Guest Opinion | Taking the road less traveled, to Silicon Valley

It's the time of year when Penn students, decked out in their best professional wear, race across campus to catch OCR presentations. But this year is a little different because many of the fixtures of recruiting have scaled back their hiring or disappeared altogether. High-tech startups have not been as hard-hit as the traditional college internship and post-college careers paths, but I think it's a career not many know a lot about.

Allow me to clear some misperceptions on high-tech careers.

High tech didn't die when the dot-com bubble burst; in fact, many companies like Google and Facebook were just starting or hadn't even been dreamed up yet. Do you need to be an engineering major to follow a career in technology? No! In fact, the majority of career opportunities in high tech are non-technical, including product marketing, marketing communications, business development, product management, etc.

Did you know that high tech creates more wealth than Wall Street? Not surprisingly, today's readjusted market cap of ALL the investment banks combined wouldn't even add up to a single Google, Cisco, Oracle or Microsoft.

Whartonites will probably want to know about the money. First, the compensation packages of investment banking could start looking pretty bleak after the government is done with them. Second, the salaries in high tech are usually higher than other sectors due to the high-tech premium. And there's no substitute for the wild upside of stock options where you've got not just one roll at the dice, but up to nine or more rolls. This is because you can work at eight or nine startups in a 28-year career span (working past 50 should be optional).

The high-tech career track is all about building corporations at high speed, which means supercharging your resume. Whatever you learn in a large company you can learn three times faster in a startup. You simply get more responsibility and more latitude to operate.

You've heard about consultants having more career flexibility to move between industries and functions. In high tech, you have the same flexibility. Big corporations recruit heavily from startups, especially when they seek to "revitalize" corporate culture. Your downstream career options can also lead to the venture-capital side, where many entrepreneurs become VCs since they are more qualified to pick winners, having "been there, done that."

Notwithstanding all of the above, I think the single most compelling factor is the fun of getting up in the morning and loving what you do. It's the constant changes, the challenges, the direct impact of your efforts and the resulting sense of reward in pointing to a tangible result and saying, "I did that." At Wharton or Harvard, we're trained for that day when we hope we'll be promoted to "captain of the ship." In high tech, we're trained to build our own ships. No corporate politics, no jostling for position. To a large measure, we control where we want to go. We make impact. We effect change on the world. It's powerful stuff. A lot different from playing desk-jockey with spreadsheets or pontificating on strategic plans.

Some startups, especially those with Penn alumni like mine, come directly to campus to interview and hire students for internships and full-time jobs. If you're looking for a job or internship, search PennLink for technology-related companies or attend the career fairs on campus where you can talk directly to company representatives before you apply. Some will hire you right on the spot. Other companies don't come on campus, but their jobs can be found on Web sites like VentureLoop. Create a LinkedIn profile to share your interests and contact companies you like.

If you don't know anything about high tech and want to learn more, an informational interview is a great way to ask alumni what they do in their job everyday and what the career opportunities in their industry are. The Penn Career Network at Career Services has a database of alumni who have volunteered to meet with students and talk about their chosen field.

While the current economic climate has affected everyone, use the opportunity to think about what you really want to be doing after you graduate, and consider Silicon Valley instead of the traditional New York career path.

Cameron Coles is a 2008 Wharton alumnus. He works at a late-stage start-up in Silicon Valley, Calif., called ZL Technologies.

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