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KPMG: David Choi
For those who don't know, I'm David and I work along with Tonya at Career Services. To kick off the SI Career Services blog, I am going to share some of my experience with internship and job searching. I know there a few people still looking for internships, so I will recount some the strategies I used to find and land my internship last year.
1. I first made a list of the companies/organizations I was interested in. Making a list is really helpful because it provides scope and also makes the task less daunting. I was interested in consulting and e-commerce so I made a list of 15-20 companies that were in those areas.
2. From that list, I tried tried making networking connections at those places. For example, I was interested in working for HP so I went to their presentation on campus and also signed up for an informational interview with them. I also looked at the SI Alumni database and asked SI Career Services if we had any contacts at those companies. I tried to send my resume to the contacts I made because there is a better chance that it would make it to the right person than if I applied over their websites.
3. I did attend UM Career fair, SI Networking Event, and the
Engineering Career Fair also. While I did not get any calls from the companies I met there, I still thought it was a worthwile experience. Plus when I did my full-time job search this past fall, the job fairs actually paid off very well for me.
4. The way, I ended up at KPMG was that I knew they recruited out of my undergraduate university, Santa Clara University. So I contacted my undergraduate university career center and asked for the recruiter contact information. I sent my resume to the recruiter and I got selected for a phone interview. After that, I was flown out to California for a second round interview. I ended up taking their offer to work as an Information Risk Management intern out of their Silicon Valley office.
So that is basically how I got my internship last summer. I started looking December and I got my offer in early March. To conclude, I did get a full-time offer from KPMG but I turned it down. Internships are a great way of finding out what you want to do and, conversely, what you do not want to do. In my case, the group I interned with was not going in the direction I was interested in. So I decided I wanted to try looking somewhere else. I hope my experience is helpful to some of you.
Next time, I'll write about my job search for those of you looking for full-time jobs after graduation.
Posted by choidh at March 31, 2006 04:36 PM
