College students need to worry about more than their grades

 Chuck Harris’s skills are obvious. They’re even measured. Per ESPN, he put up 13.4 points, 3.4 assists, and 3.2 rebounds last season for Southern Methodist University’s Division I men’s basketball team. But Harris can’t just let his game speak for itself.

“Some doors you might not be able to get to by yourself,” Harris said. “First impressions are everything, in the basketball world, especially.”

At team dinners with donors and during short post-game scout interactions, the senior point guard is seeking both to maximize his chances of playing basketball at the next level and to make sure he has options outside the game. College students all over the country, with degrees and skills in all kinds of industries, are doing much the same: networking, hedging their career bets with personal relationships.

And the entry-level job market is supposed to be active. Robert Half reports that 65% of all companies plan on hiring for entry-level positions in the first half of 2024, and that number holds steady in the financial industries. But while some students are living large on the company recruiters’ dime, some are struggling to land an interview, submitting dozens of applications and not receiving even one call back. In response, colleges around the country have adopted recruitment and networking programs, whose success rates often ultimately depend on these institutions’ own networks.    

“Networking is not optional anymore for our students,” Brandy Dalton said from a satellite building just across the highway from Southern Methodist University’s main campus.

Brandy Dalton is the senior director of BBA and MS career coaching in the Career Management Center at SMU’s Cox School of Business, where she helps connect students with prospective employers through networking fairs, resume books, and all things career.

Dalton isn’t saying that networking is now a required piece of the Cox curriculum. She’s saying that if a student wants a job, they’re going to have to know somebody.

“Submitting an application is not enough at all,” Dalton said. “I mean, you’re not going to get responses, you’re not going to get any kind of outreach.”

While connections have always been one (important) aspect of hiring in the finance, accounting, and consulting industries, they weren’t always the end-all, be-all. Dalton said that change happened relatively recently.

“Post-COVID we’ve just seen a different kind of beast when it comes to the job market,” she said.

Like the pandemic that caused them, the challenges facing today’s college graduates are wholly unique. Nobody’s parents can relate to competing with a remote job market.

“Think about Dallas,” Dalton said. “Dallas-based professionals aren’t just competing with Dallas-based professionals and graduates. They’re competing with people from all over the states looking for remote opportunity.”

To curb the effects of these new challenges, the Cox CMC began offering more in-person networking events each semester. According to Dalton, in the last school year before the pandemic, the center hosted 24 networking events. So far this

year, that number is 35. And the number of total attending students has increased by over 100%, from 931 in 2019-2020 to 2037 this year.

Jacob Butcher, though, is something of an exception. The SMU senior with a real estate finance job lined up never participated much in direct networking.

“I’ve been to one or two of the real estate roundtables,” Butcher said. “But for me, that’s just not really my vibe.”

Roundtables are like speed dating. A group of students and representatives from prospective employers all take turns meeting each other.

“They’ll have multiple companies there that set up tables, and you’re welcome to go up and talk to them,” Butcher said. “They’ll have some of the associates. Sometimes they’ll have some of the big dogs there, but usually not.”

From there, it’s up to students to introduce themselves and maintain their new network.

“Then you can exchange your resume and exchange phone numbers,” Butcher said. “And then you’ll email them for a coffee later, and then you’ll see if they have a job opening.”

Butcher didn’t land his first “big boy” internship at Rosewood Property Company through this kind of direct networking, though. He landed it through a CMC resume book. 

Dalton explained that a resume book is when a company comes to the CMC specifically wanting SMU candidates, and the center collects a book of resumes from qualified students.

“That role, I didn’t know anybody actually,” Butcher said. “I did kind of just get lucky. It was probably my GPA that got me chosen out of the resume book.”

Likely, it was a combination of Butcher’s GPA and SMU’s own name and network that did it.

“I don’t think I get the job at Rosewood if I don’t have SMU, and then I don’t get my fulltime job if I didn’t have Rosewood,” Butcher said.

Along the path to full time financial employment often lie coffee chats, where prospective employees learn about older professionals’ career and maybe even find advocates. But Butcher was surprised when, on completing one internship in the finance world, he was already on the mentoring end of this process.

“There was a guy who had reached out to me to do a copy check because he was going to apply for the position that I had,” Butcher said. “He wanted to know how I liked it.”

Butcher and the fellow student were both 20-year-old college juniors at the time. But this kind of early networking is becoming common. Dalton explained that college students need to start finding connections almost immediately to lay the groundwork for a successful career in the financial and accounting industries.

“After that first summer, you’re pretty much applying and interviewing and hoping to land internships all three summers,” Dalton said. 

And this kind of inter-SMU advocacy is common, too.

“We have a lot of fantastic alumni and great corporate partnerships,” Dalton said.

But not every school has the alumni network that SMU does, and the career management outcomes reflect that. At the University of Texas at Dallas, 76% of reporting undergraduate accounting students last year landed a job within three months of graduation. Compare that to the 100% desired outcome rate reported by Cox accounting, and it’s clear that on-campus career centers aren’t a silver bullet. The success of these programs ultimately relies on the university’s own network.

“SMU is actually one of the wealthiest schools in the country,” Chuck Harris said. “When I’m in a room and a lot of important people come in, I’m going to take advantage of that.”