Each year Middlebury students apply for internships and jobs, and look to the College for support through the application process. The Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) aims to make this part of the Middlebury experience a little less stressful by creating a network of alums and providing students with job and internship opportunities described as “Middlebury-friendly.” Sites like MOJO and MiddNet help students peruse through job opportunities and contact alumni.
Jeff Sawyer, CCI Director of Employer Outreach and Development, offered some insight into the process.
“We start with understanding where the opportunities are and what students are interested in,” Sawyer explained. “And then we start to actually go out and target organizations to bring opportunities to the table.”
The CCI then invites companies or organizations to post with them. “We go out and actively encourage employers to kind of work with us,” Sawyer explained. “The preponderance of opportunities in MOJO are brought by organizations that want Middlebury students. They aren’t necessarily alums. In fact, the majority of opportunities are not sourced by alums,” although connecting students to alumni networks is one of the CCI’s strengths.
The CCI encourages alumni to get involved in their company’s recruiting processes as well as to help the CCI understand how these recruiting processes work. In addition, Sawyer admitted, the CCI asks alumni to advocate for Middlebury students if possible.
One of the biggest challenges that the CCI faces, according to Sawyer, is making students aware of the wealth of opportunities that come with their liberal arts degree – that they are capable of pursuing a number of career paths or even a number of occupations within one industry.
Career Adviser Tracy Isham echoed Sawyer, explaining that the CCI is “trying to highlight that within a sector, there’s a lot of diversity.”
After building awareness in terms of different career paths, the CCI works to make students as prepared as possible by reviewing their resumes and offering practice interviews. But not all students have had especially positive experiences with MOJO. Emily Snoddon ’14.5 shared a recent experience with the site during an application process.
“A job for an investigator position at the Bronx Defenders was posted on MOJO in early September and was due October 24th,” Snoddon explained. “The week the application was due, I reached out to an alum, Daniel Loehr, who currently is in the same position at the organization.” Loehr regretfully informed Snoddon that the company was holding their last round of interviews the next day, but encouraged her to send him her resume in an attempt to convince his supervisor to extend the process. Though Loehr’s attempt ultimately failed, he informed Snoddon that the position for which she was applying would start in November, meaning she would have been unable to accept the position regardless, since she would still be in her last semester at Middlebury. In an email to Snoddon, Loehr noted that the date posted on MOJO was the final deadline but that the organization was interviewing candidates prior to the Oct. 24 deadline.
Snoddon expressed her frustrations with the process. “To my knowledge, the CCI has never warned students of the fact that the application due date means the final day they will accept and not when the company starts to consider. Any student who applied on the date posted on MOJO would not be considered for the position, considering the final round of interviews had already occurred. Furthermore, I am not even sure they [the CCI] are aware of these facts. [Career Advisor] Tim Mosehauer sent out an email 2 days before the ‘deadline’ reminding students of this particular position. Clearly, he was not aware that the final round of interviews had already taken place.”
Similarly, Snoddon expressed her irritation with MOJO’s description of the job, as it did not list the start date as November – which would actually disqualify any student who has access to MOJO, as graduating students only have access to MOJO until September after their graduation date.
When asked about the potential deadline confusion on MOJO, Isham and Sawyer both noted that it was certainly an issue worth addressing. “I would say that there’s a culture here on this campus…of waiting,” Isham said. “One of the things that we think might be one of our communication campaigns for the future is telling students that…how do we get students to understand that you need to apply early? When you see an opportunity, not to wait until the deadline.”
Isham and Sawyer discussed the possibility of listing deadlines as “rolling” or even going so far as to post false deadlines. But ultimately they both agreed that students must be the ones to take the initiative to apply for a job that they want as soon as possible. “You don’t wait until your milk goes bad,” Isham stressed, “We don’t want our students to lose out.”
“It’s important for students to understand that’s not the way the employment world works,” Sawyer articulated. “Don’t treat it like a term paper. You want to get it as soon as you can, first come first served type of thing,” he concluded.
