Thinking about a career change or want to accelerate your current career? The Rice Business Career Development Office (CDO) will give you momentum, with top-quality personal guidance and carefully developed contacts with key employers and alumni.
Rice CDO offers students more time and more opportunities
Thanks to Rice Business’ small, selective student body, the CDO is able to meet students more frequently than teams at a number of other top schools. Each full-time Rice Business student, in fact, enjoys an average of over five personalized advising appointments, compared with two appointments per student both at the University of Texas and at Wharton.
The outcomes speak for themselves. The ratio of companies-to-students that hire full-time Rice Business students is greater than at UT or Wharton. This is largely because the CDO staff is focused on rigorous service standards. For students, this means there are more advisors per person, as well as frequent company visits to campus because companies actively target Rice for internships and full-time job recruiting, giving students a broad breadth of companies to consider.
And the strategy clearly works. In the class of 2022, 68.5 percent of students accepted offers through school-facilitated activities. The vast majority of 2022 graduates - 94 percent - accepted job offers within three months of graduation, with an average competitive starting salary of $142,212. Rice Business students pay attention to this because they’re looking for compensation that is competitive with top business schools. Top Rice Business graduate employers include: Capital One, Dell, Deloitte Consulting, CenterPoint Energy, Chevron, ExxonMobil, EY, and KPMG.
Continuous contact with alumni builds a formidable network
To give a closer look at this high-energy career operation, we recently caught up with Phil Heavilin II, Executive Director of the Career Development Office. Heavilin had stopped in Washington, D.C. on the way home from the Week on Wall Street trek, a program in which Rice Business students meet alumni, recruiters and other business contacts at New York financial institutions. He was in Washington, D.C. to see alumni.
Year-round contact with alumni across the country, Heavilin says, is a key strategy in building the formidable professional network for Rice Business graduates. The D.C. alumni Heavilin was meeting work at Capital One, a financial services firm that had just finished a trial recruiting run with Rice Business. Heavilin wanted to get first-hand feedback on how the trial had gone. Recruiting was so successful, Capital One added Rice Business as a core campus recruiting school.
The recruiting opportunities at Rice are striking not only for their abundance, but also for their variety, says Heavilin. Though known best for its excellence in the energy industry, Rice Business also attracts employers in the fields of
consulting, financial services and technology. Recruiters from healthcare, real estate and telecom companies also frequent campus to meet prospective hires. Regardless of whether the economy is bullish or bearish, Heavilin notes, Rice Business ensures its graduates will have a wealth of opportunities.