Some students pursue alternatives to on-campus recruiting

As the spring semester scrambles to a start, so too do student job searches.

Many students are conducting their job hunts this year without the use of on-campus recruiting, a Career Services program that brings employers to Penn for on-campus interviews and recruitment presentation sessions.

According to Kelly Cleary, a senior associate director for the College of Arts and Sciences at Career Services, the companies at OCR fairs “tend to be large employers that hire dozens or hundreds of summer interns … companies that have very large university recruiting departments that can cover the expense of sending people out of the office for an entire day.”

Those industries, Cleary said, are primarily finance, consumer products and retail, consulting and technology. Most other industries “hire only a handful of interns, so it just doesn’t make sense” for them to come to campus to recruit.

Not Going the OCR Route

Some students avoid using OCR because of this limited range of visiting companies. College sophomore Madeleine Stevens is conducting her own job search for summer internships because “it is [her] impression that OCR is for financial institutions.”

Last year, this image of OCR spurred Stevens last year to look to other resources for her job search. She worked with the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to find a summer job as an historical research assistant through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program. This year, she plans on again using CURF and also the online database iNet to seek summer employment.

Cleary advocated the use of iNet as well as PennLink — which posts a multitude of internship and job positions accessible by PennKey — to both students who do not use OCR and those who do. Particularly useful for students not using OCR are the other online databases to which Career Services subscribes. Many of these databases post openings for nonprofit or think tank jobs, among others, that are not represented at OCR. These listings range from journalism jobs to international internships to policy positions.

Cleary suggested that students using these online databases should “search by industry or by job type, not by major.”

She added, “Most employers don’t think about the major at all.”

Thinking Out of the Box

College senior and Africana studies major Marcel Salas attained a full-time job after graduation but, like Stevens, was “never inclined to use OCR” because she “assumed it was mostly for finance or econ-related fields.”

Salas will be working for Red Bull in their Culture Marketing department in an 18-month rotational position, part of a selective “graduate program” similar to that of a banking firm. In this position, Salas will be analyzing “how Red Bull produces all the media that we see, which is a big part of their marketing.”

While Salas did not use OCR, she did employ the help of Career Services, at least in jump-starting her job search.

“When I realized I wanted to do stuff in advertising and marketing, they directed me towards resources to learn more about the field,” Salas said. “I was super intimidated because I know kids here major in marketing and I knew we would be competing for the same jobs.”

A more knowledgeable Salas then had the savvy to find a position on her own. She found out about the opportunity at Red Bull through another student at Penn. “I wouldn’t have known about the graduate program had it not been for this other Penn student,” Salas said. It was the perfect “Penn connection.”

OCR: A Stepping Stone

College senior Isabel Friedman, soon to be working for the online media file hosting and sharing service Dropbox, found OCR to be helpful in her ultimate attainment of that position. Though she found the position at Dropbox using PennLink, she had previously used OCR in her job search for a consulting position. After going through the interviewing process and realizing consulting was not for her, Friedman said she walked away from OCR with stronger interviewing skills that were a stepping stone in finding a job.

“My experience preparing for consulting interviews and performing at interviews without a doubt helped me get the job that I ultimately got,” Friedman said. “OCR is daunting and it’s stressful, but it provided me invaluable experience in my own job search.”

Beyond OCR, Career Services hosts both a spring fair and a start-up fair — usually in late February — for students looking for jobs that are not OCR positions, Cleary said. The spring fair is “the largest fair of the year … kind of the ‘alternatives to OCR’ career fair,” she added. Around 100 employers will be on campus for that event.

With these and other Career Services initiatives, students do have alternatives to the OCR process.

“I urge people not to feel alienated if [OCR] is not the right path for them and to know that there are a bunch of other resources out there,” Salas said. “Don’t be scared if OCR is not your path.”

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