Room For Improvement

This semester, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Office of Career Services plans to host themed “Career Weeks” showcasing professional opportunities in seven diverse career fields, including education, media, and public service.  Neither financial services nor management consulting—both fields that draw Harvard graduates in disproportionately high numbers—is featured in OCS’s itinerary. Despite this noteworthy improvement in the breadth of it’s offerings, many Harvard students find that visits to OCS leave much to be desired. While it is great to see OCS taking concrete steps to meet student demand for resources in a greater variety of fields, we urge the office to consider expanding and restructuring its services in order to provide more meaningful career development opportunities to students.

That Harvard undergraduates flock in such huge numbers to careers in finance and consulting can be attributed, at least in part, to the aggressive recruiting that occurs on our campus each year. A student at a Harvard career fair is unlikely to find a large variety of job or internship opportunities outside of finance and consulting because banks and consulting firms, unlike lower-budget institutions like nonprofit organizations or small publications, have the financial resources to travel to college campuses and print promotional materials. We encourage OCS to devise a system by which we may circumvent this unfortunate reality and bring representatives from a greater variety of fields to campus. One way to accomplish this might be to afford travel allowances to nonprofits that have had successful interns or employees from Harvard in the past.

Given that careers in sectors like investment banking and consulting are no longer as readily available to Harvard graduates as they once were, it is all the more imperative that OCS work to provide students with more varied options.

OCS can also help students find their own professional opportunities in a variety of sectors by overhauling Crimson Careers, the office’s online job and internship database. Crimson Careers is cluttered and cumbersome, and its odd job groupings—Nonprofit & Government, Engineering & Computer Science, Harvard Centers and Departments, and On-Campus Interviews (tacitly understood as the hiring process for careers in finance and consulting)—exclude many professional fields and belie the fact that the United States has a thriving, diverse private sector. Fortunately, Crimson Careers already has an enormous variety of professional opportunities in many fields, and making these opportunities accessible to students should only be a matter of redesigning the site.

The most important measure that FAS should take to demystify the job search and effectively aid students in developing their careers is to provide meaningful and personalized career counseling. Currently, students’ experiences at OCS resemble students’ experiences with a college counselor at a large public high school. Appointments at OCS usually consist of rushed resume or cover letter reviews; rarely is a student allowed the opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with a counselor who specializes in his or her field of interest. Harvard, an expensive private institution often billed as one of the top universities in the world, should not be providing such unsatisfactory career counseling to its students, particularly to its undergraduates, who are currently navigating a highly uncertain and heterogeneous job market.

The Office of Career Services should offer students more than mock interviews and cursory resume reviews. It seems that Harvard students are so apt to enter careers in financial services and management consulting because they are offered little assistance and encouragement in pursuing less established and prestigious career paths. Ultimately, long-term career development would not only enable OCS to tailor students’ job searches to their interests and talents, but it would also diminish the power of the most visible employers to recruit students who would perform better in different sectors, both for themselves and for the public good.