BY: MIREN VIJAYARANJAN

It’s time. You’ve been putting it off all year but you can’t ignore it anymore, recruiting season is finally here. By now, you’ve certainly heard hundreds of different things from countless people, surely leaving you extremely confused as to where to start.

Contrary to popular belief, the first issue at hand isn’t deciding where you want to work, it’s deciding what you want to learn and what experiences you want to gain. With so many different career paths available to you, it’s important to take the time to explore each possibility. Admittedly, no one in first year should have a definitive career path in mind, but here at Western, you have the resources to make the best possible guess. After doing some preliminary research of your own, narrow down some careers that you think you’d be interested in and begin coffee chatting with upper-year students who have completed internships in those very roles. The goal here is to gain insight on what they do and to gauge whether or not you’d truly be interested in pursuing such a career. 

Here are some possible career paths to get you started:

• Management consulting 
• Tech Consulting 
• Project Management
• Finance (Investment Banking, Private Equity, Venture Capital, etc)
• Marketing
• Accounting

Now for those of you who’ve done the research and are still confused about what you want to do, it’s time to reiterate the MOST important advice for any first year. It doesn’t matter what you do in your first year so long as you do SOMETHING and demonstrate some degree of experiential learning and interest in a particular field. To gain more insights into recruiting, I asked Robert Di Marco and Judith Chen to tell me more about their experiences in startups and corporate roles and this is what they had to say.

Robert – CIBC Finance Intern

During the Summer of 2020, I was grateful to have worked at CIBC as a finance summer intern. CIBC was very welcoming in maintaining their commitment to interns during the pandemic, and made huge efforts to ensure that the internship program was memorable for all students in the virtual environment. CIBC is well-known for hosting their annual Summer Leadership Academy for all 500 of their summer interns, and it was one of the highlights of my summer. The program is highlighted by competitions in which interns are placed in teams to solve CIBC’s largest and most pressing problems, where they are directly mentored and guided by senior executives at the bank to develop their solutions. After being announced

as one of the winning student teams, we were able to connect directly to the CEO to present our findings.CIBC actively draws from the projects from the Summer Leadership Academy to implement bank-wide. Within finance specifically, my manager and team was very encouraging and played an instrumental role in connecting me with dozens of employees from all corners of the bank to have virtual coffee chats to grow my network. They truly value a willingness to learn and grow new skills among interns, and support those who are interested in this growth mindset. Even in the virtual environment, everyone I interacted with or reached out to was very welcoming and always made it their goal to try and help out in any way they could. I believe that the diversity of opportunities within the bank and the culture among employees makes it an amazing place to work.

Pros of corporate:

• Reputation 
• Can specialize in specific skills
• Can rely on specialist teams to help solve problems
• Compensation
• Career development events/workshops

Cons of corporate:

• Low authority
• Less “meaningful” work

Judith – Swiggle Intern

Last summer, I had the opportunity to work as an intern at Swiggle, a B2B SaaS startup in Toronto that serves e-commerce sellers. I really enjoyed my internship experience because I had the opportunity to take on different roles, make an impact through my work, and collaborate closely with

leadership. Throughout the internship, I was able to work with my team in many different functions, including digital marketing, sales strategy, and operations. While I was able to wear many different hats, there were still many projects that I completed with nearly full autonomy, including the development of a new sales playbook. Also, Swiggle is supported by the MaRS Discovery District, so I was also able to leverage the expertise of industry professionals who provided feedback and guidance with my team’s projects. I think working at a startup would be a great fit for anyone looking for a fast-paced work environment with lots of opportunities to learn through hands-on experience.

Pros of startups:

• Flexible work hours
• Opportunities to learn and gain skill
• More responsibility
• Can try things outside your given “title”
• Space to innovate

Cons of startups:

• Heavy workload
• Have to solve problems on your own
• Less job stability

Now that you have a better idea of what some of the options are, you may be wondering how you should approach recruiting. Let’s get you started with a collection of useful job boards to kickstart your job search. You can surf these sites for hundreds of job postings for both startup and corporate roles.

• AngelList
• MaRS
• OneEleven
• Prospect Job Board
• LinkedIn

So you’ve found a firm that you’d like to work at but you want to connect with an existing employee and learn more about it, what should you do?

1. Use LinkedIn to find an employee (preferably recruiters or employees currently in the role)
2. Connect with them and ask if you can have a quick chat
3. If they are unresponsive, try other employees or use resources such as Snov.io to source their email address instead

Good Luck!