Placement Office Helps New Graduates to Get Jobs by Acting as Library, Information Center

For the four hundred odd undergraduates who every June or September begin pacing the streets for jobs, the University maintains a Placement Office, which for more than ten years has supplied all available vocational information.

Members of the Placement Office staff, in their headquarters in the basement of University Hall, talk over with students problems about finding jobs and direct them to other sources of information, whether books, company pamphlets, or graduate reports. More of an employment agency than a vocational guidance bureau, the Placement Office does not advise students as to what profession or business they should enter.

Contains Industrial Reports

The Office itself contains for immediate reference a small library with an extensive bibliography of all vocational literature. It also has reports about vacant positions in many large industrial concerns.

Since only a few books on occupations have been written for students at the college level, the Office has been able to collect only a small nucleus of readable volumes, to which new publications are constantly being added.

Graduate Work Histories

Probably the most useful of all material available in the Placement Office is a collection of Work Histories of Harvard graduates in business and industry. Dating from 1933 to 1940, these histories are vocational autobiographies in which from year to year alumni report progress in their careers.

In these the work Histories graduates describe their jobs, discuss their problems of adjustment to business life, comment on their living conditions, and offer advice to younger Harvard men who may follow in their wake. The reports contain the very latest first hand information on business and industrial opportunities in the words of Harvard men from no more than eight years out of college.