Frida Garza | Follow the (tech) jobs

A cco rding to Career Services, a survey of the 2013 graduating class reveals that less than 10 percent of students went to technology jobs.

But that’s not for lack of want. It’s no secret that today, the technology sector has a burgeoning and growing hunger for full-time employees. The Start-Up Career Fair held last month in Houston Hall featured over 50 companies looking for programmers, product developers, data-literate strategists, etc. Those companies need young people who can think fast and fix mistakes faster. They want smart, and they want plucky too. Penn students fit the bill, but our culture is geared more toward OCR and Wall Street than networking and Silicon Valley. Bain will hire a fresh crop of Penn students every year like clockwork. But here’s the thing: start-ups need consultants, too.

As far as I can tell, that’s an untapped job market. Flip through Bloomberg Businessweek’s round-up of the best B-schools in the country. While finance and financial services remain the top industry for many MBA programs, the McCombs School of Business in Austin, Texas represents a unique trend: 25 percent of their graduates go into consulting and 18 percent go into the technology sector. Similarly, their Executive MBA program — for those who want to get an MBA with one hand and climb the corporate ladder with the other — features similar stats.

Of course, we are all graduating with a Penn degree in hand (and in some cases, more than one). Whatever industry we break into, we will be fine. But as students graduating into a recovering post-recession economy, we should think about going where the jobs are — and we should realize that, if you’re interested in tech, the fastest growing jobs may not be in New York City. New York City lore says: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Penn students have proven that we can make it in New York. Why don’t we want to go anywhere else?

We should open ourselves up to the possibility of making a living — and making a life — somewhere else. Our successes cannot be confined to the Northeast Corridor.

And these days, it cannot even be confined to the Bay Area. When Forbes published a report on which cities in America were creating the most technology jobs, the results were surprising. The San Jose region — which holds 40% of the nation’s venture capital — came in 25th in their report. San Francisco came in fifth. But the top four cities for tech jobs were all in the American South. Austin, Raleigh, Nashville and Houston all experienced double-digit growth in tech industry employment from 2001 to 2013.

Nashville takes the cake with a whopping 65.8 percent increase in tech jobs. But I don’t see anyone in my graduating class rushing to take a job there. Friends have turned down employment offers because they were south of the Mason-Dixon line.

But in over-saturated markets, sometimes it pays to be somewhere else. Wharton MBA students Allison Berliner and Roopak Majmudar know the importance of good location. They started PopInShop , an online service that matches retail clothing stores who want to host pop-up shops with boutique brands. You won’t find them in New York City, even if it is the fashion capital of the world — brick-and-mortar stores are already scrapped for space and cash, so hosting pop-up shops isn’t high on their priority list. Instead, the Philadelphia-based start-up has found a robust boutique community here in Center City and in 28 other cities across the nation. And they’re growing. Maybe the Big Apple isn’t in the cards, but sustainable markets in Chicago and Dallas and other American cities are.

The same is true for us. Whether we’re graduating in seven weeks or in seven semesters, we should be open to variety when it comes to employment — even if it takes us west (or north or south!)

Frida Garza is a College senior from El Paso, Texas, studying English. Email her at frida.garza@gmail.com or follow her @fffffrida.

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