Today we're talking to Meredith, who specializes in business at the Career Center.

Transcript:

Stephanie You're listening to Gear Up season two, where we bring you the Duke Career Center's own career advisers to talk about a variety of summer internship experiences. My name's Stephanie. And today we're talking to Meredith, who specializes in business at the Career Center.

Meredith Sure, hi, I'm Meredith McCook. I'm one of the undergraduate counselors within the Career Center. I work specifically with all undergraduate students, no matter of industry interest or major or anything like that. But I also serve more of a specialty area within business. So business overall finance consulting and marketing more specifically. But what that really means is that I'm in touch with a lot of employers in that range as well as student clubs and organizations, but still cross-training for all industries and such.

Stephanie Yeah. So I guess kind of focusing on business for the most definitely feel free to bring in some, you know, other tips or experiences that you have.

Stephanie How early do you usually start advising students to start looking for summer opportunities for the upcoming summer?

Meredith So really, it depends on the industry that you're looking at to a certain degree and sometimes even more specifically the company that you're looking at. So if we're talking business at large and kind of marketing as well, you're really looking at potentially with the full year of depending on when a company is hiring.

Meredith So there will be some maybe companies that are more we'll know larger companies hiring a couple hundred to thousands of summer interns that may recruit earlier because that process takes a little bit longer and they need the time and they need to go to those career fairs, things like that, because they have a lot of roles to fill. So you might see some of them early in the year in the fall, while then also you're going to see a lot of companies hiring in the spring, but they may have a few, fewer openings. So maybe it is a small local company that has the room for two interns total or one that has maybe 20. At that point, they're not necessarily going to do the national recruiting that a really large company would do, but they're still amazing opportunities. It's just the recruitment looks different. So for my students who are looking at businesses overall, so business operations kind of is corporate finance, marketing, advertising, different things like that really can run the range of the year. So having a strategy and knowing how you're wanting to go about it, who you kind of want to work with is really helpful in that point. Or just even being open to discovering who you want to work with throughout that process. Whereas with consulting students and those interested primarily in consulting, much of the recruitment is going to be in the fall. There are a few boutique firms that will still hire in the spring, but the majority of recruitment is going to be around like late, early to mid in the fall for that internship recruiting process again for these companies that are hiring. And what I would call a cohort model, they're bringing on a lot of interns at the exact same time nationally. Whereas those that are a little bit smaller don't have as many openings. You might see a little bit later in the fall, too, also in the spring semester and then for finance. And it's much more year specific. So with the other industries, I wouldn't really put it into a year category. But for finance, we're really seeing our sophomore year, spring semester and summer before junior year is the primary recruiting for internships.

Meredith That is for the junior summer internship. And so within finance, that junior summer internship. And when I say finance, let me clarify that, I mean much more specifically investment banking and sales and trading.

Meredith And those two divisions are the ones that