Title: A Personal View

As a final-year Computer Science student at a university with a good name, I often get glossy brochures from large employers sent to me, trying to entice me into applying to work for them. Apparently, some of them gain access to student details through co-operating with the department (usually by making a donation), some of them simply walk in and read the paper class lists, and others just canvas all the pigeonholes. They often use the knowledge of previous graduates who work for them to improve their methods of reaching the students.

Students do not object to this unsolicited use of personal information, since it often saves them from having to bother to do a job hunt. After all, the final year of university is full enough already and job hunting takes time and effort; if employers are willing to send forms to you then why complain?

In practice, there is simply not enough time to peruse all the options that come your way anyway, and the amount of information overload is bewildering. There are so many deadlines in the first term of the final year that you have to drop some of them before you can even decide what you want to go for, and so many of them advertise meetings in pubs that it makes me wonder if I'm the only non-pub-frequenting student in the UK.

The thing that amazes me most is the number of these companies who, in all their glossy recruitment advertising, don't actually tell you what the company DOES. Some of them do, but a lot of them just say "we need excellent Computer Science graduates like yourself and we offer stimulating challenges." and seem to assume that such people couldn't care less what they'll actually be working on. Would you apply for a job if you didn't know what the company did? They could be nuclear bomb designers for all I know! Perhaps they expect us to know already or to find out, but doesn't that defeat the whole object of the glossy brochures in the first place? I am very apprehensive about applying to a company who thinks I don't care what I work on, or that I'll want to climb to the top of some "ladder" just because it's there.

As it happens, many of them are financial companies (like investment banks) and management consultants. It seems that a lot of Computer Science graduates go into the financial sector, perhaps because of the high salaries. I'm only a student and I don't know everything, but I get the impression that working in investment banking would be like being a cog in a huge machine whose only purpose is to shovel money around, and although you may be earning a lot of money you won't be doing anything that's really worthwhile (not even in your free time, since many of these careers leave you with very little free time). And I get the impression that signing up for a management consultancy is like saying "Send me wherever you wish; I don't care what my work is".

By the time you read this, ACCU should have an opt-in mailing list for advertising positions. This has the potential to be a much higher quality source than the brochure mailshots and I look forward to seeing nice sensible postings on it.

Meanwhile, a lot depends on examination results, especially if you want to go into research. Unfortunately, university examinations do not measure people as objectively as you might think. The people who get the top results are the people who did the best that year, regardless of how they measure up to the students of other years. Thus someone with a top grade in 1997 may be of a different standard than someone with a top grade in 1998. Examiners have to do this, since there is no other known method of objectively assessing the difficulty of the questions for that year, but it does rely on the assumption that the "average" ability of students is relatively constant.

In national examinations, such as GCSEs and A-levels, it is easier to go by the average performance of the candidates, since there are very many of them. However, in a university examination, there are not nearly so many candidates and so, statistically, there is a much higher probability of one particular year not putting in so much effort, or putting in a lot of effort. Effectively, your getting a good result depends as much on your peers doing badly as on yourself doing well. This saddens me; I want to see all of my peers do well, not to be in fierce competition with them!

Hi-tech jobs usually require a good second-class degree, and funding for PhD research usually requires a first. (It is ironic that it takes less effort to get into a high-paying job than low-paying research, but I prefer the research because it offers more chance of producing something worthwhile.) In some years, large numbers of graduates opt for the jobs, and therefore do not exert themselves as much as if they were aiming for research. This makes it easier for those who do want to do research to get a good result in the competition. There is no knowing whether this year will be such a year; it depends mainly on how attractive the jobs seem to be in any particular year. But I have overheard conversations of my peers about PhD research, so things are looking grim.

What all of this seems to add up to is that where you can end up depends a lot more on random factors out of your control (or that you'd rather not control!) than you might think. I don't know if a solution is humanly possible, but perhaps this situation ought to be better known than it is.