Perfecting resumes and personalizing cover letters, staying up until 3 a.m. to schedule interviews, waiting in agony to find out about a second interview and then, finally sitting by the phone for days or even weeks hoping to get the call offering a dream job.
For Wharton seniors, the search for the perfect job is stressful and time-consuming. And this year, it was often discouraging.
With a downturn in the economy and companies dealing with the ramifications of Sept. 11, the process was drawn out and unfruitful for some candidates last fall. But most persevered and used their networking skills to make the best of the situation.
"It definitely wasn't the job searcher's market that it was in the last three years," said Barbara Hewitt, associate director of Career Services for Wharton undergraduates. Students "may not have had the number of choices that they've had in previous years. They couldn't afford to be quite so picky."
Some students said that On-Campus Recruiting Services, a Career Services program that facilitates the interview process, was helpful despite this year's harsh job market.
"Most of my job search was basically on-campus recruiting, mostly because I got what I wanted through it," said Wharton senior Kristen Wermuth, who accepted an offer from an investment bank in December.
However, students who were less successful with OCRS said they used alternative job-searching methods.
"I did notice in the fall that students who had gotten offers from their summer internships were likely to accept those offers," Hewitt said.
Other students utilized connections to attain interviews and, eventually, secure employment.
"I've been doing all of my interviewing and recruiting through connections I've made -- internships, people I met through internships and previous interviews and through friends already on Wall Street," Wharton graduate student Nadav Besner said.
Some students also tried looking for jobs abroad, hoping that recruiting in Europe would not be as limited as it is in the United States.
After a discouraging OCRS experience, Wharton senior Kyros Shirazi Moghadam decided to take his career search into his own hands.
"I decided I had to be more proactive... I looked into more opportunities abroad, and so I will end up working in London."
Shirazi said Hewitt helped him realize that he would have to use alternate methods in his job search because of the state of the economy.
"Since I didn't want to settle with something I didn't like, I was persistent enough to find something in the end that I really wanted and I finally got what I really wanted," Shirazi said.
Besner, who was looking for a trading job on Wall Street and has gone through the recruiting process for internships several times, said that his experience this year was different than Wharton students have had in past years, with flourishing economies and the dot-com boom.
"It's not everyone coming and laying down the red carpet for you. It's flipped around this year," Besner said. "You have to hunt for stuff more. Go out there, hit the pavement and really go on a serious search for jobs.
"You can't just sit back and wait for the red carpet to roll in," Besner said, adding that he remembered the ways companies lured prospective employers in the past. "They used to do fancy dinners, they'd take you out, in the summers they'd have events to woo you to the firm where you were an intern."
He also noted that companies are not as eager to hire new employees.
"People are much more cautious and taking a lot more time in giving out full-time offers. Everything takes longer. They're really, really looking for experienced top people," Besner said.
Likewise, some companies, especially consulting firms, were barely hiring at all this fall.
"We saw at the end of last year that there was a real downturn in consulting hiring," Hewitt said. "They really didn't come to campus at all or really limited the number of students they were hiring. For students that were really interested in consulting, there wasn't that much opportunity this year."
