BY MARION MESSMER '13
This drop in Mount Holyoke’s ranking might come down to workforce preparation. It seems that a lot of effort goes into fellowship applications — which is great and meant I had a funded master’s at Cambridge as a “fallback” when I couldn’t get a job in the US before my visa ran out — but not that much into career preparation. The career center was not that great when I was there, to put it mildly, and given that Mount Holyoke rightly prides itself on the fact of admitting lots of nontraditional and first-generation college students, it needs to emphasize this area of post-college preparation a lot more.
It seems that out of members of my graduating class, 2013, the few people who are doing well have either only recently gotten into their fields, after extensive networking of their own, or were already well connected when they left due to family or prep school. It seems that if that doesn’t apply to you, you’re on your own.