Students who want to get into a good college often start planning in middle school, sometimes even in elementary school. By high school, on top of their grades, they’re working on activities, competitions, and essays, because everyone knows test scores alone are nowhere near enough to get into a good university.
Then they get to college, and for many of them the job search suddenly looks very simple: I studied this major, I learned these skills, jobs need these skills, so I should be able to find work when I graduate.
I understand the thinking. After more than a decade of preparation, you’ve finally made it, and you want to focus on classes and enjoy college life for a while. But finishing your degree on time doesn’t automatically produce a matching job. The job search needs planning too, and some industries start screening candidates far earlier than you’d expect.
Skills and the Whole Package Do Different Jobs
Students have asked me things like this:
“Tian, I know Python, I know SQL, I can build models. It should be pretty easy for me to find a job, right?”
Other students figure that after two hundred LeetCode problems, with most of the mediums down, landing a software development engineer (SDE) job shouldn’t be hard.
That preparation matters, of course. If you’re missing the skills a role requires, you may not get past the screen or the technical round. But you also need to show how you’d use those skills, how you think when you hit a problem, whether you can work with colleagues, and whether you can explain something clearly and keep it moving.
It’s a lot like college admissions, where schools look at more than your test scores and review each application holistically. Skills help you meet the basic requirements for a job. The whole package affects whether you get picked from the pool of candidates who all meet them. By the whole package I mean communication, teamwork, the ability to learn, judgment, and whatever else the particular role calls for.
The analogy doesn’t mean that once your technical skills clear a certain line, you never have to improve them. In highly technical roles, candidates keep getting compared on depth. But for a lot of students, the more common problem is fixating on whether they know a particular tool, and not putting the same effort into explaining their projects, understanding the business, and answering questions.
The people a company hires have to work together and solve problems together. An interviewer is judging whether you can do the job, and also thinking about what it would be like to talk to you and work with you. Knowing more tools won’t make that part better on its own.
Why Good Students Get Stuck Preparing
Over time I realized that for a lot of strong international students, the trouble comes precisely from being too good at being a student.
In school, the teacher hands out the test and tells you what’s on it, and shortly after you finish, you get a grade. You study today, take the exam in a few days, and see your score a few days after that. That loop keeps rewarding you for studying more. Feedback in a job search comes much more slowly. You might send twenty applications and hear nothing, message fifty people and get a handful of replies, practice interviewing for a month and still have no offer to show for it yet.
When people are anxious, they fall back on whatever is most familiar and gives the fastest feedback: more classes, more practice problems, more resume edits. The preparation keeps getting more complete, while the number of things they send out into the world stays the same.
GPA and studying still matter. What you need to figure out is whether you really lack knowledge right now, or whether you’re using studying to avoid a job search that has no answer key. One simple check: Did anything I did this week have a chance of bringing back feedback from outside? Sending an application for a role you qualify for, asking someone in the field to weigh in on your direction, or doing a mock interview will each tell you what to change next. Revising your own documents over and over can easily keep you stuck with the judgment you started with.
School trains you to do well on the test you’re given. A job search also expects you to find the opportunity yourself when nobody is handing out tests, and to get yourself a seat in the exam room.
Don’t Rule Yourself Out Before You Know the Job
Another group of students has the opposite problem. Instead of thinking “I know these things, so I’ll definitely find something,” they think “I don’t know those things yet, so I’m definitely not qualified.”
One student wanted to apply for a non-quant risk role at an investment bank, but believed she had to be able to build complex models and write a lot of code before she was even qualified to apply. The first thing I had her work out was which kind of risk she meant, what the target team actually does, and which requirements on the posting are real must-haves.
Some non-quant roles don’t need anything close to the technical depth she imagined. They care much more about whether she can understand a problem, learn new material, and state her judgment clearly. If you never check any of this, it’s easy to go the wrong way, spending dozens of hours on a skill you’ll never use and then putting off your application because you “haven’t finished learning it yet.”
The same goes for business analyst and data analyst roles. Two jobs with the same title at different companies can involve very different work. Some lean toward statistics and experiments, some toward business analysis, and some need much stronger programming. A general question like “How good does my Python need to be for a DA job?” usually won’t get you an answer that helps.
I often say, thinking it doesn’t make it so. Here it’s a reminder to take your assumptions out into the world and check them. Read the job descriptions, talk to people who actually do the work, find out what the interviews test, and then decide what to shore up. Don’t decide you’re ready because you know a few tools, and don’t stay too intimidated to apply because someone told you it’s hard.
Why I Keep Telling You to Start Early
Recruiting and school run on different calendars. Material you won’t learn until junior or senior year may already come up when you apply for internships. And by the time you’re getting ready to graduate, some full-time positions have already been filled from the previous year’s interns.
Take investment banking recruiting, which I know well. A lot of the preparation starts freshman year: learning about the divisions, going to events, meeting alumni, learning the basics, and then applying for the internships that come later. The real advantage of starting early is having time to see your gaps and close them on recruiting’s real schedule. Being able to send a few more applications is the smaller part of it.
Wait until you’re about to graduate to start learning about an industry, and you have to deal with everything at once: understanding the roles, building skills, preparing materials, meeting people, practicing interviews. When everything is urgent, it’s easy to spend your time on what’s most visible instead of what matters most, like rewording the same line on your resume again and again.
Starting early is king. Take that seriously, because some opportunities are tied to your class year and to specific timing. Once you’ve missed them, working harder won’t bring those options back on its own.
If you’re already a junior or in grad school, don’t read this as “it’s too late.” You need to figure out more quickly which opportunities are still open to you and spend your time preparing for those. What the early starters built up, you can make up for with more targeted research and by asking for help. As for programs that have already closed, stop building your plans around them.
Your School Gives You Resources. Using Them Is Up to You.
There’s one more misconception I want to clear up now: don’t think of a top school, or another degree, as a guarantee that your job search will sort itself out.
Schools really do differ in their recruiting resources. Alumni, clubs, and relationships with employers can all affect which opportunities you can reach. But having access to resources is not the same as knowing how to use them. A US master’s can be a fresh start. You’ll still need to know your target role, the recruiting timeline, and what you have to prepare.
I sometimes say that the students who can find a job would find a way at a different school, too. What I’m stressing there is initiative. I’m not saying the school makes no difference. If you compare schools only by ranking, without looking into how each one would help you get closer to the job you want, you may not discover the problem until after you’ve enrolled.
The hand you’re dealt will never matter as much as how you play it. The chapters that follow are about how to put your coursework, experience, school resources, and time to real use in your job search.