Bringing in the Dough: Woohoo!

Last Friday at the 2007 Career Forum, as students and recruiters exchanged monotonic pleasantries inside the Gordon Track and Tennis Center, one high-pitched noise rose above the din. “Woohoo!”

The Pillsbury Doughboy stood in front of the General Mills (GM) table , instantly recognizable in its white chef’s hat and expansive stomach—sure enough, the Doughboy responded to FM’s poke with a squeal of irrepressible glee.

Emily S. High ’06, a marketing associate at GM, stood calmly by while the Doughboy began shimmying its body from side to side. “It’s definitely drawn a lot of people to our booth,” High said.

One enterprising job-hunter even used the Doughboy as an icebreaker. “Who’s in there?” he asked a GM representative. “It’s the Doughboy!” she replied with an enigmatic smile. The student tried a different tack to get the recruiter to talk. “It must be hot in there,” he said. “There are no air holes.”

But GM seemed unwilling to acknowledge that there was a person inside the polyester. Brittany L. Lin ’09, who learned about the gig through fellow Kappa Kappa Gamma member High, was allowed to don the suit on the condition that she limit her vocabulary to one word. “General Mills didn’t really allow me to speak—I just went ‘Woohoo!’ when people poked my stomach,” she said.

Never mind that the idea of a 6-foot-tall Doughboy with a mind of its own is vaguely alarming. “Some people said I was creepy,” said Lin. “Especially when I started walking—people said that was really scary.”

The job might not have been ideal, but Lin thinks she had the right idea: “You can be kind of goofy. You’re an undergrad at a career fair, and this is the complete opposite of how you would normally act.” The $25 an hour didn’t hurt either; that’s how much i-bankers make, right? Woohoo!