What HapPenned?
Visualizing Career Pathways of Penn Undergraduates
Summer 2020
Among colleges, Penn is known for its pre-professional culture, and within it, Wharton serves as an extreme. As a result, I thought it would be interesting to explore the data on internship/full-time recruitment to see how much these stereotypes hold true.
Data is taken from Penn Career Services which publishes annual summer and postgraduate results of undergraduate students at the Wharton School. These surveys reflect the responses of 708 undergraduates (~41% response rate) and 582 new graduates (~93% response rate).
On the graph to the right, the columns (from left to right) represent student years, concentration of study, and industry of employment.
Are we really just excellent sheep?
It’s clear from the graph, that each additional year, more and more people flow towards the occupations of finance and consulting. Whether it’s the prestige these jobs offer, the bandwagon effect, or their excellent exit opportunities (perhaps a mixture of all 3) that by the time graduation roles around 3 out of every 4 students is either in a finance or consulting role.
On the right-most chart, we can see how the size of the companies people intern at change over time. The size breakdowns are as follows.
Next year, they’ll start recruiting you from kindergarten!
Just in the past 4 years, the recruitment timeline has been heavily pushed up for rising-senior summer internships. The huge jump in 2019 to around 30% of students receiving offers before August of the previous year resulted from many banks pushing their recruitment for summer 2019 to spring 2018, meaning that students were interviewing for internship positions well over a year in advance.
Is it all about connections?
Since few companies hire freshmen interns, it’s no surprise that many rising sophomores turn to personal contacts or Penn resources for opportunities. These slices of the pie shrink in later years, as most upperclassmen rely on on-campus recruitment and direct applications to find their jobs.
What about the rest of Penn?
So far, the data has come exclusively from Wharton, the most pre-professional school, how do these outcome change when accounting for the broader Penn community.
The greatest spread in graduate employment exists in the college, where no industry holds the majority. However it is interesting to note finance and consulting’s popularity in engineering and the college. Since nursing offers the most specialized program, it makes sense that most of the working students end up in healthcare.
Even from the first summer break, students in the business and engineering schools are much more likely to pursue an internship instead of taking classes, traveling, or having a non-intern jobs.
Wharton students are more likely to directly enter the workforce. This makes sense since even though many students are planning on getting an MBA in the future, most programs expect them to work first for several years.
My Thoughts
Honestly, I wasn’t too surprised by the results. While Wharton offers great resources and opportunities, there is a huge lack of diversity in the careers people end up pursuing. While some may point to finance/consulting’s attractiveness for its high compensation, part of the appeal is also about delaying the decision to specialize. These industries are known for being an excellent launching pad to any other career. And when I talk to my peers, many point to the excellent exit opportunities and the ability to keep your options open.
So while many students start their career paths from the same stepping stone, every one may end up in very different positions. As a result, tracking outcomes, 5 to 10 years after graduation may tell us a very different story.