CareerExploration – Page 3

Take Some Time This Summer for Self-Assessment Using SIGI3

Some students arrive at college already having a pretty clear idea of what career path they plan to pursue and the path winds up being fairly straight forward and linear. For the majority of students, however, that is not the case, and the path has many twists and turns. Students may take an amazing class and discover whole new career areas they had never even thought about. Others might land an internship thinking it would be a great fit, but discover that the day-to-day work just wasn’t quite as interesting as anticipated. Some students may simply find a particular path extremely hard to break into, so would like to widen the scope of careers they are considering to increase the number of possibilities available.

There are many reasons why people choose to assess their career options and the summer is an ideal time for self-assessment and exploring how your values, skills and interests relate to a variety of occupations. Luckily for Penn students, Career Services offers a great FREE tool to help you explore your options. SIGI3 (System of Integrated Guidance and Information) helps students create a career plan that’s right for them by integrating self-assessment with in-depth and updated career information that is easy to use and provides individuals with a realistic view of the best educational and career options for future success. SIGI3 helps each user examine key motivators and matches work-related values, interests, personality, and skills to educational and career pathways, and then helps individuals explore a range of options based on their personal choices.

Career Services has purchased a license for Penn students to use SIGI3 for free. Student can access it from the Digital Resources link on the Career Services home page. (Note you must use your PennKey to gain access.) Enjoy the exploration!

Embarrass Yourself This Summer

Natty Leach, Associate Director A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across Mike Boyd’s Youtube channel dedicated to learning new, often frivolous, skills. The first video I came across, for instance, focused on an MIT physicist’s peculiar ability to quickly make a dotted line across a chalk board.

For the chalk trick, it only takes Mike a few minutes; other videos chronicle upwards of 8 hours of attempts. Regardless of the task at hand, every video shows him starting from scratch with what some might consider embarrassing results. And that’s what I found most impressive about these videos—through every failure, no matter how public, he betters himself until reaching the goal in mind. So this summer, I recommend that you do something completely new and different, even if it feels embarrassing to try at first. Whether you’re busy at a new internship or just taking a break this summer, do something you’ve never done before, no matter how big or small, and relish in eventually conquering it. If you’re not as bold as Mike and would rather do some trial and error before hitting the big stage, here are a couple of projects that you can easily do, embarrassment-free, from the comfort of your couch: A small thing to easily familiarize yourself with this summer: Handshake – Career Services’ new job and internship platform. Mastering Handshake will only take you a couple of minutes. Check out our Handshake Hints on getting started. If there’s anything I can stress, it’s completing your profile and marking some career interests. Handshake’s homepage shows you opportunities that are molded around your interests so the more choose, the more you’ll see. A bigger project you could tackle: Anything on Lynda, a tutorial database that’s free to Penn students. Lynda.com Lynda has a ton great, skill-oriented tracks you can follow along with. Most videos are digestibility small (10-20 minutes) while full collections can total 40+ hours of hands-on training. Last year, I took a few courses on drawing, game design, and JavaScript.

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Advice for PhDs and Postdocs from Carpe Careers

By Dr. Joseph Barber

The Carpe Careers blog on the Inside Higher Ed website is written by PhD/postdoc career advisors from institutions across North America. The bite-sized advice offered is rich with steps you can take to make the most of your professional and career development. Here are just some highlights over the last few months:

Needed: Flexible Mentors in Science: Adriana Bankston provides advice for how research scientists can positively influence the personal and professional development of the trainees who work in their labs.
Immerse Yourself with Intention: Short, intense interactions with organizations where you might want to work can provide career insights, but how do you make the most of those experiences? Laura N. Schram shares four best practices.
Using Assessments for Career “Fit”: Stephanie K. Eberle outlines the misconceptions about assessments in career counseling and advises how to use them most effectively.
Your Ph.D. Experience Is Great Work Experience — Part 2: Attending to the impression you make in graduate school is a great investment in your long-term career, argues Briana Mohan.
Your Ph.D. Experience Is Great Work Experience — Part I: Contrary to popular and judgmental opinion, your doctoral experience is some of the best real-world working experience you can get, writes Briana Mohan.
Using Job Ads for Career Exploration: Reviewing advertisements of all sorts can help you identify appealing job types and sectors that you may never even have heard of, advises Derek Attig.
Seeking Grants: More than Money: Pursuing funding support as a graduate student or postdoc can help your career — and in more ways than one, writes Victoria McGovern.
The Menagerie of Potential Employers: It’s important to realize that employers see the world differently than you do and to understand their specific emotional states, advises Joseph Barber.
Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Mentor: Pallavi Eswara raises the most important ones — and also provides some answers.
Perfecting Your Panel Interview Game: Job interviews with groups of people are quite different than one-on-ones with individuals, and you never quite know what will happen. Saundra Loffredo gives some helpful advice.
Help Is Right at Hand: Never again after graduate school will you have access to so many free, high-quality career development services, writes Melissa Dalgleish, who advises how to make the most of what your campus offers.
Building Your Personal Brand: Just as corporations try to establish a memorable brand, Ph.D. students and postdocs seeking new opportunities should work to create a lasting impression, writes Gaia Vasiliver-Shamis.
Mastering the Art of Presenting: Being able to give an effective presentation is essential to your career success, writes Christine Kelly, who provides six pointers on how to do so.
Your Job Is Not You: How can you shift away from mind-sets that equate identity with academic work? And in doing so, can you relieve anxiety about exploring unfamiliar career pathways? Sarah Peterson provides some answers.
Why Career Self-Assessments Matter: Determining what your skills are, what you enjoy doing and what is important to you is fundamental to career development, writes Natalie Lundsteen.

Posts are published every Monday on the Carpe Careers blog, and so make the most of these career perspectives relevant to your career development, exploration, and job applications.

How to Navigate Professional Conferences

By: Fiona Tang, Graduate Assistant

It’s the time of the year again for professional conferences organized by different student groups. Selecting which conferences to attend and how to best maximize the value of each conference can be a challenge for students who are busy with school and recruiting.

Therefore, I will share some tips on how to successfully navigate various professional conferences organized by student groups.

Which conferences to attend?

Many conferences take an entire day, which is quite a time commitment. Therefore, carefully selecting which conferences to attend is important for your time management.

For freshmen and sophomores, conferences are some of the best boot camps to explore an industry and geographic location. If you are interested in learning about private equity and venture capital, then attending a private equity/venture capital conference is the best way to learn about the biggest funds, industry trends and network with potential future employers. If you are interested in an internship in China, then attending China Forum is the easiest way to connect with local employers and students. I would also recommend expanding your horizons by participating in conferences focused on industries you have not explored thus far – there are more job opportunities available beyond finance and consulting. Attending different conferences during freshman and sophomore years can potentially expand your career options.

For juniors and seniors, conferences can also be opportunities to learn about industries/geographic locations, but more importantly they are valuable for networking with future employers. By junior and senior year, it is helpful to have a sense of the industry/location that you would like to target. Given the busy schedules of recruiting and classes, being selective and targeted at which conferences to attend is important. Try your best to Identify you career interests first and attend relevant professional conferences is probably a better option than attending all of them.

How to maximize the value of the conference?

Being well-prepared in advance can save you time and maximize the value of the conference. Review the conference schedule prior to the event and identify specific workshops/forums that you would like to attend. Do your due diligence on the speakers/firms that you are interested in so that you can better understand the topics discussed and ask meaningful questions during the conference.

During the conference, network, network and network! Some students might believe attending conferences is just about listening to different talks. That might be true for freshmen and sophomores, it definitely should not be the case for juniors and seniors. Companies come to student organization conferences mostly for networking and recruiting purposes. It’s important to spend time networking after each talk and get contact information from the speakers, particularly for firms of great interest. Another way to get involved is participating in the conference planning team. For industries/geographic locations that you are interested in recruiting, getting involved in the conference planning team is a great opportunity for outreach and networking with different companies.

In conclusion, conferences are fun and great ways to network and learn about industries. Enjoy these experiences and make new friends while you are there!

Investment Banking vs Consulting – A Student Perspective

by Fiona Tang, WH MBA ’17 and Wharton Graduate Assistant

Investment Banking vs. Consulting – A Student Perspective
By: Fiona Tang

Investment banking and consulting are usually popular career choices after graduation because of their great training programs, brand names and wide range of exit opportunities. Having been fortunate enough to work at both McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, I would like to share some pros and cons of each industry from my perspective.

Compensation: Banking tends to be more lucrative

Base salaries are similar in banking and consulting, but the bonus varies significantly for each industry. In banking, the bonus received may be valued as much as 12 or 24 months of your base salary while in consulting the maximum bonus is probably 6 months of salary. There is generally a 20% – 40% pay difference between banking and consulting at all position levels. Exit opportunities are also more lucrative after banking positions compared to consulting roles. Private equity and investment management positions pay a lot more than strategy roles in big corporations. If compensation is an important role in your decision making, banking might be a better option.

Job Security: Consulting is more secure

Job security in consulting is much less cyclical than banking. Regardless of good economic times or bad economic times, consulting firms continue hiring and minimize layoffs of junior staff. Investment banks, on the other hand, layoff more workers and enact hiring freezes during financial downturns. For example, this summer after I left Goldman Sachs, the Hong Kong office laid off 20 analysts and associates because the market isn’t doing well now.

Work Lifestyle: Unpredictable hours vs. Traveling

If you are looking for a 40 hour per week job, neither consulting or banking is ideal for you. The hours are LONG, generally 70-100 hours per week depending on your project or deal. As you become more senior and gain more work experience, the hours can be shorter. But my manager at McKinsey and VP at Goldman both still send emails to their teams at 2am on occasion – the nature of the work illustrates banking and consulting will never be nine-to-five jobs.

The big difference is that consulting is intense during the week but in general doesn’t require you to work on the weekends. The hours are more predictable as you will be working on one specific project and it’s easier to manage and plan ahead. The downside to consulting is endless traveling from Monday to Thursday. Trust me, waking up at 5am to catch a 7am flight to the client site on Monday is not fun.

Banking requires much less travel at junior level. However, the hours are less predictable as you don’t know when a deal will intensify or a pitch suddenly becomes live. As an analyst, you will be staffed on multiple deals and it’s difficult to predict your work hours or make plans in advance. During a live deal, working on the weekends is considered pretty normal.

Daily Work: PowerPoint or Excel?

Both bankers and consultants spend the majority of their time on Excel and PowerPoint. The key difference in banking is a focus on finance specifically and financial modeling in general. Junior bankers devote their time to studying the value of a company and its capital structure; junior consultants think about the strategy of a company and its organizational structure.

The life of a consultant is interesting because of the broad range of projects managed by a range of different partners. Every project and every client is different and the learning curve is quite steep in the first couple of years. However, sometimes I do struggle with limited opportunities to put ideas into practice – like junior bankers who put together endless pitch books for M&A deals that never happen.

Junior bankers’ work in some way is more process-driven. During the first six months, you will generally have a steep learning curve. But afterwards, IPOs, pitch books and M&A transactions will have a standard process with a different twist for each deal. If you are passionate about finance, you might like it. Otherwise, the daily work can become a little repetitive. That being said, the training and deal exposure are definitely invaluable assets for your future recruiting.

In terms of work culture, banking tends to be more tough. Bankers are not bad people – the nature of the work can simply be grueling though. A banker is usually staffed with a couple of deals simultaneously and when things become more active, it’s difficult for him or her to be patient when a junior banker asks certain questions. You may feel “on edge” awaiting new work assignments that may come at any time which may result in having to pull an all-nighter again. Consultants are generally only staffed on one project at a time, which makes it a lot easier to manage the workload and plan ahead of time. Hence, in consulting, managers have more time to focus on individual team members’ development, team bonding events, etc.

Future Job Prospects:

Banking and consulting do have somewhat different exit opportunities and career trajectories. Most of my consulting friends shift to startups, private equity, corporate strategy, or technology after 2 years while my banking friends go to startups, private equity, investment management, technology or corporate M&A. There is definitely some overlap given that the skillsets from banking and consulting are somewhat similar with a different focus. Consulting provides more training on strategy and big-picture thinking, which companies with corporate strategy roles or private equity operation roles might find very attractive. On the other hand, banking provides robust financial training and most finance-related jobs such as private equity and investment management find banking analysts good hires.

When choosing between consulting and banking, I would encourage you to think about where you see yourself in 2 years. If you know that you want to be in the finance world and work for a big private equity / hedge fund, banking would generally provide a better foundation. If you would like a role as senior management of a Fortune 500 company or managing a startup, consulting might provide more fundamental training. However, I definitely see some consultants switch to finance and bankers switch to strategy. You are not restricted if you choose one option or the other. What I share above is merely general guidance on the skillsets you would gain after 2 years and what companies are looking for from ex-bankers and ex-consultants.

Banking and consulting both provide excellent training and you will be working with talented and driven individuals. Whatever you choose, you can have a great career and I hope this provides general insight for the lifestyle of banking compared to consulting.