Is incompetence how you would describe your career center folk?

Ya, they are good for general help, but nothing specific to banking. I think schools who want to increase their IB placement would do better if they just outsourced resume and interview help to people more qualified. I have found the to be most helpful in identifying alums who I can contact and just maintaining the database. As far as working for the career center goes, 50K sure isn't a lot, but they are usually unionized and have very little worry about losing their jobs. Kind of like professors who could make tons more in the private workforce, but chose to stay in academia. To some people the security is worth it I suppose.

Almost as incompetent as BAs.

That's why I never went to my school's career center. Alumni are always best anyway.

It's a good first step if you're totally clueless, after that, you have to quickly let go of em.

Agreed, much more useful for general info to start off with, as well as for international students with visa inquiries and such.

Pretty much clueless. I remember going in asking for help breaking into S&T and they thought I was talking about some sales associate job.

Then again my business school hasn't had the resources to develop a career center independent from normal undergraduate recruiting. The undergraduate b-schools with their own career centers tend to be pretty solid.

My career centers is actually pretty helpful, which is probably because about 50% of our graduates go in to investment banking.

econ

I would go as far to say that it's a problem with universities as a whole. Your professors are brilliant people, however, they have spent their life doing academic research, not working in industry. Therefore, they teach you plenty of things they deem as important, even if employers don't. On the flip side, there are many things employers would like you to learn, that professors won't teach you (either because they don't know it, or because it doesn't really interest them). In my opinion, universities are largely inefficient organizations, especially when it comes to practicality (both in terms of teaching you practical information, as well as helping you learn skills/tools that will be practical in your life).

In that case, you've missed the point of universities. They're not designed to teach you much, if anything at all. They're designed to teach you how to think.

Yeah, they are useless.

I had very similar feelings about my career centre, which can be a topic of semi-casual humor if need be.

First I go in to make an "appointment" with an advisor regarding basic advice etc (I'm a 1st year looking to get into PWM, etc...). They quickly tell me that they are fully booked to help 3/4th year students who clearly didn't have their shit together early in their career, hence their dependance on the career centre for "career counselling". Subsequently, they tell me to come to a "summer job search for 1st year students" session, where they teach you how to get a job cleaning floors this summer, I kindly didn't show up. I'm semi-passively making as much as a full-time minimum wage kid would be making during a summer of stupidity.

Then they tell me that I'll get completely rejected at info sessions by bankers who will call the school to talk about how they don't want 1st years showing up at sessions. I ended up showing up at a couple of sessions, and they seem to be annoyed by my presence...strange. Too bad, I'm showing up to as many more as I can find, I could use the contacts.

"are working at some stupid career center for a mere 50k or less" -- I love it.