more on oci, including why symplicity.com sucks.

[justin gosling]

OCI bidding has come and gone for UC Hastings students; all we can do now is sit around and wait until the bid results are released on the first day of school.

It seemed to me like this year was a bit different than usual because there were a lot of underbid employers. Maybe this happens all the time, but it strikes me as odd. Most of the underbid employers either had underbidding for an office outside of San Francisco, or a specialized interview schedule (e.g. IP Only). I guess that is good news for anyone looking to work somewhere other than SF, but it kind of sucks for the rest of us.

To their credit, our Career Services Center quickly rectified the situation: they let us know about the bidding trends and extended the amount of time we had to bid, while increasing the number of available bids per student by 10. Cool.

Increasing the number of bids got me thinking about OCI in general.  As Brian pointed out only a small percentage of students actually get jobs through OCI. If that is the case, then why is there so much pressure to participate in a program that will not land jobs for the majority of interviewees? Moreover, because class rank plays a major role in the outcome of OCI summer associate offers, does that mean those outside of the top XX% should skip OCI altogether? While I am not in the upper echelon of the class rank I still bid because Career Services made OCI sound like such a fantastic opportunity.

So why does Career Services hype OCI so much?

My theory is that Career services is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Career Services knows that only a portion of the class will receive SA offers, but they also want to maintain a rapport with employers and bring as many warm bodies as possible into the pool of interview candidates. So, while OCI really only serves a small portion of the student body, they need to pump up the interest from everyone in the school so there is enough to make it a viable program. If the number of interviewers drops and employers are underbid, then the employers will eventually realize it's simply not worth going through the OCI motions only for a handful of interviewees. At the same time, if employers drop out then OCI fails to meet student demand.

The whole process is cyclical and seems like a lot of frustration for everyone, especially the hyped up students who do not receive an interview and the Career Services Center.

Sidenote: are any other symplicity.com OCI users sick of the Symplicity website? Ugg, it's awful. Not only does the interface try to be so smart that it ends up being clunky and unusable, but they break the number one rule of website design: Don't Break the Back Button!  That list of web design mistakes was made almost a decade ago, and symplicity.com is apparently not aware of it.

Comments

[bb]

symplicity.com sux

I can't stand symplicity either. The school I go to uses it for job listings and the broken back button is extremely annoying. I can't see a reason why they would do that, and it actually seems like it's more work to design it that way. Also, the pretty javascript menu doesn't work in Opera.

Well the menu works in opera now, but the broken back button still destroys the site.