Pick Me

Pete Idziak’s drive is considerable and sustained. So says his cover letter to McKinsey & Company. “My drive is considerable and sustained,” he writes. “As a swimmer, for many years I practiced 25 hours per week for a 20-second race.” Will he bring that same commitment to McKinsey & Company? Yes he will. “I will bring that same commitment to McKinsey & Company,” the letter confirms.

It is not really fair to judge someone by their cover letters. No one writes good cover letters. They are a strange feature of the modern corporate mating ritual, wherein a very simple communication—“I need a job. You have jobs available. I would like one of those jobs.”—gets bloated by ridiculous formalism into a page-long ordeal that makes each applicant sound like an insane sycophantic freak with a bizarre, fetish-like interest in whatever departments are hiring. Any and all life experiences must be grotesquely contorted to demonstrate an abundance of some personality trait crucial in the business world. Which is how Pete B. Idziak ’02 ended up passing off his ability to move quickly from one end of a pool to another as a skill that would help him be a better Business Analyst for McKinsey & Company.

Achieving the requisite cover letter tone may have actually been easier for Pete than it is for most. In searching for a Harvard Recruiting Everyman, we may have missed the mark by a bit. He exhibits none of the hesitation which accompanies many forays into the world of financial services. He looks forward to interviews. “Why not apply to them all?” he asks.

A good question, in these times, when the first recruiting meeting of the season opened with Judy Murray, director of the Office of Career Services, announcing that “this is the worst job market in years.” Why not apply everywhere possible? Especially if you actually like business. “I just have an affinity for business,” Pete says. “I read the [Wall Street] Journal, the Economist. If I didn’t go here I would have been a finance major at the University of Texas.”

But a chance encounter with an assistant swimming coach (Idziak was a three-time All-American swimmer at Euless Trinity High School in Bedford, TX) during an unplanned visit to the Harvard campus eventually led Idziak to pick, somewhat reluctantly, Cold, Distant Ivy League College over Appealing Fun State University. The distance between Bedford and Cambridge felt even longer when he quit the swimming team after only three weeks. “I got depressed,” he said. “In high school I was always ‘the swimmer,’ and I kind of lost my identity. I didn’t know anyone, and the one thing I did know, swimming, wasn’t there anymore. I was a stranger in a strange land.”

Idziak, a government major and Sigma Chi brother, has never completely shaken that feeling. He took a semester off to go to school at the University of New South Wales and work for I.B.M. in the Olympic Village during the Sydney games. “Going abroad was the best thing I ever did here,” he says, a statement that’s telling even if it is a bit of a non sequitor. Harvard’s lack of a practical business curriculum has made his time here something of a stalling period. Idziak probably would have recruited right out of high school if he could have. “I would enjoy [business] classes more than a class on Charlemagne and the Birth of Medieval Civ., but I know that I will get that business education in a job,” he says. “My mom says the only thing I’m learning how do to at college is think!”

He hasn’t spent all his time thinking. His cover letter tells it best: “As you will see, my GPA is solid but not exceptional.” Why not? “I viewed my time at Harvard as an opportunity for self-examination and discovery. For example, I spent a junior semester studying abroad in Australia to experience another culture and its ideologies, giving me a broader concept of international relations. Also, these past two semesters I have spent as Vice President of my Fraternity. It is an office that has required at times upwards of 40 hours of attention, but has honed my team and leadership skills.”

Time will tell whether pointing out what Idziak considers his weakest selling point, his grades, was a wise job-hunting strategy. Certainly the other elements of his résumé are very impressive. He comes across as a man who really, really likes efficiency, especially efficiency that can be expressed in percentages. The summer after his freshman year he worked at a Texas law firm and “Eliminated 30% of office paper by linking incoming facsimiles electronically to office intranet.” Junior year: “Implemented a multi-media marketing campaign [for a computer-training company in Texas] that increased student enrollment by over 300%.” About the only resume item not accompanied with a percentage is his address.

Pete is ready to meet the recruiting beast head on. His McKinsey application has already been sent. Many others will soon follow. He is also applying to the University of Texas law school and considering other options, including joining the Marines (he’s a conservative who liked international relations partly because “it’s the last bastion of Republicanism at this school”). He is actually more worried about his grades than about interviews. “I’ve done well in interviews in the past,” he says. “I tend to connect well with people.”

In the race for plum I-banking and consulting jobs, Pete is probably one of the favorites. His résumé is formidable. He seems genuinely interested in finance. And—we cannot emphasize this enough—he likes doing interviews. He is primed. He is ready.

His drive is considerable, and it is sustained.

Pamela Peng ‘02
HOUSE: Pforzheimer
CONCENTRATION: Economics
HOMETOWN: Brookline, MA
POST-GRADUATION INTERESTS: Investment banking, consulting, CIA
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Founded the Organization of Asian American Sisters (OASIS)

Pamela Peng ‘02 remembers what career week was like last year. The companies at the Career Fair passed out freebies to any student with remote interest in their firm. Internet start-ups distributed bouncy balls and T-shirts bearing their soon-to-be-forgotten logos. This year, the Office of Career Services (OCS), which runs on-campus recruiting, recieved around twenty cancellations for the career forum. Peng returned to Pfoho with a bag full of cheap pens.

At the first recruiting information session, OCS officials informed a somber senior crowd the job market is the bleakest they have seen in the past sixteen years. Even recruiters do not gloss over the fact that this will be a fiercely competitive year. OCS’s Judy Murray believes Harvard to be in a less precarious situation than most. At least companies are still knocking at the door, although they have less to offer and less with which to entice seniors. This is discouraging, but Peng remains confident that her years of hard work will pay off.

Peng seems as relaxed as a senior who is only taking three classes should. She sleeps in late, enjoys a nice lunch hour, and has been freeriding off her friends’ various social organizations. By taking five classes each semester for the past three years she has already completed the requirements for her economics concentration. Peng is now finishing up her cores and taking some courses related to East Asia. And yet the sense of calm is purely a façade. Peng is so engrossed with applying for jobs that she is forced to invest more time on packaging herself than on studying advanced Chinese. As most seniors going through the recruiting process would agree, an A on their transcript will not matter a few months down the line as much as gainful employment will.

Peng typically spends three to five hours a day preparing, organizing, and contacting company representatives. Coming into this semester, she knew that recruiting would be a serious time commitment. What she did not realize is that she must literally structure her life around recruiting until she gets an offer.

As to competition with fellow seniors, Peng says, “there is more a sense of commiseration than of competition.” Yet the soft spoken Brookline native certainly has fire in her belly. She speaks with authority when discussing her experience and capability and she is positive that she is qualified for all the positions for which she is applying.

Peng’s resume is colored with four years of term-time work at a Boston law firm and summer jobs at an Internet start-up and Monitor Consulting, respectively. Last summer Peng had to choose between satisfying an innate desire to study in China and possibly solidifying her post-graduate plans. The prospect of interning at a firm that could offer her a full-time position at the end of the summer was appealing. A full-time offer would save her from the hectic months of recruiting.

But Beijing won out. Although she is now trapped in “recruiting hell,” she does not regret her decision. In fact, the summer strengthened her interest in East Asia and made her more determined than ever to be recruited by a firm with a presence in that region. Her preference for East Asia is based on her desire to be close to family and her boyfriend, stationed with the US Army in South Korea.

With this in mind, Peng has already dropped résumés with three different companies that combined have over twenty offices in Asia. Peng decided that it would be wiser to send résumés toall the firms where she would ever even consider working. She did not want to limit her search at the outset and then be left without so much as a single offer. “I’m not kidding myself,” she says. “I know my outlook is pessimistic, but it is mirrored by a lot of seniors.”

Peng’s organizational skills are mindblowing. She has read books on recruiting, practiced answering interview questions and made connections at most of the information sessions she has attended. When she returns home after these sessions, she completes her recruiting homework for the day. On the backs of each of the business cards she collected, Peng jots down notes about her contacts, their conversation, and whether she should follow up with them via e-mail.

Peng even researches future employers before attending their information sessions. People are key, particularly in a field such as I-banking. “If you can’t stand to be around your co-workers for however many hours a week, and I really don’t want to think about how long that is,” says Peng, “you are going to be miserable.” Right now, Peng is focusing on people, location and job stability in deciding what companies would suit her interests and tastes best. She professes that she still needs to work on her interview skills, but during an hour-long interview all her answers seem to have been visualized in outline form. She structures sentences with supporting evidence.

Last week, Peng had her first interview of the year. Since it was for the CIA, she decided that she really had no way of knowing just what they would ask her. Peng is applying for an economist position, which would include researching black markets, money laundering and weapons exchange. “The job seems very Hollywood,” she admits. “You don’t go into Ec 10 thinking that you’d be able to do such compelling work.” The only drawback to the government job, aside from the considerably lower salary in comparison to what investment banks offer, is that it is based in Washington DC, far from her boyfriend in South Korea.

But for all seniors, there is the “what if.” Peng is casually looking at other options and creating back-up plans. Her parents have reassured her that she is welcome back home, an option that is both comforting and scary. Peng would love to study abroad again or attend cooking school, but these options are expensive. She would most like to be able to support herself and save some money. For now, Peng can rely solely on her credentials and luck while she waits for interviews. “It’s only going to get more stressful,” she says.