Banking recuiters leave 'lesser' schools in the dust

BY LAURIE RANDELL

SOOWHAN LAH/YH

The ads are everywhere during the fall semester, inviting Yale students to come and be wooed by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Goldman Sachs, Salomon Smith Barney, and others. Consulting and investment banking firms routinely vie for the cream of the Eli crop to fill out their summer internship and postgraduate positions. The same scene plays itself out at the rest of the Ivies throughout the busy recruiting season. But for equally talented students at other universities that don't bear names like Yale or Stanford, the search for high-paying jobs is a little different—established consulting and I-banking firms won't touch these places with a 10-foot pole.

When I was admitted to Yale three years ago, everyone said I would be set for life. The Yale name would open doors that would have been forever closed had I chosen instead to go to a state school like UConn, as 30 or so of my classmates did that year. I filed this away in the back of my mind, figuring that either it wasn't really true, or it wouldn't matter until senior year anyway. I naïvely thought that people's resumés would be judged mainly on their merits, and only marginally upon what college was listed at the top. That was my major mistake—I was assuming that resumés from UConn would even make it to the point where they would be considered for jobs against people from Yale.

I'm not trying to be elitist here. I'm just recalling the many stories told to me by my good friend in the Honors program at UConn. There, the talk during recruiting season is not of raking in the big bucks at Goldman, it's of being a retail management intern at Walgreen's. Instead of consulting firms in New York that pay enough to buy a car, a select few Huskies are encouraged to go into insurance at one of the ubiquitous companies in Hartford. I initially thought that my friend must have been exaggerating. After all, even though Goldman accepts hundreds of resumés from Yale during or after its catered information session, it actually interviews only 25 people here. Maybe the whole thing was just a bit more low-key up there in Storrs.

Then I looked at Goldman's recruiting schedule. The only U's of anything listed for undergraduate recruiting are UCLA, UC-Berkeley, and the U's of Michigan, Texas, and Virginia. This was out of at least 100 listings on the schedule, including six just at Cornell or Brown—more than all of the state schools combined. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's recruiting schedule is slightly more balanced—if you can say that 10 out of 100 listings is that much of an improvement. Are Goldman and Morgan Stanley saying that their time would be wasted by making a single trip to a school like UConn?

UConn's own Department of Career Services lists very few names familiar to a UCS-scouring Yalie. The number of science-related positions could put UCS to shame, but for anything else, the pickings are pretty slim. Current listings for on-campus interviews included the Newtown Public Schools, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and various sales positions.

Sure, nothing's stopping any UConn student from taking initiative and sending an unsolicited resumé to a place like Goldman Sachs. But without even being told that such positions exist, it's an awful lot to ask of a busy junior or senior. The online application at Morgan Stanley (for students at schools it hasn't deigned to visit) is convoluted and hard to find. Nothing explains what you're applying for; you can't sit there nibbling a sandwich while someone sings the praises of life in Cash Management vs. I-banking. And if you've already seen that Morgan Stanley doesn't think your school is important enough to visit, you're not very likely to think it'll give your resumé any thought either.

According to my UConn friend majoring in economics, the only time anyone there has even seen a recruiter from a consulting firm is when one happened to stop by unannounced on the way to an informational session at Princeton. I believe her when she said that she could almost hear the sound of the resumés hitting the bottom of the trashcan as soon as the recruiter was out of sight.

SATs only mattered as part of getting into college—at least, that's what we're supposed to think. But when you can't even get someone to look at your resumé based solely on the fact that you went to an honors program at a state school, it suddenly seems like those three hours you spent as a junior in high school matter a whole lot more. Laurie Randell, SY '02, is executive editor of the Herald.

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