Do you want a job in South America making women's bathing suits? Or would you prefer to be a casket salesman for a Boston funeral parlor?

Either way, the Office of Student Placement in Weld Hall guarantees you the inside story on how to get the job.

Now in its sixth year, the office is the College's latest in a line reaching back to 1898, the year of the Harvard Appointments Committee. This committee had the job of: "recommending for positions of various kinds, men who are studying or have studied under the Faculty."

From 1908 to 1935, placement after graduation was an alumni responsibility. Then the University took it over, and has carried out its functions ever since, except for the war periods.

Placement operations have expanded enormously since the Committee days. Since 1945 the present office has placed well over 2,000 graduating seniors in big business jobs, or in government departments. Thousands more have been given help in finding jobs for themselves.

The office has sent some men out to build oil refineries in India for Standard Vacuum: some to work on secret government prospects at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory; others to executive jobs in department stores like Macy's, and still others to designing helicopters for Bell Aircraft.

Sometimes though, the office cannot satisfy employers. For example, one Mid-Western manufacturer of ladies' underwear, has for years past asked for graduates from the College to do sales work for him. Many lingerie-minded students have tried for the job, but all have failed. They never met the apparently vital specification that they be between five foot ten and six feet one tall.

Despite the exotic requests of some employers, "Placements is a little more than getting a job," says John W. Teele, the office's present director, and also the University's Director of Personnel. "Our idea of good placement is that it follows from the right kind of counselling. A possible objective for us might be to try and place the whole of our graduating class. But I think the most important standard to aim at, is the qualitative one does the man like his job?"

Many critics, from employers to students, disagree with this whole approach. They say the success of a placement policy stands or falls by the quantity of men it gets placed. They point approving fingers at mid-Western colleges like Chicago or Michigan where placement agencies often boast getting jobs for 100 percent of the graduating class.

Teele thinks much of this statistics' argument is 'hocus-pocus.' "How can you always tell whether a placement office has put the man in the job or not?" he asks. By way of demonstrating his point, he tells the story of a student whom he once referred for a job to the "Boston Herald." The "Herald" interviewer sent him to a friend at the "Boston Globe." The "Globe" man thought the student had great potentialities and tried to find him a job with a publisher. The publisher had no openings, but remembered a friend on another Boston paper. This was the man who finally hired the student.

"If we can call that placement," says Teele, "then perhaps we can claim to place everybody."

Not on a Platter

Alexander Clark, assistant director of the office, thinks the "100-percenters" are wrong, but for different-reasons. He asks the basic question: "Are you going to spoon-feed your man with a lot of jobs that you hand to him on a platter, or are you going to train him so he can go out and find a job for himself?"

Furthermore, students here are mostly liberal arts majors, and only in a few cases get the specialized training that forms the back-bone of study at many colleges. They therefore find that fields like accountancy, electronics, or advertising, are closed to them unless they take special training courses. More important, they start off knowing little or nothing about what work they will have to do in such fields.

Spoon-feeding, Clark feels, is way out of line with Harvard's whole teaching tradition. "From the day a man gets here," he says, "he is told he will have to turn himself into a tough-minded, independent thinker. He starts going to his courses and finds his only big 'must' is being present at examinations. He must arrange his whole home-work schedule himself, as well as almost everything else he does."