C A R E E R S

RESUMES

'Professional polish': Adviser Reddington, A

Execut ive
Know-How
Mentors mean business
Every few weeks last spring, Maureen
Dunn commuted an hour and a half
from Marymount College's Tarry-
town, N.Y., campus to John Barton's office
in downtown Manhattan. And Barton, a
vice president at Chemical Bank, made the
trip worth her while, offering high-
powered career advice and helping the 22-
year-old senior make job contacts. "When I
had interviews, I called and asked him
about the companies," Dunn says, "things I
wouldn't know coming out of college but
someone in the business world would."
Interview Views
H magine Knute Rockne ranting around
the locker room while job candidates
suit up for the Big Interview. Such is the
tone of Martin John Yate's "Knock 'Em
Dead" (180 pages. Bob Adams, Inc. $6.95)
featuring "over 100 winning responses" to
typical interview questions. Yate creates
the consummate security blanket for the
anxiety-ridden. He offers concise bites of
information-posing potential questions,
divining the interviewer's reasons for ask-
ing them, then giving effective answers. If
asked whether you want the boss's job,
Yate suggests a side step: "I'm looking for
a manager who will help me develop my
capabilities and grow with him."

T About 25 Marymount juniors
' and seniors make similar com-
mutes every spring as part
of the school's eight-year-old
mentorship program. Unlike
interns, the Marymount "men-
tees" don't work for the sponsor
companies. Paired with a Man-
hattan executive, they meet
over lunch or in the office to
discuss career goals-and the
mentor's own job history. "The
students develop some profes-
sional polish by getting to know
a vice president and learning
it's a flesh-and-blood person
who's not so intimidating,"
says Lee Orvieto, Marymount's
director of career services.
OL BERNSON Just as important, the men-
iartin tors provide a corporate net-
work that can come in handy
during later job hunts. Founded with help
from Chase Manhattan Bank, the program
offers contacts in banking, finance, adver-
tising and publishing. A few students even
wind up working for former mentors. "All
my friends were still pounding the pave-
ment, and I started my job two days after
graduation," says 1986 graduate Bridgette
Martin, who now works one door down
from mentor Martha Reddington, director
of special sales at Simon & Schuster.
About 70 percent of the mentors in this
year's program are women, and the advice
they have to offer is personal as well as
professional. One of the monthly group ses-
sions is set aside for discussions about bal-
ancing career and personal goals. Says
mentor Terri Mickaliger, a second vice
president at Chase: "If nothing else, we can
show them that other people have felt the
same things they feel and have confronted
the same problems."
STEPHEN WEST

Name: Robert
Calderbank
Age: 33
Occupation: Staff
member, Bell Lab-
oratories Mathe-
matical Sciences
Research Center,
Murray Hill, N.J.
Education: B.S.,
Warwick Univer-
sity, England;
M.S., Oxford;
Ph.D., California Institute of
Technology
Q. What do you do on the job?
A. Bell Labs is the research arm
of AT&T. The majority of Bell
Labs work is concerned with de-
velopment. A relatively small
part is concerned with more
fundamental or basic research,
and that's what I do. I think
about the mathematics behind
the problem of reliable
communication.
Q. How directly does your work relate to
particular products?
A. I'm not the person they come
to when they're deciding wheth-
er they want three or four out-
lets on some device. I work at a
more fundamental level. My job
is to find my own problems and to
solve them. I like thinking.
Q. What's it like for a mathematician to
work in a corporate situation?
A. Bell Labs is a pretty special
environment. The fact that I
work for a technical company
means that I get exposed to some
interesting problems. When
you look back at the history of
mathematics, one of the big
forces that drove mathematical
advances was the challenge of
explaining the outside world. I
like being exposed to real-life
problems.
Q. What do you like best about your job?
A. I get paid to think about
what I like. I get to choose pret-
ty much everything about the
way I work.
Q. What advice do you have for students
who are considering corporate careers in
mathematics?
A. You have to ask yourself
whether you like to do research
and think for yourself or wheth-
er you prefer to be told what to
do. If you want to-do research
you should get yourself a Ph.D.

Now imagine Freud. By comparison with
the "Win one for the Gipper" approach,
James D. Kohlmann's "Make Them
Choose You" (178 pages. Prentice Hall.
$17.95) offers a less functional, more per-
ceptive examination. While geared for the
"executive-selection process," the subject
matter is applicable to almost any employ-
ment level with its mature treatment of the
intricacies surrounding the questioning.
He emphasizes honesty with a dose of prop-
er restraint rather than manipulative pro-
grammed responses. If the question calls
for a discussion of shortcomings, Kohl-
mann rejects responses that pretend
strengths are weaknesses (e.g., "I work too
hard"). "Come on,". scoffs Kohlmann, an
executive-recruiting consultant.
BRUCE MEYERSON

NEWSWEEK ON CAMPUS 43

APRIL 1988