Roads less traveled

Last fall, Sanwaree Sethi, now a senior at Amherst College in Massachusetts, was certain she'd go to work for a investment bank or consulting firm after graduating. For Ms. Sethi, a softspoken woman who was born in India and has lived most of her life in

Washington, D.C., corporate recruiting seemed an easy, laid-out course. It was one that other family members had already taken.

Now it looks as if she may be teaching – in Mongolia.

A tight job market contributed to her 180-degree switch. But as discouraging as all the dead-end interviews and unanswered job inquiries had become, Sethi now says the rejections may turn out to be a positive development.

"I don't think I really wanted to go into consulting or i-banking," she says, noting that her sister is unhappy at her banking job. The prospect of moving abroad, however, fills her with excitement. So much so that even if the school where she's applied turns her down, she may still go to Mongolia to look for work. "I don't know where [the idea of Mongolia] came from," she laughs.

Sethi's case may be an extreme example of a shifting job-hunt focus, but the pattern it sets is not too far from the picture now unfolding for many college seniors, career counselors, and employers.

No one doubts that the job market is tight. Nearly one-third of this spring's 1.2 million college graduates may still be looking for work in 2003, estimates Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Employers say they have decreased their entry-level hiring of new college grads by 20 percent, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reports. And college career centers say on-campus recruiting is down 20 to 40 percent.

Jobs are still out there, of course. More government jobs can be found. A few fields, such as healthcare and education, are hiring more than ever. And even firms laying off employees tend to take on some college graduates, so as not to bypass a generation of workers.

But as many of the traditional routes close off, experts say, students need to be creative and proactive – and may need to alter their original visions of the position, salary, or even career. Such shifts may be difficult, but career counselors say today's cloudy job climate has a silver lining for college grads.

"I think some of them are looking a bit more creatively than they have in the past," says Donna Harner, co- director of the Duke University Career Center in Durham, N.C. "Sometimes what they're really called to do or are passionate about they don't pursue, because they don't think it's an appropriate choice.... Now, some students are choosing things they might have wanted to do in the first place."

Take Albert Norweb, a senior at Duke. Like Sethi, Mr. Norweb hoped to sign on with a big consulting firm last fall. He landed a number of interviews, he says, but the competition was steep, and he ended the corporate recruiting season last fall without an offer.

Norweb is still looking at the corporate world, with the idea that he'll go to business school in a few years, but now he's focused on smaller, more personal companies whose values are more in line with his own. His first choice: a small streaming-media company that develops educational software.

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