On-campus recruiting is in full force this month, and about 300 business organizations have booked dozens of rooms in Huntsman Hall, interviewing Penn students for jobs.
And each year, more and more of those eager interviewees haven't studied finance or management - they've studied art history or comparative literature.
Wharton may be the reason big-name investment banks are attracted to OCR at Penn, but having such a comprehensive program makes it easy for plenty of non-business majors to apply for jobs.
According to a Career Services student survey, of the 620 respondents from the College class of 2005, 25 percent landed jobs in financial services, while 19 percent opted for the consulting field. That same year, about 60 percent of Wharton graduates went into financial services, and 21.5 percent went into consulting.
Officials say the on-campus presence these companies offer makes it easy to apply for jobs, perhaps influencing non-business students to consider the field.
"If museums recruited the way consulting firms did, we might see that everyone suddenly wanted to work at a museum," Penn Career Services Administrator Peggy Curchack said. "OCR is easy to do; it has a straightforward formula."
Students wanting to participate in OCR register during the first weeks of school and attend information sessions with any of the hundreds of companies that participate. They can then drop off their resume with recruiters - no postage required - and attend interviews in Penn classrooms.
And the fact that it's so easily accessible often encourages more non-business majors to participate.
"It doesn't matter that I'm not in Wharton," College senior Greg Moran said. "OCR gives us the best opportunity to get a good job coming out of school."
Recruiters themselves say they are happy to hire smart students from every major.
"While a finance background is a plus, we are looking for smart, talented people from many different backgrounds," said Jamie Lister, a recruiter for the investment-banking firm Lehman Brothers.
At other schools where OCR programs are big, the same holds true, according to Beverly Hamilton-Chandler, director of Princeton's Career Development.
For Princeton's class of 2006, 16.4 percent of graduates went into careers in financial services; a large portion of those students did not major in business-related fields. Hamilton-Chandler said the breadth of the OCR programs on Princeton's campus helped encourage those students to apply.
"Even if you study English, you can still be a banker," said Patricia Rose, Penn's director of Career Services. "Your major is not your career."
And at schools where OCR doesn't exist, significantly fewer students go into business-related fields.
At Occidental College, a small liberal-arts school in California, only 30 students out of 2007's 350 graduating seniors are economics majors.
Valerie Savior, interim director of Occidental's Career Development, attributes this figure to the lack of a strong OCR program and of business-related majors.
