| Full-time undergraduate program |
This aspect of the USC undergraduate experience probably has more to do with
individual major than any other. For those in the social sciences and humanities,
there are many obstacles to finding gainful employment (assuming graduate school
is not in immediate plans). The School of Engineering and the Marshall School of
Business generally place very well at high quality firms. The USC Career Planning
and Placement Center offers a range of services such as internship week, which
enable students to explore various industries before looking for employment. It
also offers a database of 5,000 USC alumni that students can contact (3 per
month) and ask questions to.
USC does not place very well at top consulting firms such as McKinsey, Bain, and
the Boston Consulting Group. In fact, we have not sent an undergraduate to
McKinsey or BCG (though we had an intern at BCG this past summer) for a few
years. However, we do send a few to Bain usually (1 for 2004, 3 for 2003, 5 for
2001). Investment banks do recruit on campus and we have a few people going to
bulge bracket firms this year (at least 2 to Goldman Sachs for 2003 and possibly
even more for 2004). Bain recently started to recruit on campus for internships
and so we have solidified our position as a top source in the L.A. area for the
firm (with UCLA and the Claremont Schools being the others).
Although some top firms do not have an on-campus presence, we have sent a few
people over the years to firms like McKinsey and BCG, but it is never through any
sort of official on-campus recruiting process. Assuming one is not interested in
strategy consulting or investment banking, however, USC can offer its students a
wide variety of lucrative positions with companies (often within those companies
that have a strong Trojan presence). Because USC's Leventhal School of Accounting
is one of the best of its kind in the nation, we regularly send a large
contingent to the Big 4 each year. As for law schools, we only send a handful of
our graduates (though this has been changing rapidly over the past half decade
and continues to change) to the top ten law schools.
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