people really want, even if they’re having a hard time saying so.” She’s too early in her career to be one of Drew’s biggest financial donors. In terms of career impact on current students, though, she’s a standout.
Alumni can be remarkably helpful, too, in helping you be at your best in a job interview, especially if you’re picking up signals that your dream employer’s routines are a bit out of the ordinary. In the opening pages of this chapter, Kaori Freda made nimble use of Reed-based expertise on Nike’s hiring habits. Similarly, University of Portland graduates frequently ask April Dennis for her insights about accounting-firm interviews. The reason: she has conducted more than a thousand interviews on behalf of KPMG, the accounting firm that has employed her for most of the past decade. Think of those sessions as the equivalent of a musician’s master class. You won’t just be learning how to play the standard notes. You will be getting advice about how to come up with your own distinctive phrasing so that you can meet all the usual checklist requirements and still come across as you.
Dennis’s specialty: Figuring out how people with unconventional backgrounds can tell a personal story, whether it be about growing crops or working in the Peace Corps, while also shaping those experiences in ways that make accounting firms say: “We should hire you!” Even something as mundane as growing bell peppers becomes a winning anecdote once Dennis gets you to recount how much your seeds, water, and fertilizer cost and how much money you made from the crop. As she explained to me: “There’s a cost-benefit analysis story right there. I just help students discover strengths they didn’t even know they had.”
If you need help with life’s little things, alumni can come through in a surprising variety of ways. Hoping to visit an unfamiliar city to carry out a short job hunt? At Pitzer College, alumni in places ranging from Hamburg, Germany, to Austin, Texas, have been known to offer short-term lodging, free of charge. Dispirited by life’s setbacks? The odds are good an alum is willing to take you out for a nice dinner and a pep talk to help you get back in the game. Embarrassed about your tattered college wardrobe? Pragmatic alums will take you clothes shopping; generous ones may lend you something stylish from their own closets. Trust me, I know; I’ve been there. (Jacob Young, if you’re reading this, I’m really sorry about getting your foulard tie wrinkled.)
If you need help with life’s biggest challenges, alumni can steer you to safe ground. At Amherst College, career-services specialists have come to realize that Latino and African American students want easier ways to connect with alumni of color. Everyone’s job hunt is different, observed Emily Griffen, director of the college’s career center. She has introduced a new version of Amherst’s online alumni portal that allows students and grads to find counterparts with the same social or racial identity. That makes it easier for students to ask blunt questions—and get real answers—about opportunities and rough spots in the job hunt, as well as how welcoming or aloof a particular employer might be once job offers are made.
A few years ago, Amherst tried to create full-fledged versions of online mentoring in which alumni and students would pair up for a long-running series of conversations. “Actually, we found out that this was overkill,” Griffen told me. If you’re starting a job hunt, you don’t always need to come back to the same person for more advice. As a result, Amherst now offers a single, thirty-minute Quick Conversation so that students and alumni can exchange a few ideas without being roped together for months. Participation on both ends of this process has surged. Sometimes, less is more.
Even with all these initiatives in play, alumni connections remain a greatly underutilized resource. In the spring of 2016, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) asked 5,013 graduating seniors across the United States to share their experiences about fourteen types of job-hunting resources.
Only 46 percent of seniors said they had direct dealings with alumni. (By contrast, 94 percent had visited an employer website, and at least 60 percent had chatted with friends, sought out parents’ advice, or attended a job fair.) Interacting with alumni ranked a modest tenth on NACE’s list, according to frequency of use.
In terms of actual usefulness, though, alumni rocketed into fourth place—ahead of traditional mainstays such as job fairs, career-center visits, and spending time with employer representatives on campus. The only categories that ranked higher: employer websites, friends, and campus faculty.