DEEP IN THE WOODS NEXT TO VLSB, Calif. – Berkeley Consulting has unveiled a new, state-of-the-art recruitment format by hosting their first annual “Stripped for Success” competition, a lazily-named knockoff of the hit show “Naked and Afraid.”
“Y’know, it’s tough hunting for fish in Strawberry Creek while bullshitting a 56 week marketing plan, but when you keep in mind what we’re playing for here– 20 hours a week of free labor for our corporate overlords– the pain is worth it,” explained standout contestant and submissive king Billy Cheng, while intensely market sizing the number of people that would reject his recruitment fliers on Sproul. “What I love about this is that it encapsulates the collaborative spirit of Berkeley. I mean sure, I did push that one kid to his death in the climb-a-tree-while-lying -about-my-research-sources challenge, and see my fellow competitors as below me, but at the end of the day, we can all come together and passive-aggressively talk about our high school GPAs.”
“As the contestants, sorry I mean applicants, partake in our rigorous process, we grade them on relevant and strict rubrics, such as ‘Are they conventionally attractive?, Did they go to my high school?,’ and perhaps most importantly, ‘Do they do everything possible to stroke my ego?’” explained club member Connor Chad-Kyle.
Following in the footsteps of the common consulting motto, “take what others did and claim it as new and inventive,” Berkeley Consulting’s new president Anna Hughes reveled in her program’s success.
“We really think that taking these 700 potential applicants and putting them in the forest for two weeks will really help us understand which five we should pick at the end of the day,” Hughes explained, before going on a ten minute monologue about her Black Rock CSR summer internship in New York. “Have we already decided the five people we’ll pick because they know the president? Sure. But putting these kids through physical torture is the best way to prepare them for a career of doing cocaine in a New York nightclub in their mid 30s.”
Although applicants are currently going through excruciating pain sending out 10,000 emails a day whilst hunting lost foothill deer for their survival, the future beacons of corporate America will be focused on their potential future with the club, where they can learn from the best, slave over a large corporation’s busy work and become LinkedIn influencers. One such corporate liaison, John Denroe of Adobe, was impressed with the applicants on display.
“When I sign a contract with a bunch of college kids that I know will probably fuck up whatever I give them, I want to know that they had to go through hell and back to earn my 30 minute Google Meets meeting and lukewarm congratulations as I focus back on my actual job,” Denroe explained, sending a $15,000 check he had previously used as toilet paper. “Much like this application process, where the interviewers are somehow both enthusiastic but incredibly distant, I want to set a tone of reverence when my team meets me– and that really comes from just not engaging in the project whatsoever until a last minute Zoom call. That’s why I’m going to ghost the team for three months before the final deliverable.”
Whatever the outcome, results of the game show will be announced live, this Friday, at Sproul, where prospective Excel slaves will find out if all their pain and suffering was worth it, or if a mid semester crisis and pivot to Greek life is on the horizon.