A Tough Year to Graduate

Summer internships are wrapping up, and rising seniors1 are heading back to school for their final year. All signs point to it being a particularly tough time to graduate with a degree in tech – not too dissimilar to when I graduated after the first dot-com bubble twenty years ago. The year before I graduated, employers were aggressively hunting candidates – organizing Our Lady Peace concerts and flying candidates around the country for interviews. The year I graduated, this completely evaporated, and the onus was on graduating students to find their own opportunities. Having lived through this, I figured I would offer a bit of unsolicited advice to this year's cohort.

First and foremost, before you complete your internship, make sure you connect with the folks you have met and worked with. The network of engineers you encountered during your internship is invaluable and will come in handy when looking for work after graduation and beyond. Many companies (including Google) ask for references from current employees before granting onsite interviews, and you never really know where your coworkers will end up. But even if you don't need the references, a robust professional network will help you learn about opportunities and allow you to get the 'inside scoop' on a role before interviewing.??

Next, if you are lucky enough to get a return offer from your current employer, I strongly encourage you to accept it. Even if the team you have been interning with isn't the perfect match to meet your long-term career goals, a job in hand will make your life much easier. Looking for a job in a bear market is a full-time job -- and you still have a lot of school left. If by some miracle, your dream job materializes over the next year, you can always change your mind. But if not, you will save yourself from a lot of stress2.

If you don't have an offer in hand, it is at least worth considering grad school. I am generally not a huge advocate of pursuing a Master's or Ph.D. in tech for folks that eventually want to work in industry3. In good years, the financial return on investment is just not there. A grad degree may give you a starting level bump, but you likely will never make up for the lost wages during the extra years you spend in school. However, in a bear market, the opportunity costs are different. When the choice is between a job at a company you aren't invested in (or worse – no job), then grad school becomes much more appealing. And when the economy does recover, employers are much more likely to hire a fresh grad student than a seat warmer from a second or third-tier company.??

Last but not least, it is not a bad time to consider creating your own startup . Again, it is all about opportunity cost. Your startup is likely to fail (they almost always do), but the cost of that failure is significantly lower in a bear market – so the downside risk is considerably less than in a good job market. The market will eventually recover, and the startups being created now will be in the best position to capitalize on the upswing. So, if you can't find a job the traditional way, you can create your own.

I'll be honest, you picked a pretty lousy year to graduate. But you are not alone. Practically every engineer I know thinks they started in tech five to ten years too late (that is true for engineers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond). It is always easier to look back at what could have been than to see through the fog at what is next. The cool part of working in tech is that there is always something new – and when there isn't, you can create it yourself!

Be Happy!

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Footnotes:

1. I have to admit I still find terms like "rising senior" extremely confusing. I grew up in Canada, where we simply referred to the year (i.e. we would say I am going into my 4th year of undergrad). I find the American system pretty darn confusing — why would you need to spend three years in school before being called a "junior"?
2. As a general rule, you don’t want to be looking for a job when you need a job.? The desperation comes through in the interviews, and your potential employers can and will capitalize on it (either intentionally or unintentionally).? When you have a job, you enter the relationship from a position of strength and don’t need to rush.? It becomes your decision – not the potential employer’s.
3. I probably need to elaborate on my grad school statement a bit – at least for my father, who asks me whenever I see him when I will head back to school to do my Master's. Opportunity cost aside, I think there can be many good personal reasons to pursue grad school. Particularly for international students or folks who completed an undergrad in non-tech fields. I gave grad school serious consideration when I was in my last year of undergrad - and still may go back someday.

Please note that the opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.