All the Same Toys

Those seniors who ventured into the Office of Career Services (OCS) 1999 Career Forum last Friday may have experienced a moment of deja vu. Was this not faintly reminiscent of that other mental meat market, the Freshman Activities Fair? True, the screaming upperclassmen with their in-your-face heckling have been replaced by well-dressed, well-heeled members of the "real world" who wait instead for us to come and find them. And there's no question that the handouts are a lot more enticing--free T-shirts and playing cards are certainly a step up from a fistful of candy and four years' worth of worthless e-mails from a mailing list you just can't seem to shake.

But though we may be looking to find a livelihood and not a hobby, the essence of the event is the same. We need to make a decision about where to invest our energies, we're new to the area and we'd like to know our options. So why did it seem that all those glossy recruiting pamphlets contained fewer choices than did the tacky posters and ridiculous stunts of long ago? Why did it seem as if the same power suit, the same strong handshake, the same future sat behind each and every table?

We'll spare you the suspense. It should come as no surprise to most undergraduates that the consulting industry constituted the largest category of employers, with a whopping 41 companies sending representatives. Close behind in terms of numbers were the investment banking and computer technology firms, the latter having long shed their Silicon Valley grunge. Here and there were token "alternatives"--Teach for America, the Peace Corps, the Walt Disney Corporation--some of whose employees chose to wear clothes that tended (gasp) more toward casual Fridays than toward Wall Street.

It is awfully hard to expect students to swallow the idea that, given the incredible spectrum of career options, such firms comprise the same percentage of the real job market as they did at the fair. The choices represented did students a gross disservice by perpetuating a narrow-minded perception of success.

Moreover, the lack of comparable alternatives was almost embarrassing. The "media," "accounting" and "insurance" categories contained only one company each; surely, it is not merely arrogance that leads us to believe that there must be other firms in those fields eager to recruit Harvard graduates (though we do acknowledge that the wealth of the firms represented allows them to come to the fair with greater ease). In the future, we would hope that the event's organizers would redouble their efforts to attract a wide variety of industries.

The OCS forum is the only University-recognized career presentation fair. To have such an overrepresentation of certain industries sends a powerful message to students. We hope that seniors who are currently embroiled in the dilemma of what to do during life after Harvard do not feel as if they needed to find the ultimate answer last Friday.