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The
number of University students pursuing careers in startups and
technical services has increased substantially in the past decade, while
participation in finance and insurance jobs has remained relatively steady, according to the Office of Career ...
News
The number of University students pursuing careers in startups
and technical services has increased substantially in the past decade,
while participation in finance and insurance jobs has remained
relatively steady, according to the Office of Career Services.
The Professional, Scientific and Technical Services
industry has seen a 200 percent increase in alumni employees. For the
Classes of 2006 and 2010, this sector hired between 7 and 9 percent of
the graduating class. This number jumped to between 12 and 14 percent
for the Classes of 2011 and 2014.
Meanwhile, finance and insurance employment rates have
fluctuated only between 11.5 and 12.9 percent in the past five years.
Between 9 and 15 percent of the Classes of 2006 through 2014 have chosen
to work in these industries, according to data from the post-graduation
career plans survey from the University’s Office of Career Services.
The timeframe for the post-graduation career plans survey
was changed from three months to six months, beginning with the Class of
2011. In the same year, the Office of Career Services began using the
North American Industry Classification System as well as the Hoover’s
Business Database for the survey.
Director of External Relations and Operations Evangeline
Kubu said that while there are students interested in finance and
consulting, they are certainly not representative of the majority of
University students.
“The financial services industry has been recruiting at
Princeton for decades, and they have a long, established history here,”
Kubu said. “So they tend to have very visible hiring processes in place,
and sometimes, that may be driving the perception that most students
are going into finance.”
Pulin Sanghvi, executive director of Career Services, said
that one trend that is emerging amongst the career choices of graduating
classes is the popularity of technological startups and
entrepreneurship in general. He added that companies in the
Professional, Scientific and Technical Services industry are much more
able to create attractive opportunities for recent college graduates and
to give them meaningful work to do.
“I think [the increase in popularity of startups and tech
companies] is because that sector of the economy has become structurally
larger than any time in history,” he said. “There is innovation that is
happening now in so many different areas that that part of the economy
keeps regenerating itself.”
Sanghvi said that startups are an extremely popular career
choice because they allow students to graduate college and take on
positions of significant responsibility very early.
“Our alumni serve as powerful role models as students look
to them as examples of what non-traditional paths can look like over
time,” he added.
Entrepreneurship professor Derek Lidow ’73 noted that
increased media attention is another reason for the popularity of
startups.
“The media makes some successful entrepreneurs into
sensations – they promote how much money is created by those
entrepreneurs – so those are certainly things that attract students and
many others into wanting to be entrepreneurs,” he said, noting the
media-generated profile is unrealistic because most successful
entrepreneurs are not high tech billionaires.
All other industry sectors employed less than 5 percent of the graduating class.
“What we are experiencing anecdotally and what we expect to
see happening as the economy continues to evolve is that our students
will aggregate less,” Sanghvi said. “What will happen instead is that
they will spread out across a much, much broader number of companies,
industries, functional roles.”
He added that despite the increasing popularity of the
startup environment, there would always be a lot of interest in
opportunities that have been traditional paths for University students
because some of those platforms help students in learning skills.
Shafin Fattah ’15, an economics major now employed in the
investment banking division of Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., said he
first tried his hand in the financial industry through an internship
during his junior summer. He explained that he wanted to see whether he
liked the work and whether what he had heard about the industry was
true.
“I don’t know where the future would take me,” Fattah said.
“It’s just the first few months at work – you don’t know how the rest
of your life will pan out – but yeah, I wouldn’t mind staying in the
financial world.”
Fattah noted that there was a strong negative stereotype about people in the financial industry.
“A lot of people are thinking, like, you know, people who
are going into finance are doing it for money or something,” he said.
“You know there’s a very black and white picture portrayed by popular
culture … which shows that it’s a really glamorous world and everything.
That’s not really true.”
Markus Brunnermeier, director of the Bendheim Center for
Finance, said that the glamour factor is rapidly shifting to tech firms
like Google and Apple.
“Mark Zuckerberg and other tech gurus, and not bankers, are
the heroes of young people these days,” he said. “Tech firms are
changing our world, but they also need to solid finance knowledge to be
successful enterprises.”
Brunnermeier added that many interesting new developments
at the intersection between finance and technology make the financial
industry difficult to predict, and also have important implications for
financial regulations and monetary policy.
Brunnermeier said that the interest in the Program in
Finance has remained relatively stable over the past few years, though
the global financial crisis in the late 2000s caused a slight increase
in the numbers. He attributed the uptick to curiosity in what had caused
the Great Recession.
According to Melanie Heaney-Scott, Academic Administrator
for the Undergraduate Program in Finance, 82 students in the Class of
2015 received the finance certificate, while the Classes of 2016 and
2017 currently have 109 and 91 students enrolled in the program,
respectively.
According to statistics from the post-graduation survey for
students enrolled in the program in finance, 59.6 percent students
pursued careers in the financial industry while 7 percent went on to
further their education.
Lidow said his classes in entrepreneurship and design have
always been very popular with students across majors. He added that
student interest in these classes is growing beyond their capacity,
leading to additional sections of classes like EGR 392: Creativity,
Innovation, and Design.
Lidow said it is much harder now for a University graduate
to feel like they can have a positive impact on a large organization
because large institutions have become complacent and risk-averse.
“Large organizations build forces within them to resist
change,” he said. “You know, Princeton is a place with a lot of
ambitious students, a lot of talented students, a lot of students with
tremendous capabilities. And how frustrating is it to go in and spend 40
to 50 years doing something that’s really not using all your talents?”
He added that using best practices, a Princeton students’
chance of starting an enterprise that has a positive impact on the world
can be beyond even 50-50, though this is unlikely in fields like
technology which attract a large number of startups.
“If you approach a startup using best practices, it is
probably a less risky way to ultimately lead a high impact organization
than rising through ranks of a huge corporation where your chances are
measured in one in a thousand,” he said.
Sanghvi noted that students who choose certain industries
immediately after graduation are not signaling that they are going to
continue to work in the same place forever.
“We do not see students that are saying, you know, I’m
joining a certain opportunity and I know that I’m going to retire in
that opportunity,” he said. “What we see instead are students that are
thinking of this two- or four-year experience as a building block
towards their longer term identity.”
Sanghvi explained that students are also using their
experience at the University as a laboratory to answer questions about
themselves and to test different parts of themselves out. He said that
the students are becoming increasingly mindful and intentional about how
they can use different parts of their social, extracurricular,
internship and academic experiences to shape themselves.
Lidow said that, at least in the United States, a typical
person has a 50-50 chance of being an entrepreneur within their working
career, which is often beyond their control.
“Throughout your career you will be faced with decisions on
whether or not the place you work is the best place for you to practice
your skills and for you to create positive benefits for you, your
family and the world,” he said.
Sanghvi said that the entire model in Career Services is
shifting towards personalization and towards helping students figure out
their unique passions, interests and identity.
“I think the big story of this generation is that they are
no longer really falling into categories as much as they are planning
their unique paths that are defined by what they really care about,” he
said.
Politics major Harsan Sidhu ’15 began working at Uber Technologies in San Francisco after working in consulting.
“I really like the [startup] culture. I like waking up
everyday and solving interesting problems,” he said. “And when I go to
work, I know that what I’m doing is having an impact on real people. You
know, I’m not building some like isolated process.”
Sidhu added that consulting was too rigid for him.
“It’s too suit and tie,” he said. “Like, you can’t call
your manager ‘dude’. Like that’s very bad. Or ‘bro’. I called my manager
‘bro’ one time and he stopped me. I like tech — it’s more relaxed.”
Zach Horton ’15, a philosophy major currently employed in
the Investment Banking division of Rothschild North America Inc., said
that he joined the financial services industry because it was the
optimal field to learn business in the least amount of time.
Horton is a former member of the Editorial Board of The Daily Princetonian.
“I wanted to find another opportunity to learn, this time
in the workforce,” he said of his choice of industry. “I figured that
the field of finance, in particular, presented a unique learning
opportunity because it’s incredibly fast-paced.”
He added that even though the working hours are long and
demanding, they are very rewarding in gaining good amounts of valuable
experience.
Horton noted that studying liberal arts was very helpful
because it teaches students how to live, how to think and how to
maintain sanity.
“Sometimes in the ‘real world’, you’ll have to do some
mind-numbingly dull tasks,” he said. “But studying the liberal arts
instills in you a way of thinking that helps you get through the moments
of toil, enabling you to see the bigger picture and understand ultimate
ends.”
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