In what will likely be a controversial decision, Career Services has announced that starting this fall, Penn students will no longer be able to participate in on-campus recruiting, or OCR.
“We are tired of the toxic atmosphere [generated by OCR],” Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett said. Wharton students will be among those most affected by the change; nearly 90 percent of Wharton juniors and seniors participated in OCR last semester. “Penn is an institution of learning, and the stress and competition of OCR make it difficult for that learning to take place.”
Garrett cited complaints from professors from the Wharton School and the College of Arts and Sciences that attendance in some classes fell as much as much as 70 percent in October during the peak of OCR.
“I ended up cancelling class altogether,” professor Jarvis Lorry said. Lorry teaches Finance 305, Models of Financial Forecasting. “Nearly half of my students told me in advance that they would be missing class during the weeks of OCR, and the other half were too distracted by upcoming interviews to focus. It’s simply impossible to continue teaching in such an environment.”
“Penn is a university, not a feeder program for Goldman Sachs,” Lorry added.
After several major banks, including Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank, announced last fall that the bulk of their recruiting process would be taking place in the fall rather than the spring, many Penn students found themselves scrambling to reorganize their calendars. Penn’s decision to end on-campus recruiting may make the adjustment even more difficult.
“I’m very concerned about what this means for our class’s job prospects,” Wharton sophomore Charles Ryder said. “Without OCR, I’m going to have to do a phone or Skype interview, which makes all the time I’ve spent writing emails to Bain’s Penn recruiters pretty much useless.”
“I mean, who are we, Swarthmore?” he said. “If I had known that Penn was going to do this, I would have gone to NYU.”
“OCR is a huge part of the Penn lifestyle,” College junior Dagny Taggart said. Taggart, who will be working as a summer analyst at Citibank this semester, credited OCR with being integral in her internship search. “It was overwhelming and exhausting, but in a good way,” she said. “My roommate is pre-med, and she loves to complain all the time about how hard [organic chemistry] is and how she’s too busy studying for the MCAT to do any household chores. But during October I could be like, ‘Oh sorry, I don’t have time to do the dishes, I’m super busy with OCR.’ It was pretty much the only time I got to one-up her.”
Editor’s Note: This article is part of The Daily Pennsylvanian’s annual joke issue. Read more about the history of joke issue here.
