Student calls out Career Services

The Union has resolved to put pressure on Imperial College to Improve Career Services. The decision came after Eric Suen, a third year medic raised the issue during Council last Tuesday.

Suen acted on results from a survey he carried out with help from Officer Trustees and Union staff, which revealed an average satisfaction score of 3.6/5. The survey (which admittedly had a small sample of only 48 participants) revealed that users found booking appointments with Career Services very hard (3.9/5) with 30% of participants having tried and failed to secure appointments.

Career Services employ 17 members of staff of which only six are career consultants. The equivalent services at LSE employ twice as many career consultants, an additional six CV consultants and eight freelance career consultant presumably for seasonal spikes. Considering that Imperial College has 17,000 students while LSE has approximately 9,000 students, the quality and quantity of career advice at Imperial is significantly lower.

This might come as a surprise to many, as Imperial is renowned for producing highly employable graduates. According to The Times and the Sunday Times’ Good University Guide 2016, Imperial is ranked 2nd in terms of graduate prospects. This discrepancy is thought to be due to the support departments give out themselves though.

Weekly Career talks are for example routine practice in the departments of Earth Science and Engineering. Similarly the Science Communication MS offered by the Department of Co-curricular Studies is well known for facilitating the networking of students with industry giants through seminars and internships.

Other departments are less lucky. Industry oriented career events in the department of Life Sciences are notoriously few and far between with student looking to follow ‘greener’ paths such as Ecology often left to their own devices.Those coming from such less career-oriented departments face a mediocre service.

The testimonials from Suen’s survey don’t paint a flattering picture “They always say “very good” to CVs and rarely give any good advice. In terms of job search they say “just google it” – Anonymous “The most useful thing would have been to know the deadlines. Goldman Sachs’ graduate deadlines were in August! I have been applying this October when really I should have been applying the latest September. Wish someone had told me especially since I had been to a careers appointment”. Perhaps College will take a page out of the book of Simone Buitendijk (Vice Provost for Education). Buitendijk has been working on redefining the teaching strategy and one of the key elements of her plan has been identifying pockets of good practice within departments and trying to apply them across the College.

When asked about the student dissatisfaction surrounding Imperial’s Career Services, a College spokesperson told felix that “support is available to students throughout the year, including during the summer vacation, and we encourage students to begin thinking about their career plans as early as possible”

Furthermore we were informed that when demand is high Imperial also recruits freelance consultants, while the Services also offer a full range of group support through daily workshops, seminars, interactive sessions streamed workshops through Panopto. Whether these services are insufficient or simply inadequately advertised will be debated during the long lobbying process that is certain to come in the following months.