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Penn students looking to go straight from college to the corner office need look no further than Penn’s co-ed business fraternities.

Alpha Kappa Psi, Delta Sigma Pi and Phi Gamma Nu have been at Penn since 1961, 1932 and 2003, respectively, and have helped catapult brothers into their dream jobs ever since.

Wharton senior Makini Hughes is a DSP brother who joined in her sophomore year. Hughes cites the opportunities for professional development within the fraternity as being integral to her own success. “I have a great job at one of the top three consulting firms, and DSP helped me a lot in that aspect, from looking over my resume to helping with mock interviews. My big was also doing consulting, so she was very instrumental.”

Contrary to popular belief, the business fraternities are not only for Wharton students. College senior Jessica Schneider, a Philosophy, Politics and Economics major, joined DSP after she transferred to Penn in her junior year.

“It was the week after NSO, I was trying to get my footing and trying to decide if I wanted to get involved in social frats,” Schneider said. “My roommate was going to an internship panel for DSP and I heard they had Greek Lady. I wanted to try [Greek Lady], so I went.”

Schneider said that her experiences in DSP have helped her solidify her career interests. “Even though I’m not hard core finance, consulting or business, I knew I wanted to go into corporate law. In corporate law, you have to know part of the business side. [Through DSP], I added a second layer of knowledge to the way I look at the world,” she said.

Schneider agreed with Hughes that the business fraternities help with the job search, adding, “It is the same type of help that you could get from Career Services, yet DSP is an all-inclusive package. You don’t have to go to lots of places on campus, you can ask one brother in DSP. Things also can change from field to field. Career Services may or may not be able to give you the nuances for things like how much jewelry to wear [to an interview].”

In particular, all three fraternities focus on preparing their brothers for the infamous On-Campus Recruiting, which is in full swing for the Spring 2015 semester.

2014 Wharton graduate and AKPsi alumna Kenge Blue said that the business fraternities help provide an environment that is like a “microcosm of the real world.”

“Every year in preparation for OCR, the seniors [of AKPsi] host mock interview Super Days. The seniors structure it around what they have learned in the real world [at recruiting events]. The pressure is not exactly the same, but it emulates it quite well,” Blue said. “There is no other way to prepare than to experience.”

In addition to the development of hard skills, membership in one of these fraternities comes with valuable networking opportunities. “BCG, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs — any company you find to be a goal of yours, there’s a current brother working there or one who has worked there,” 2011 College and Wharton graduate and DSP alumnus Artem Mariychin said. Mariychin now works at a hybrid investment fund in New York City, and said that he has gotten “interviews through DSP and a couple of offers.”

“Nowadays, there are just so many applications to different firms. It’s almost just who you know in terms of whether your resume gets pulled,” Wharton and Engineering senior Nicholas Liu said. “I worked in private equity. It’s harder to access coming out of undergrad, so it helped that there was a PGN brother at the firm.”

Though the underlying focus of the fraternities is professional development, the brothers agree that the social element is equally important — especially with pledge classes of sizes seven to 12, with 50 to 60 total brothers in each fraternity.

“A business frat is a great community to have at Penn if what you’re looking for is a mixture of business and social organization,” College senior and PGN brother Oliver Sitt said. “The main myth is all we care about is finding jobs ... that we’re just nerds. But half of our activities are social — we’ve gone skiing, gone on a cruise and we’re going to Istanbul together.”

Schneider agreed, saying, “DSP is rabidly social ... it has all of the elements in my mind that social Greek life does.”

Although the fraternities’ central offices mandate that they may not have on-campus houses, many of the brothers choose to live together — including Schneider, who lives with four other members of DSP.

“Our brothers do very well and, academically, we help each other out — all of that is true — but we’re a family as well,” Blue said.

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