Mia Riverton ’99—a performer since age four—knew she wanted to go into the entertainment industry when she graduated from Harvard.

But Riverton says she found few resources related to arts and entertainment careers when she went to Harvard’s Office of Career Services (OCS) for help.

The OCS counselor Riverton saw was “extremely

encouraging, but she told me flat out that they didn’t have the resources,” Riverton says.

To find a way into the industry, Riverton had to turn elsewhere, starting an e-mail list of people she knew who were interested in the field. As the list expanded, Riverton collaborated with Stacy Cohen ’89 and Adam Fratto ’90 to start Harvardwood, a non-profit organization that connects current Harvard students with alums in arts and entertainment.

Sparked by the dead end at OCS, Harvardwood today runs an intersession program and a summer internship program which together attract 100 to 120 Harvard students per year.

And Riverton says that OCS—partly through working with Harvardwood—has developed better resources for students interested in those careers than it had when she was a student.

But with nearly 2,000 students participating in the on-campus recruiting program for full-time or summer jobs this academic year, students and career counselors say that other employment options are overshadowed by the visibility, organization, and apparent ease of the recruiting process.

For fields outside of finance and consulting, which traditionally dominate the recruiting process, students say they have had a harder time getting career assistance at OCS. And OCS counselors say it is harder to provide students with direct paths to such careers—a source of frustration for students already busy with schoolwork and extracurriculars and perhaps overwhelmed by or undecided about the variety of career options available.

“I guess people would just expect that at Harvard the career services would be this magical place where you could find any job, because before you come to Harvard you hear that once you have the Harvard name on your resume, you won’t have any trouble finding a job,” says Kimberly M. Cheng ’06, who has participated in the Harvardwood program.

Both students and OCS counselors see a disconnect between student expectations and the realities of the job search.

Though students and OCS counselors try to collaborate to connect students with their desired careers, the counselors say their mission is not to place students in specific jobs, but to teach them lasting career-finding skills. With this goal in mind, they say that OCS cannot replace student initiative in the process.

THE CULTURE OF RECRUITING

This year, 1,912 students—almost a third of the student body—submitted applications to 433 organizations recruiting for either summer or full-time positions. The interview data excludes McKinsey and Teach for America, programs for which OCS does not have records, according to OCS Director William Wright-Swadel.

The companies know in September that they want to hire a particular number of analysts that year, and that they can reach that number by recruiting at Harvard and a certain number of other schools, so they participate in the on-campus recruiting program, Wright-Swadel says.