For most Penn students involved in on-campus recruiting, January marks the beginning of countless networking sessions and — if lucky — interviews that lead to a prestigious summer internship or job offer.
However, on-campus recruiting’s focus on a “important, but limited, sector of the economy,” as noted by Career Services’ website, is apparent to many undergraduates outside of the Wharton School.
College senior Sarah Vaughn has been involved in on-campus recruiting since last fall, and despite successfully landing several interviews, she found the process “lacking in certain areas and regions.”
“If you want to do any type of nonprofit work, it is seriously lacking,” Vaughn said. “It’s geared towards more business, consulting and finance-related jobs — there aren’t many other jobs available.”
However, OCR is not designed to favor business students, explained Patricia Rose, director of Career Services — it’s simply that the logistics of the process are suited to larger, often business-related employers.
“It’s not about Wharton. It’s about the employers that use OCR,” Rose said.
According to Rose, the employers that use OCR are large businesses and government agencies with predictable hiring patterns. These employers can thus anticipate hiring a large number of interns and employees months in advance.
Small employers such as cultural institutions and news organizations don’t have that sort of demand, she added. They also lack the monetary and human resources to participate in OCR, she said.
Conversely, other large industries such as film and advertising are less prominent in OCR not because they lack the resources, but because companies don’t feel the need to actively recruit employers, Rose added.
“They have people besieging them, saying ‘please hire me’,” Rose said. “They don’t need to do on-campus recruiting.”
While Rose acknowledged that it may be frustrating for students hoping to enter fields not covered by on-campus recruiting to actively reach out to employers, this is the norm for the vast majority of prospective employees.
College sophomore Emily Doll, who is interested in working at a museum, said she wouldn’t consider OCR even if she had the option to.
“I’d prefer to find — on my own — what I’m interested in,” she said.
However, despite these sentiments, statistics from Career Services indicate that many non-Wharton students make use of and benefit from on-campus recruiting.
According to Career Services, 40 percent of graduates from the College of Arts and Sciences and 62 percent of graduates from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences working full-time received their job offers through OCR or other Career Services leads last year.
In fact, Engineering students are “heavy users of OCR,” Rose said, noting that many employers recruit exclusively for Engineering students.
“Although a lot of companies come to OCR, they actually reach out to [Engineering students] because they want to hire someone with some sort of expertise. We are exposed to [OCR] a lot,” Gaby Moreno-Cesar, Engineering sophomore and president of Women in Computer Sciences, said.
Moreno, however, was surprised to learn that more than 40 percent of Engineering graduates last year were hired in business-related fields — a substantially higher percentage than those hired in technical fields.
Similar statistics were seen in last year’s survey of College graduates.
Of the College students who obtained full-time employment after graduation last year, 20 percent went into financial services, making it the largest employment industry, with education following at 17 percent.
“Business jobs aren’t just for business students,” Rose emphasized.
