“If all you’re thinking about is your GPA and your resume and how you are positioning yourself for internships in September of your sophomore year, it’s just detracting from the whole point of college, which I think is about opening up new horizons.
“At some point, of course, our students have to think about what they are going to do after college, but we want students to have lots of opportunities to explore and find their passions while they’re here,” says Garrett. It was starting to take away from what the college experience is supposed to be about, which is exploration, Garrett says. They were getting into situations that might lead to regret, and it was creating a lot of stress.” “It became a wellness issue for students, trying to plan ahead while feeling unable to communicate their desire to explore different options and learn about what they most prefer because of this early time pressure. “It’s very difficult for a student to decide as a second-semester sophomore what they are going to be doing during their junior year summer, when they haven’t even figured out how they feel about their sophomore year summer experience yet,” Rosenkopf says. She also heard directly from students how this increasingly early internship recruiting was taking a toll on them and their academic performance. Then it moved to the fall semester before, the summer before, and on and on. Lori Rosenkopf, vice dean and director of the Wharton Undergraduate Division, noticed the trend in action: About five years ago, it was the norm for internship recruiting to happen the semester directly before the internship. “We were thinking, ‘Come on, this is just not right.’ The alarm bell went off for everybody.” The Rising Tide “We got to this absurd extreme where a firm wanted to try to lock students up for internships that would start in 21 months time, at a time when the students had only two semesters on campus,” says Garrett. That pressure was only heightened in the past year or so as several banks increasingly inched up recruiting schedules - to students’ sophomore years. Such high first-job expectations require hard work and grit to fulfill, which adds extra weight on students’ shoulders, not only to “get good jobs, but to get good jobs early in their college careers,” explains Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett. Summer internships, especially those for rising seniors, aid very directly in full-time job placement, acting, more often than not, as “try ons” for both the firms and the students. At the Wharton School, undergraduate students are unsurprisingly laser-focused on career preparedness, as well as landing their dream gigs right out of college.
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