HUNTSMAN HALL — As every Penn student who isn’t an Art History major knows, the past month has been dominated by the inescapable shadow of On-Campus Recruiting, also known as OCR. For those slackers who missed the advanced accelerated recruiting deadline 8 months ago, OCR is the perfect opportunity to meet potential employers, interview with them, and land the internship or job that will determine their worth as a human being.
The competition during OCR is intense, with many students clamoring over each other for the opportunity to work at Goldman Sachs or…well… somewhere else… which is OK too. However, sometimes this competition can get out of hand, as it did at Goldman Sach’s info session for OCR this semester.
Although details are still fuzzy considering the anarchy surrounding the event, there have now been six confirmed fatalities in what can only be called a stampede that occurred at the end of the presentation. This stampede broke out at the end of the info session, when students rushed to the front of the room to grab business cards and meet with the presenters.
“The first few students’ questions were fairly standard, but soon became drowned out by countless other questions and escalated to an inaudible wall of screams,” commented one of the presenters. “As more students rushed to the front, the students became so pressed together they reached a critical mass that just burst into the front of the room and right toward us.”
When asked about the tragedy, Roger Pennyworth III W’18, a third-generation Wharton student, said this: “of course what happened to those students was terrible, but the marginal cost of that stampede was far outstripped by the marginal benefit of my getting to talk to those recruiters. My entire life had led up to that moment, and to an internship with Goldman Sachs. I think a lot of my enemies… I mean classmates… felt the same way.”
Evidently many students did feel the same way, as the stampede forced the Goldman Sachs recruiters to climb on top of the nearest table and use chairs to prod the students back.
“The fact that the stampede happened is still very unfortunate,” Pennyworth stated. “There are many things in life more important than working at Goldman Sachs.” Pennyworth then made some sort of muffled noise, which our reporter believes was suppressed laughter.