FINALS…and Recruiting?

It’s finals time at the Tuck School of Business and everyone is hunkered down in their dorm rooms trying to decipher between a deferred tax asset and liability and seeking to understand how to properly hedge one’s stock portfolio. Three finals and two papers stand in my way before two weeks of lying on my parents’ sofa, watching terrible reality television and decompressing from thirteen weeks of intense study groups, quantitative courses and innumerable assignments to be turned into each class every day. However, after receiving an email from our career services office today, I realize my winter break plans might not be as relaxing as I once thought:
“Congratulations! You have been placed on the closed list for company X.”
Oh, right. Recruiting – the very thing I came to school to do. At Tuck, companies come on campus to interview potential interns immediately following winter break. In between getting ready for finals, students have been steadily dropping their resumes and cover letters to potential employers with the very hope of getting on a closed list. Luckily, all is not lost if a student doesn’t make a particular closed list. If recruiters want to come on campus at Tuck, they can choose half of the students they will interview (the closed list) and the other half can “bid” their way on to the interview schedule. Each student is given 1,000 points to bid on interview slots which are essentially auctioned off. This process acts as a way to level the playing field for career switchers and it is proven to work: a historically high percentage of internship offers actually go to students who use their bid points to land an interview!
Don’t get me wrong; I am absolutely thrilled to be placed on a closed list for company X, especially since this particular company is one of my top choices for a summer internship. Yet, reality has set in that I might spend more time winter break preparing fit interview questions and scouring the aisles of Target for marketing and packaging innovations to get ready for marketing cases. Moreover, as the rest of the closed lists come out, I will need to figure out on which companies I will need to bid. Since I just took my Decision Science final, maybe I should build a model and use the Risk Solver skills I developed this term to optimize my own bid strategy…

Julie L. Reimer, Forte Fellow
Class of 2012
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth