Nearly half of all UChicago undergraduates who participated in the Jeff Metcalf Internship Program this year have reported receiving return offers from their employers for either an internship next summer or a full-time job after graduation.
Fourth-year economics major Diana Wang was one of them. Interested in consulting since early in her undergraduate career, Wang said her nine-week Metcalf internship at L.E.K. Consulting resulted in a full-time job offer in the firm’s Chicago office, starting in fall 2016.
During her summer internship, Wang researched and analyzed data, tested hypotheses, and helped produce a presentation for an L.E.K. client—work that she found she loved. “The internship provided an opportunity to see what being a consultant is like in the real world,” she said. “It confirmed that this is the right career for me.”
Many of this year’s Metcalf interns found success in consulting, finance and other business fields, with 150 students receiving full-time offers from firms such as Accenture, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and many others. A majority of rising fourth-years in the selective UChicago Careers in Business pre-professional program received return offers, including Wang.
“These numbers reflect just how highly our Metcalf organizations think of UChicago students,” said Meredith Daw, assistant vice president and executive director of Career Advancement. “Our students are adding value and making significant contributions at their internship sites—the credit goes to them for their performance on the job.”
In addition to the notable successes of UCIB students, employers in many industries consistently seek and hire UChicago students with a wide range of academic interests.
“Employers in the financial and consulting sectors often have more resources and a very structured hiring process that allows them to make return offers to their interns a year in advance,” Daw said. “That’s not always possible for organizations in other industries, but our employer retention rate speaks volumes about how much they value our students. Year after year, employers in arts and culture, education, healthcare, journalism, law, nonprofits, you name it, come back to hire UChicago students through the Metcalf Program.”
Administered by Career Advancement, the Metcalf program offers a system of more than 1,300 paid, substantive internships, available exclusively to UChicago undergraduates during the summer and the academic year. The career program is part of the University’s broader efforts to increase employer engagement and build the University’s standing domestically and internationally with leading organizations in a wide variety of industries.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
