There Are Cool Job Options After College That Aren’t Consulting (Or Finance)
5 Recent Graduates Pursuing Varied Entry-Level Opportunities
As on-campus recruiting season rolls around, college students everywhere are flocking to apply for jobs in a sector they hadn’t heard of a few years ago. Especially for a generation intrigued by optionality, the structured recruiting process and fabled perks of consulting are very alluring.
These are indeed great benefits, and there exists a whole web of other career options that are exciting and fulfilling and may be a better fit depending on what kind of lifestyle you’re looking for after college. I don’t mean to suggest that other sectors are any less competitive or demanding than consulting and finance — recruiting in other sectors can be difficult to navigate for different reasons — rather, I just want to remind you that you have options.
In the first piece of this series, I interview a few of my colleagues from college who have embarked on careers in fields other than consulting and finance after graduating.
Alex Hem, Operations Executive Analyst at AeroFarms (Newark, NJ)
“I graduated in May of 2016 planning to take a month or two for myself before beginning the job search. I was lucky enough to land a summer opportunity teaching English in China, an excellent international experience that taught me as much about patience and improvisation as it did about China and teaching. Afterwards, I returned to my parents’ home and began to hunt for jobs in earnest.
After a few months of job-searching and networking (these things take time!) I landed a role at AeroFarms, an indoor farming start-up that aims to revolutionize agriculture by growing sustainable, healthy food in cities across the U.S. As an operations analyst, I was brought on to support the COO, which includes everything from developing inventory tracking systems in the farm to working on board-level reports to providing administrative support. All in all, I’ve loved having the opportunity to learn how a young business operates while simultaneously contributing to an important mission — improving food access and reducing the environmental impact of agriculture.”
Avni Nahar, Policy Analyst at NYC Mayor’s Office (New York, NY)
“By the time I was a senior in college, I had done a few internships at nonprofit organizations that focused on serving a variety of vulnerable populations. After I graduated in 2017, I was interested in learning about policy development and service delivery from the perspective of government instead. The best opportunity I found to do this was through a nine-month fellowship in the New York City government, known as the Urban Fellows program.
The program placed me at the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, which functions as an anti-poverty R&D team of sorts. The office works with a variety of city agencies to develop innovative, evidence-informed programs that will help lift people out of poverty and then contracts with external evaluators to determine which initiatives should be scaled up (and which should be discontinued). During my time there, I worked on a variety of programs and evaluations that focused on workforce development, juvenile justice, and maternal health, and learned a lot about the ways in which government and nonprofits can and should collaborate to support low-income individuals.
After my fellowship concluded, I accepted an offer to serve as a Policy Analyst for the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, where my portfolio includes homelessness, child welfare, juvenile justice, seniors, and domestic and gender-based violence. This new role has provided me a slightly different lens into government work, and will be a helpful perspective as I think about my next steps.”
Dylan Schaffer, Planning & External Affairs Manager at Ascend Public Charter Schools (Brooklyn, NY)
“I started working at Ascend Public Charter Schools’ network office as planning and external affairs associate a few weeks after graduating college in 2016. Ascend’s K-12 charter schools offer a rich, liberal education to students from the economically disadvantaged communities of Central Brooklyn, and works more broadly towards scalable solution to inequality in American education. During my job search senior year, this position was the first one I was offered, and I took it not because I had necessarily planned to work in the education sector or to relocate to New York City, but because I felt aligned with and passionate about the organization’s mission, and because the day-to-day work sounded interesting and varied enough to keep me engaged and to teach me important skills I’d need for the future.
My work — everything from strategic growth planning and research; applying to open new schools or renew existing ones; branding and marketing; and managing relationships with community partners, board members, and elected officials — is indeed varied and definitely challenging at times, but it has given me the chance to understand the inner workings of a large nonprofit organization.
After a year, I took on the role of manager and special assistant to Ascend’s president: I’ve enjoyed having ownership over large-scale projects and getting the chance to work closely with the organization’s top leaders. I’m eager to continue applying the skills I’ve learned so far to furthering Ascend’s mission and ultimately apply and adapt what I’ve learned here to my future work in other sectors.”
Kathryn Kearney, Robert Gardner Postgraduate Fellow (Auckland, New Zealand)
“Prior to my graduation in 2017, I was unsure of what professional path to take so I decided to apply for yearlong fellowship opportunities that would allow me to explore some of my personal interests. Fortunately, I was awarded Harvard University’s Robert Gardner Postgraduate Travel Fellowship to study Māori and Pasifika dance in Auckland, New Zealand. With an open-ended grant that covered my travel and living expenses for one year of personal exploration, I was able to — for the first time in my young life — do exactly what I wanted without constraints. I spent my year dancing for a contemporary company, training hundreds of hours in a variety of genres, making lifelong friends, trying my hand at nannying and tutoring, and discovering that I have a passion and gift for working with children.
Although my fellowship formally concluded last month, I’ve decided to stay in Auckland and continue my work at a local primary school. What was supposed to be something of a gap year has accidentally become “Real Life.” I know that I will inevitably return to the States and am fairly certain I’ll go back to school for a graduate degree, but as I’ve finally realized since graduating, there’s no rush. I love the independence and excitement of making my way in a place so different from where I’ve grown up and grown too comfortable, and I believe this year has been imperative for my personal growth.”
Ratna Gill, Senior Associate for Government Partnerships at Aangan Trust (Mumbai, India)
As for me, after graduating in 2016, I started an internship (and later a full-time job) with Living Cities, a philanthropy that works to create jobs for people of color in U.S. cities. My role mostly involved looking at the work we were doing in a particular city, analyzing the factors that made it successful or not, and seeing what lessons we learned that could apply to other cities. I then wrote up “real-time research” so that cities could learn from one another on promising practices to reduce racial wealth gaps.
I really enjoyed that the work pushed me as a writer (since I hadn’t done this type of writing before) and the office culture’s focus on flexibility allowed me to take care of my physical and mental wellness while making the most of living in New York. I also got to learn a lot about racial equity and inclusion, issues I have been interested in for a long time but never quite knew how to engage with. Working for an organization that was also figuring out the answer to this question gave me an opportunity to start to grapple with what a racially inclusive approach to development work looks like, in theory and in practice.
After two years at Living Cities, I took a few months off and then moved to Mumbai because I was looking for an opportunity that would give me more on-the-ground exposure to challenges faced by children and women. I’m now a senior associate at Aangan Trust, a nonprofit working on reducing child harm in the forms of trafficking, labor, early marriage, and violence. My job is to meet with local government officials and advocate that they collaborate with us on the community-based child protection programs that we design and train on-the-ground volunteers for. I love having the opportunity to work so closely with local leaders, and the chance to directly interface with the communities we care about. As someone who is interested in pursuing a career in public policy in the long term, I wouldn’t trade this sort of up-close look into the nitty-gritty of local governance and how decisions that impact people are made for anything.
As you can see, there are lots of exciting, challenging, fulfilling career options available in a wide array of spaces straight out of college. I know you know this, but when hordes of your classmates all seem to be focused on recruiting for a few fields, it can be easy to forget. Just remember: there is a lot of good work to be done in the world that’s worth getting excited about.