Students are warning their peers to be wary of commercial clipboards being passed around Carleton classrooms that ask for personal information and offer jobs.
Caitlin Heffernan, a first-year journalism student, said she was recruited by an organization called the Summer Management Program to circulate clipboards in Carleton classes asking students to provide their contact information for a summer job opportunity.
Heffernan said she was hired for the position after responding to a post in the Carleton University Class of 2021 Facebook social group promising a “super easy” job that would only last for a few weeks.
“They said you just go to the first row of the lecture hall, explain the program to someone, tell them to pass the clipboard around, and pick it up at the end of the lecture,” Heffernan said. “There was going to be training, but I backed out at the last minute because everything seemed so sketchy. Every time I told friends about this, they told me not to do it.”
In an email Heffernan provided to The Charlatan, the Summer Management Program described the manner in which it wanted its employees to approach students in lecture theatres.
“Enter the classroom and ensure that you do not attract attention from the professor. If you do, sit down and wait until they divert their attention,” the email instructs.
The name on the email that was sent to Heffernan was of Victoria Landreville, the general manager of the Summer Management Program in Ottawa. Upon entering a classroom, the email instructs Summer Management Program employees to approach “someone who looks like a good candidate” in the front row and ask them to sign and pass the clipboard. Before approaching students, employees are asked to ensure that the clipboard has “at least four names on it.”
“It’s imperative that they both sign the clipboard, and that they wait until the class begins to pass the clipboard. If they do not want to sign the clipboard, find someone who will!” the email states. Employees are then asked to “promptly leave the classroom” and repeat the process in up to 10 classrooms that they have been designated to “hit.”
According to its website, the Summer Management Program trains over 200 student managers each summer to run their own businesses.
“With emphasis on weekly goal setting and organizational skills, our program is specifically designed to support hard working students to market, sell, manage and lead their own business,” the website states.
Robert Graham, a fourth-year computer systems engineering student, said he signed up on a clipboard in the fall of 2015, which he said advertised a summer work opportunity that was being circulated in a large engineering course.
But after attending one meeting, he said he felt uncomfortable with the job description.
“They said we would be recruiting other people to work under us,” Graham said. “There was another meeting that I didn’t go to, and I never heard from them again.”
Graham said he had seen “those types of clipboards” being circulated in classes before, though he had never signed them until 2015. He added that he is against the clipboards being circulated in class.
“I feel like they take advantage of students,” he said.
Heffernan agreed, and said that when the clipboards are circulated in classes, “it gives the illusion that they are approved by the university.”
But Patrick Lalonde, vice-president of the Summer Management Program, said in a phone interview that students shouldn’t be so quick to believe in “rumours” about the company.
“It’s unfortunate, but they’re obviously just misinformed,” Lalonde said of students who judge the program without attending an information session. “All they know is they signed up on a clipboard to get more information, and they’re just waiting for their call back. If you actually talk to people who have done it, then you actually get a better idea of how it works.”
Lalonde said students who provide their information on clipboards circulated in classrooms are invited to brief information sessions, where they can decide if the program interests them or not. Interested students can then attend a more “in-depth” information session lasting a couple hours, where they have the chance to apply for managerial positions and go through an interview process. Selected students can then specialize in managing different student businesses, such as painting or window cleaning. He added that student managers will be hiring employees, meeting with clients, and selling jobs.
“We’re not going to take anybody for our program,” Lalonde said. “We actually make a big investment. We spend a lot of money on the people that we select.”
Lalonde said the Summer Management Program has been passing around clipboards in classrooms “at every campus in Canada” for 35 years, and that Carleton has proved to be the most challenging school in recent years because of their policy on commercial activities. He added that students distributing the clipboards in classrooms are instructed not to attract the attention of professors because many buy in to “rumours” about the company.
“Carleton as an administration don’t want us on their campus, and so they basically told the profs, ‘don’t let this happen.’ The profs assume the clipboards are bad, so they kind of made up in their heads, ‘oh, it must be some sort of a scam,’ and so that rumour started circulating,” Lalonde said.
“So now the profs think that clipboards are in some way evil. That led us to avoid the profs so that people can still have this opportunity if they want it, and we try to stay out of trouble,” he added.
Lalonde said that Carleton “used to be one of the best schools where we’d find awesome applicants every year” before the university’s commercial activities policy was instated in 1997. He added that “the vast majority of schools in eastern Canada” take no issue with the Summer Management Program circulating clipboards on campus.
“We’ve talked to [Carleton administration], they’re not interested in talking to us, they’re not even interested in looking into it,” he said. “That’s something that we’re looking to change, because it sucks when you have that kind of misinformation going around about a program that has actually gotten tons of really good responses.”
According to Carleton’s policy on commercial activities, every commercial activity on campus requires the approval of the office of the vice-president (finance and administration).
Ancy Joseph, executive assistant to vice-president (finance and administration) Michel Piché, said that she could not find any communication between her office and the Summer Management Program.
Photo by Meagan Casalino
