3 - Opportunism

Opportunism is, I believe, a neutral word. When someone choose to walk up to talk to the recruiter he met in career fair before in a restaurant and later scored a job, we call it opportunism. When someone cut in line while nobody finds out and have the chance of buying the last ticket, we can also call it opportunism. Just as professor said, opportunistic behavior can be either ethical or unethical. Also, it is not always the best thing to be opportunistic. I want to share a story I involved and witnessed. It happened at the Business Career Fair this week.

If you every been to the Business Career Fair here on campus, you would do research and narrow down the companies that you want to talk to because there are just way too many people. It is difficult for anyone to be able to talk to a bunch of companies under the limited time you have. So it was very critical to save time and energy. Long line of students queueing for recruiters can be seen everywhere. But not everyone decided to wait in the line as supposed to.

I was queueing in a long line to talk to a consulting firm. There were three recruiters, each has a line of 2-3 people waiting to talk to them. And there was a very long line that waiting to queue for the three short lines so it leaves the space between short lines and the long line that other people can walk and avoid jam. Most of the people sees the situation would queue at the end of the long line. But I saw two people looked at the long line and just walk straight to the short lines when the people at the front of the long line did not look at them. And as you could tell, they came later than I did but still talked to recruiter before me.

Clearly those two people took the chance and cut in line so that they could save time and energy to talk to other companies that they are interested in. It is an act of opportunism even though it is not ethical. They took advantages of the situation. It is really tempting to cut in line during career fair since the long line, high temperature and the noise could stress you out very quickly. Those two people just simply want to rush the process and boost their chance of landing a job.

You might say that it could be that they really didn’t realize that the long line of people were waiting for the short lines. But the truth is, they peaked at the long lines several times after they stepped in the short lines. So from my perspective, I do not believe that they did not do it on purpose.

Therefore, it is not unusual to see opportunistic and unethical behavior at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive.