The Bottom Line

Recently resigned GM CEO Rick Wagoner: your new competition

Here at Penn, the quest for the summer internship is institutionalized into three little letters:

O. C. R.

The underlying reason for students to get an internship is to eventually secure full-time employment after graduation. The side benefit of having something to do during the summer days doesn’t hurt, nor does the extra money.

For employers, hiring interns can create long-term cost benefits. Interns are not only cheap and relatively skilled labor; they are also a great pool from which firms can draw their first-year classes, saving on repeat recruiting expenditures.

This model implicitly assumes that interns are college students or the freshly graduated who are economically able to work for lower wages because they have the safety net of parents to fall back on.

That was in the old, pre-recession days. Read more…

Uncategorized internships, jobs, OCR

I know a lot of you are looking for jobs right now and are completely stressed out by it. I’ve never been as glad to be below 21 (the age to get that first job of course). I’ll point you towards this article on CNN, which explains that 20 of the top 100 companies to work for are hiring.

Uncategorized jobs

With all the fireworks and theatrics surrounding the signing of the second stimulus bill, one would think that the economy would bounce right back. This has not been the case, however.

Recent figures from the International Monetary Fund show that, in fact, global growth this year is forecasted to fall to a measly .5% at best. In addition, the economy is not expected to rectify itself anytime in the next year to date. It doesn’t help that the stimulus plan is to be doled out over a period of eleven years.

What does this mean for you, my Locust Walk-walking friends? On Campus Recruiting is going to get even more stressful. Companies are going to cut costs and improve productivity where they can. Unpaid internships are going to become more and more valuable.

Be warned though, keeping the job is going to be as hard, or harder, as finding the position. Last semester, a lot of our friends who graduate this spring came back from summer internships with job offers from Merrill Lynch, breathing a sigh of relief when the merger with Bank of America (BOA) went through—I feel for our Lehman-offered friends. With Merill’s estimated value at $175 billion, their futures at the new company not only seemed secure, but also bright.

Unfortunately, it seems as if this dream empire is doomed to come crashing down. Today, Merill Lynch has a market capitalization of a mere $40 billion. Indeed it seems that Kenneth D.Lewis, BOA’s chief executive, has made a major mistake in his race to expand. With rumors of John Thain, the brains behind the Merill-BOA merger, asking for a $40 million bonus, it’s no wonder even he was ousted.

Uncategorized jobs, stimulus