I applied for a bunch of jobs my senior year, I got rejection letters from all of them and, as was customary with MIT seniors, I taped them to my dorm room door. I got into grad school, so it was ok, but years later I’m wondering: how did those 8 companies know to reject me? I mean, an MIT physics major with good grades is a good thing to have, right? At the time, we all just took it for granted that we’d get tons of rejections, but in retrospect I wonder if those companies were being a little silly to just summarily throw out the resumes of so many MIT students. (I can’t take it personally since it was my resume they were rejecting–it never got to the interview stage.) I wonder who they hired instead?
Who were the 8 companies, and when did you apply for these jobs?
Which year did you graduate? It might be an aggregated rather than idiosyncratic shock, so don't be so sad.
more important is why you assume companies "summarily" trashed MIT resumes to make a point. kind of arrogant.
My guess would be that they had a lot of MIT physics majors with good grades (or equivalent). It's expensive to interview a lot of people, so they interview a smaller number, and hope they get someone good in that lot. If they don't, they keep going.
They were satisficing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing – not optimising.
Thanks all for the comments. In answer to Anonymous #1, I can't remember now, but they were various industrial companies, places like RCA, TRW, etc. I sent off to the places that said they were interviewing physicists.
I think Jeremy is probably right that they had a lot of applicants (especially considering that lots of people like me were applying for several jobs!) and from there perhaps chose somewhat randomly (or not based on grades, maybe based on other things such as lab experience or summer internships or whatever). I guess my point was that, in the context of MIT interviewing, they had lots of options so they could pick a few (just as our Ph.D. program is pretty arbitrary in picking a few out of our dozens of highly qualified applicants). But, looking at it from the outside, there aren't so many MIT physics grads out there–we were probably all pretty qualified for these jobs. (In answer to Anonymous #2, I wasn't saying that they threw out our resumes "to make a point"; it was just interesting that they threw these out at all.)
In any case, it worked out fine for me and I have no complaints. In fact, I didn't even have complaints at the time: based on everyone else's experiences, it seemed perfectly natural for me to have a perfect 8-for-8 record of rejections. It's only looking back at this, as an employer, that I'm struck by the fact that we weren't actually surprised by this, that even as MIT grads we thought it was perfectly normal that companies wouldn't want to interview us.
I'm a clueless academic too, but I think that people that have already done internships or have some other personal connection have the inside track on these types of jobs.
My guess would also be that very few companies hire BS's in Physics; they'd either hire engineering BS holders, or Ph.D.'s in Physics. If you asked some of the people you're still in touch with, you might find out that Physics is a 'go to grad school' degree.
I had a rejection from a government research organisation that was advertising for graduates. They offered to discuss my rejection, so I did, apparently it was excellent but they had so many PhD applicants they didn't interview anyone else. Nice for them as they only need to pay graduate rates.
My guess is that most companies look at top ranked MIT physics undergrad majors as people not likely to stick around with the company for the long term. They probably have aspirations to go one eventually to graduate school.
Why interview and hire someone who after one year of working is sending out applications to grad school