Check out the text below to see my thoughts on the issue.
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SM wrote:
Hi Marquis!
Once again, I am emailing you because I could really use your advice. I have two weeks left in my internship, and I talked with someone yesterday from HR about how the full-time offer process would go. He told me that they hope that I will have the offer in my hand on my last day. However, he said that if I was considering a different location, I should tell them soon rather than later so they can take that into account when making the offer.
[The company] has 4 location options, [one of which is Austin (but the current internship isn’t in the Austin office)]. Well, my top preference would be Austin. […] I really like my team here, and they really like me […],so I am not sure how to tell them I would want to go to Austin if I go a full time offer.
Additionally, do you think I should tell them that I want to interview with other companies this fall before I decide? Eventually, I am going to have to tell HR to get an extension on the offer, but I haven’t actually told my team this yet.
Let me know what you think. As always, I really appreciate all the advice you have given me.
SM
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My response:
Hey SM,
I’m glad to hear that you’ve almost reached the finish line in your internship. I swear that you’ve put together a hell of a professional profile over the past couple of summers. […] Baller!
You’ve asked a couple of great questions to get resolved as you move toward the end of your internship. The last thing you would want to do is to go into that stage without having thought through things first. Here is my quick read on them:
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- Should you tell the company that you want to interview before accepting their offer?
My quick answer here is….hell to the NO. Hahaha! Although there are a few issues that you’d want to consider here, I thought that I should start with the headline for my response. I really don’t think that it would be good for you to show your cards at all until you have an offer in hand.
Think of it this way… Imagine if you were a company that had invested in bringing on a college kid for the summer and had your team give him/her as good of an internship experience as possible. During that time, you’ve invested time and resources in developing that kid and making him/her feel welcome as a way to convince him/her to want to come back for full-time. At the same time, you’ve been paying attention to him/her performance and have decided that he/she is a great fit for your company. Then, he/she tells you “Hey, I like y’all, but I want to have a chance to see if I like someone else better before I lock it in with you”…not a good thing to have said to you, right?
That’s essentially what you’re describing with your question and this is the sort of thing that makes companies reconsider giving out a full-time offer. Your goal here is to get that offer and then have that in hand to give yourself option value going into campus recruiting. As such, you need to make those folks think that you’re so jazzed about the company that you’ll accept an offer damn near immediately if one comes your way. Once you get the offer, you can ask for however many extensions as you’ll need, but, until then, don’t show your cards at all.
- Which location should you choose for a full-time offer?
A few criteria that you should think about are:
- How long will you work before you apply to business school? –> If you’re thinking that you’ll go to business school after 2-3 years of working, you would probably want to optimize more on the kinds of work experiences that you can get and how those experiences will look on your applications. Of course, you wouldn’t want to choose a location that you would absolutely hate, but living in an OK place instead of one that you love isn’t a bad trade-off if it will help you to have a stronger MBA application.
- Which city do you WANT to live in and which cities could you tolerate for a certain amount of time? –> Of the 4 locations, it sounds like you really want to be in Austin, so that’s good to know. You can use this as an anchor for how to judge the other locations. The bigger part of this is about where you might be able to live without wanting to pull your hair out. This doesn’t mean that these places would be the most exciting or fun in the world. Rather, it’s more about finding a place where you can possibly build a life while getting some good work experiences.
- Which location would give you the best opportunity to gain experiences that will look good to MBA programs? –> Ending up in a great location is nice, but, if you end up with a do-nothing job where you won’t learn anything, won’t do you much good in terms of getting into B-school. When it comes to creating a strong app, you need to have good things to talk about and the best place for that is in the workplace. You might not be able to determine what your role would be in each location, but maybe there’s a way for you to make an educated guess based on the nature of work done in each spot.
- Would the positions available in the other 3 cities be as good as the one that you’d have waiting for you if you went back to [location of internship]? –> Hopefully, the answer to this question is a big YES, but, if it is a NO, then you’d have a big issue to work through. The other questions above would come in to play here, but you’d ultimately have to prioritize for yourself.
- How long will you work before you apply to business school? –> If you’re thinking that you’ll go to business school after 2-3 years of working, you would probably want to optimize more on the kinds of work experiences that you can get and how those experiences will look on your applications. Of course, you wouldn’t want to choose a location that you would absolutely hate, but living in an OK place instead of one that you love isn’t a bad trade-off if it will help you to have a stronger MBA application.
I hope that the above information is helpful as you consider your options.
Take care and have a great weekend.
Marquis
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