As club application season wraps up for the 2025-26 academic year, students involved in various Wharton organizations described the impacts of new recruitment guidelines in interviews with The Daily Pennsylvanian.
The updated guidelines — first announced to club leaders in July — ban multiple rounds of interviews and prior knowledge tests as part of Wharton club’s recruitment process. While the school’s leadership has characterized the change as an improvement to club culture, students have expressed conflicting sentiments — including concerns that fewer interview opportunities have led to an unfair selection process.
In an interview with the DP, Mike Elias — the senior director of strategy and operations for the Wharton undergraduate division — called the decision to eliminate multiple rounds of “skill-based questions” a means of removing “barrier[s] for entry" for new students.
“Not all of our students, particularly first-year students, are coming in with a level of expertise and knowledge that would help them navigate the club interview process,” Elias said. “What we’re trying to do is set an equitable starting point.”
He highlighted the importance of maintaining fairness “across the board,” adding that clubs should “[assess] somebody’s commitment and interest to a club and not the prior expertise they’re bringing.”
“I would challenge students to think through whether or not the experience they had as a first-year student — after being here for only a week or two and being put through several rounds of interview — was actually a positive experience,” he added.
Elias said that hearing the experiences and input of club leaders is “incredibly important” to the ongoing development of the new rules.
However, Wharton senior Arthi Venkatakrishnan — who serves as the Vice President for University Relations for Wharton Women — told the DP that the decision was “frustrating” and “not collaborative at all.”
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“This was kind of just something thrown on us,” she said. “It was not a discussion at all. It made it really hard to communicate what was happening to the students that are applying, many of whom just got here.”
Venkatakrishnan added that “the club recruitment process has never been collaborative” and she wanted to know “why there wasn’t more of a discussion.”
She said that the student leaders in Wharton Women only found out about the changes through the email sent by Elias over the summer.
“There wasn’t any sense that Wharton Council or Wharton Undergraduate would be working with us to actually help us implement this,” she said.
According to Elias, clubs that receive Wharton undergraduate funding should be “open to all students.”
Elias also referenced clubs that help prepare students for career experiences after leaving Penn.
“I think we could do a lot more with our clubs to really train them and teach them around what makes good interview questions that mirror the type of interview experiences our students would have during an internship or a career search,” Elias continued.
Ben Serafin, a College junior involved in the financial literacy club Penn Common Cents, described the knowledge freshmen are expected to have prepared for interviews as “annoying and preprofessional.”
“My freshman year interview round 1 was 10 minutes long and essentially I came into the interview, they asked me about myself and then one of the interviewers walked in halfway through late, asked me to walk him through how to make a [Discounted Cash Flow],” Serafin wrote in a statement to the DP. “I had no idea. I told him that and they said thank you and the interview was over.”
He added that “the changes … make a lot of sense” because the previous process “relied a lot on nepotism and … having advanced knowledge … [that] should not be the baseline expectation.”
Venkatakrishnan said that the point of requiring technical knowledge is to gauge if students are “treating it very thoughtfully, not about getting the right answer or having a certain level of expertise.”
“When you take that away, I think you're basically just letting any behavioral biases run wild,” she said. “Not even just nepotism — you are opening yourself up to a lot more demographic biases and gender biases.”
While Serafin acknowledged the potential for improvement under the new policies, he referenced “workarounds” and “loopholes” that club leaders may employ to avoid increasing fairness.
“Old dogs can’t learn new tricks,” he wrote. “I hope that the process will become more fair although I do believe that the nepotism/connections factor will still play a big part.”
Wharton sophomore Samantha Mirabal similarly mentioned that some “clubs [accept] people that are friends with people that are already on the board” — and that the new rules might “exacerbate that issue.”
“Because there’s only one round of interviews, I think people are just going to do all they can to try and get into that one round,” Mirabal told the DP. “I think we’re going to see things like coffee chats become more and more important."
She added that “people are just going to exploit that opportunity to get to know people on the board and make an impression.”
Mirabal serves on the board of Penn Women in Consulting, a student group that offers a “simple behavioral interview” and, as a result, did not change its recruitment approach.
“I want to make sure that they can engage well with clients, and just overall, be someone that will fit in with the club’s community,” she said. “We don't expect them to come in having any experience in consulting or anything like that. We just want them to have a genuine interest and feel like they can fit in with the community.”
Venkatakrishnan said she has heard many people say that “not having technical [interviews] has taken off that inequity burden.” However, she also said that removing any testing for “objective standing” can lead clubs to start “relying on really subjective things” for admittance.
“Our clubs are about exploration, about real-world application, and about students cultivating good connections with each other,” Elias said. “The most important thing to the undergraduate division and Wharton Council is that we create an equitable, fair way for all of our students — particularly first-year students — who are brand new to the institution, to have access to these clubs.”
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Senior reporter Anvi Sehgal leads coverage of the University's administration and can be reached at sehgal@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies philosophy, politics, and economics. Follow her on X @anvi_sehgal.
