Long-Term Success

Students perform experiments in Olin Hall.

Preparation for Life

The ultimate payoff of a Colgate education is the type of well-rounded person one becomes.

Colgate gives students a profound ability to gather facts, summon reason, solve problems, and communicate with power. It teaches people to see many perspectives, to embrace responsibility, and to engage society. The students of Colgate carry its values. And one day they carry out the value of a Colgate degree, which opens doors to career success with its reputation for excellence.

This rigor of a Colgate education is the best training for professionals who can launch out and solve the world’s most challenging issues. The core curriculum itself — ambitious and constantly updated — teaches not just topics but habits of mind. The core takes students through an intellectual exploration of questions that every educated person will need to deal with at some point in their lives. The courses cross all majors, reflecting a world that never fits neatly into one discipline.

This is what it feels like to have the best of a research university and a liberal arts college in one. This is why Colgate graduates emerge so ready to make a living and make a difference. Employers and graduate school admission officers know it.

Career Services Toolkit

Colgate offers guides, workshops, and online tools to help students prepare for internships and develop career skills. It amounts to a tool kit, including guides to:

Craft, tailor, and target a résumé and cover letter
Design outreach emails to employers
Dress for professional success
Build a network
Understand professional conduct and ethics in career searching
Write thank-you notes
Succeed in different interviewing formats and styles

Pre-Professional Programs

Colgate helps undergraduates prepare for professions with hands-on learning so that they can explore interests and immerse themselves in practical experience.

This allows students to shape their academic experience toward career goals, network with successful and influential alumni, and get an early feel for real-world work. These pre-professional programs connect the lifelong value of a liberal arts education with training for careers that provide tangible and enduring benefits.

Colgate's Pre-Professional Programs Include:

Academic support and partnerships with professionals and graduate schools.
Study abroad and endowed fellowship opportunities catered toward specific, professional skill sets.
Assistance with internship placements.
Extracurricular learning, under faculty direction, through student organizations that have access to professional-grade facilities.
Faculty and staff expertise to guide students on their options.

Career Fields

Business

Two of the top career fields for Colgate students are business/management and financial services. Colgate prepares students with such programs as a semester-long economics study group in London, special endowments for students to intern in business fields, and a thriving club devoted to Colgate Women in Business.

Engineering

Colgate offers a 3-2 Program: Students attend Colgate for three years, then transfer to an engineering school for two more — and earn a bachelor’s degree from both. An additional year of study can lead to a Master of Science degree.

Health Sciences

Colgate graduates have been accepted to medical school at about twice the national average. Students can learn in the local ambulance corps as an EMT, shadow area physicians, and have the chance to be selected for a full-semester study group at the National Institutes of Health.

Law

Colgate students can begin to pursue a legal career by joining the Colgate Speaking Union and studying an array of subjects, from political science to philosophy, economics to classics. Pre-law students have a dedicated adviser in Career Services to assist them as they plan for law school.

Architecture

Students can take advantage of an architectural studies emphasis in the Department of Art and Art History. A pre-architecture adviser prepares students for internships and graduate schools in the field.

Employer Connections

Colgate has long served as an attractive place for top employers across a variety of industries to find talent.

Colgate’s relationships with employers create opportunities for students to receive greater consideration for internships and jobs.

Throughout the year, Colgate Career Services hosts information sessions on campus, driven by leaders of some of the most respected companies and service organizations. Colgate’s online job and internship board hosts thousands of opportunities for students based on their interests. Colgate’s reputation for producing top talent allows the University to maintain a strong core of recruiting partners while pulling in new, exciting internship and entry-level opportunities every year.

Recruiting Partners

Colgate has 155 formal recruiting partners, including Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Google, Mass General Hospital, NBCUniversal, Pinterest, and Teach For America.

Frank Cherena ’03, a professional geologist and environmental professional, and John O’Brien ’99, director at Siemens Financial Services, speak with Colgate students during the SophoMORE Connections networking event.

Students attending the 2022 Michael J. Wolk ’60 MD Conference on Medical Education connect with alumni working in the health care field. The 2022 conference focused on practicing medicine in the 21st century.

The Prep for Tech weekend includes skill-development workshops and mock-interview sessions with seasoned alumni who work in computer science.

Students receive close instruction directly from Colgate's distinguished faculty.

Faculty Support

Students’ experience in the classroom provides the foundation for them to excel in a professional environment.

And at Colgate, the learning experience is personal. Colgate faculty are not just known for their achievements; they are actually known by the students in a real way, every day.

Every single class is taught by distinguished faculty — never teaching assistants. The faculty are approachable, inspiring, and deeply networked in the industries where Colgate students want to be. Many faculty have colleagues, mentors, and former students at the graduate schools that Colgate students may be considering. Faculty want students to finish college with a foundation of academic rigor and a path to tangible career outcomes. They provide career support, helping students understand where their degree can lead them.

95%

Faculty with PhD or highest degree in their field

Joel Sommers, Computer Science

Sommers collaborates with Career Services on events, a technical interview preparation program, and an annual trip to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference.

April Baptiste, Environmental Studies and Africana and Latin American Studies

As a former codirector of the Residential Commons, Baptiste offered first-year and sophomore students a 10-hour career exploration series. Sessions included discovering career areas of interest, networking and relationship development, and creating a career development action plan.

Mary Simonson, Film & Media Studies and Women’s Studies

Simonson helped coordinate internship opportunities in filming, production and management, and more during the production of the feature film Odd Man Rush, co-produced by Grant Slater ’91.

In 1994, international law hadn’t caught up with global corporations. Katie Redford ’90 co-founded EarthRights International and started taking organizations to court, holding them accountable for environmental damage and human rights abuses.

Alumni Engagement

Colgate alumni are known for their loyalty, accomplishments, and eagerness to connect today’s students to the people and opportunities that can shape a career.

At more than 35,000 strong, Colgate alumni are leaders of business, literature, finance, entertainment, and more. Colgate grads provide mentoring, internships, and constant engagement with undergraduates tailored right down to their areas of interest. In so many ways, they invest in the outcomes of students, just as their predecessors did for them.

While a student at Colgate, Darien McFadden ’88 was a residential adviser and a peer counselor with a call-in support program — roles that he credits as his best career preparation. Now, as director of the Center for Counseling and Mental Health at Amherst, McFadden practices clinical work and leads a postgraduate training program that has a multicultural focus.

Learning From Alumni

SophoMORE Connections

Nationally recognized, SophoMORE Connections is a two-day career and academic discovery conference unique to Colgate. It is specifically geared toward the career topics and questions students should be considering in their second year. More than half of the sophomore class typically participates.

Immersion Trips

Alumni host visits to their place of work for small groups of students. Students benefit from networking events created around an industry theme.

**Liz Rampe ’05, NASA, planetary scientist**

Liz Rampe ’05 is the deputy principal investigator for the chemistry and mineralogy instrument on NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Mars since 2012. She and her colleagues tell the instrument what to do and analyze its data. Rampe’s fieldwork in Iceland complements the work she does with Mars samples. Curiosity is studying lake samples, so the specimens from Iceland might help Rampe’s team better understand how subtle changes in water conditions affect mineral compositions.

**German DuBois III ’91, HOPE Murals, founder**

Through his nonprofit, German DuBois III ’91 provides hope and a creative outlet for young people living in high-risk situations. DuBois uses the mural design process to encourage at-risk youth to talk about their situations and then depict them in vibrant colors.

**Nicol Turner Lee ’90, Brookings Institution, senior fellow, governance studies, and director of the Center for Technology Innovation**

Turner Lee’s day-to-day duties at Brookings has her addressing U.S. and international audiences about digital inclusion; leading Brookings’ efforts to address inherent racial biases in machine-learning algorithms; talking with educators, industry leaders, and community activists about how to get online access to all distance learners; and writing policies she’ll funnel to President Joe Biden’s administration.

Professional Networks

Colgate’s professional networks, organized around interdisciplinary industries, make it easy for students and alumni to get and stay connected. Launched in 2013, the Colgate Professional Networks have become a nationally renowned example of alumni engagement and career programming. The networks help students leverage the power of the Colgate alumni and ensure lifelong connections in these areas:

Arts, Creativity, and Innovation
Common good
Consulting
Digital Business and Technology
Entrepreneur
Finance and Banking
Health and Wellness
Lawyers
Marketing, Media, and Communications
Real Estate
STEM

Take Advantage of Colgate’s Lifelong Value

Colgate alumni are deeply engaged in supporting Colgate students. They commit their time and resources to launch students toward successful careers. Receive the tangible and enduring benefits of a Colgate education by taking the next step.