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Looking
for jobs outside the box
July/August 2009
by Carole Bass '83, '97MSL
If
the scandals and the bailouts weren’t enough to keep graduating seniors away
from Wall Street, the job market was.
The
best-known path for job-seeking Yalies is to interview with the finance and
consulting firms that flock to campus each fall. But the number of offers in
those fields has dropped 35 percent since 2007, reports Philip Jones, director
of undergraduate career services.
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On-campus interviews yield employment for 20% of Yale seniors.
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Overall,
employers that conducted on-campus interviews made job offers at about 80
percent of last year’s rate, Jones says. That’s on top of a 15 percent decline
in the number of interviews themselves—all of which means this year’s crop of
grads had to be more creative in their job-hunting.
Even
in boom years, on-campus interviews yield employment for only 20 percent of
Yale seniors, Jones emphasizes. But through one route or another, jobs in
business and finance were the third most popular choice for Yale College
graduates in 2006 (the most recent year available), employing 18 percent of the
986 class members surveyed one year after graduation, according to the university’s
Office of Institutional Research.
In
tough years like this, that path gets narrower. But Jones thinks that’s not all
bad. "There are directions other than the traditional ones people think of,
which are Wall Street, the law, and medicine," he says. "There are other ways
to be happy in this world, and be useful.”
Among
students who did find jobs through on-campus interviews, there was a big jump
in what Jones calls "structured educational" employment. Teach for America, for
example—which hires new grads for two-year stints in troubled public
schools—accepted 45 Yalies, twice as many as in 2007.
At
the graduate school, employment statistics are hard to come by, says graduate
career services director Victoria Blodgett. But from a quick glance at a survey
taken in March when students submitted their dissertations, it appears that
about 10 percent had faculty positions. An undetermined additional number had
postdoctoral fellowships. But many colleges and universities were still in the
midst of making offers in March, Blodgett notes. Furthermore, about half of the
school’s graduates seek non-academic jobs.
Also
in March, the New York Times reported that the American Mathematical Society’s biggest
job list had shrunk 25 percent this year compared with the year before, and
that 15 percent fewer history departments were recruiting new professors.
Some
new PhDs are patching together opportunities—one-year teaching positions, for
example—instead of moving straight into faculty jobs that simply don’t exist.
"In the next 12 months," Blodgett points out, "it’s imperative that they
continue to move their scholarship forward—that they continue to publish,
continue to research, so that this year doesn’t appear to have been a waiting
period. They have to keep going.” 
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