Today was the deadline for intern candidates to return their signed offer letters and decide which Big 4 accounting firm they want to work for in Los Angeles this summer. It is amazing to think that we juniors are just about set in terms of starting our careers; we no longer need to worry about having a job when we graduate, since this summer internship will turn into a full-time position, unless something significant goes wrong during the internship.
One interesting thing is that there are six students from Hawai'i in our accounting class (graduating May 2012). This is an unusually high number of students from Hawai'i in the same accounting class at the same university. (Although there are a lot of students from Hawa'i at USC, there are usually maybe only a couple of people who decide to do accounting each year.) Five of us six decided to stay in LA to start our careers. All five of us ended up going to the same firm in the same practice.
The coincidence of all five of us starting at the same firm was just something interesting I wanted to point out; the more notable statistic is that five of the six students from Hawai'i will be working in LA - not returning home to work in Hawai'i.
Hawai'i is losing so much of its talent to the mainland, especially in fields such as business and engineering. In the eyes of us college students on the mainland, the career opportunities back home just simply do not match up to those available up here.
