Almost two weeks into the spring semester, the Penn InTouch shopping season is nearing its end and students are quickly turning their eyes and ears to a new order of business: the summer.
Love it or hate it, the season of the internship search is here, the time when many students feel the burn of Penn pre-professionalism.
"It's not everywhere that you have 20-year-olds vying for 100-hour-a-week jobs," said College junior Alison Nadle, who applied for internships with McKinsey & Company in Dubai and Bahrain. "It's a lot of stress, it's a lot of pressure and I think it's a really weird culture, to be honest."
According to Director of Career Services Patricia Rose, the pre-professional culture at Penn is a reflection of its three professional undergraduate schools and its "pragmatic and ambitious" student body.
Despite On-Campus Recruiting's focus on junior-year job candidates, even freshmen are a part of the craze.
Wharton freshman Andrew Dudum, for example, has applied for four positions in investment banking, as well as tapped connections through family and friends.
He said he hopes an internship this summer will give him the opportunity to meet professionals in the field, sit in on meetings and get a sense for his career interests and how the industry works.
"I don't want to be a second-semester senior looking for a job or not sure what I'm interested in and have to take a couple of years to figure that out," he said.
Dudum is one of 1,300 Penn students who have already applied for internships through "iNet," a new consortium shared by Georgetown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Rice University, Stanford University, New York University, Yale University and Penn.
Launched earlier this year by Rose and a colleague at Stanford, iNet already boasts over 500 postings, and new employers are registering every day.
The internship database favors no single industry over another, an advantage for students whose career paths are not represented in OCR.
Rose said the business- and engineering-slant of the recruiting period reflects the ability of those industries to predict their intern needs over a year in advance - the amount of time required to meet Penn's employer registration deadlines for OCR.
In addition to OCR and iNet, Career Services sponsors nine career fairs throughout the year, including the Spring Career Fair, which is scheduled for Feb. 29. The event will feature a wide range of employers, the majority of whom did not participate in OCR.
But some students aren't buying into the internship hype.
College sophomore Emma Margolin hopes to savor her last summer before the junior-year crunch by pursuing her passion in theater.
"I know a lot of Penn students who are really cognizant of their futures, even in their 19-year-old selves," she said. "I really do feel that that's not the most important thing to do after sophomore year. This year I'd rather do what I like."
According to Rose, the trick is to find a healthy balance.
"There's nothing wrong with working and working hard during the summer, but if you're spending 40 hours a week during spring semester looking for an internship, that's not a good use of your time," she said.
Instead, Rose said, students should keep their primary focus on academics, as well as developing skills outside the classroom and enjoying life at Penn.
"Our undergraduates are lucky to have the opportunity to be here," Rose said. "It would be unfortunate indeed if they spent these four years on the hereafter."
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