For many juniors who have been seeking internships in consulting and finance through Harvard’s on-campus interview program, today is the deadline to decide whether to decline or accept outstanding offers.

According to preliminary data from the Office of Career Services, 554 juniors—or 33 percent of the Class of 2012—participated in the On-Campus Interview program this year, leading to roughly 11,174 internship applications in total and an average number of five interviews per student.

This year, interviews through the OCI program began on Jan. 28, the first Friday of the spring semester.

OCS has made an effort to shorten the timeline of the recruiting process from six weeks to five weeks this spring, according to Deborah A. Carroll, director of the on-campus interview program.

OCS has made it a policy for participating companies that they must give students until March 4 or three weeks after offer date—whichever comes later—to make a final decision.

“Definitely this year we are finding a lot of organizations weren’t getting their offers out early enough for the March 4th deadline to reply, but that students have three weeks of notice for most of them,” Carroll said.

Sometimes the March 4 deadline allows students more time to consider their summer prospects, making sure that students are given the chance to fully evaluate internship offers that came in at different times.

“The March 4th date is to even the playing field among those who come on the first day and those who come on the third week so that students can compare,” Carroll said.

Yet even with the OCS policy in place, students in the recruiting process say they have had mixed experience interacting with the firms.

Some students say they are not facing much pressure in terms of decision-making, such as Daniel C. Norris ’12, who quickly accepted an offer made by Bain & Company this past Monday.

Other students, however, say they have faced more pressure from the companies that offered them internships.

“I got an exploding offer on my first day. [They told me] ‘you have to tell us in two days if you want to take this.’ ... This was a good place but it was just putting me at an awkward spot,” said Sanjay P. Misra ’12.

According to Carroll, OCS has dealt with many cases in which students were not given enough time to make decisions on offers. Carroll said that the Office encourages students to speak up about the issue, as “it is always [OCS’s] place to enforce the rule.”

“We definitely had a lot of students come in this spring, and we have a sort of multi-pronged approach to this,” Carroll said.

“We can coach students on how to make sure that they get enough time on their own, as some of them are pretty nervous about having OCS [intervene]. At the same time we absolutely can call employers,” Carroll said.

—Staff writer Heng Shao can be reached at shao@college.harvard.edu.