Peace Corps Vies for the Best : Recruiters Strike It Rich on Campuses in State

It hardly seemed the time or place to talk someone into shoveling manure on a Gabonese goat farm.

Most of the employment recruiters attending the UC Irvine Graduate School of Management’s reception at the University Club last month were dangling the kinds of jobs that lead to BMWs and refrigerators full of Brie. The students, dressed for success, nibbling hors d’oeuvres from silver platters and sipping white wine, had the distinct look of aspiring “Y-word” types (as Michael Doonesbury calls a certain youthful, upwardly mobile and terribly over-publicized segment of the baby-boom generation).

But there, rubbing elbows with his counterparts from Rockwell International, Bank of America, Peat Marwick and New York Life, was Terry Ratigan, 27, of the U.S. Peace Corps. Despite the fact that the jobs he was peddling offer no pay in the traditional sense and decidedly unconventional perks, when Ratigan made his pitch the emerging MBA’s were attentive.

25th Anniversary Saturday

Saturday is the 25th anniversary of the day President John F. Kennedy signed the Executive Order creating the Peace Corps--a quasi-government organization that sends American volunteers to help the people of developing nations. Although Peace Corps recruiters in Southern California concede that a lot has changed since that era when everyone was asking not what their country could do for them but . . ., they say that the Peace Corps remains a competitive recruiter of post-Me Generation graduates.

Last year, 15,000 people sent in applications for about 3,200 positions, and more than 6,000 volunteers of all ages are at work on projects of every description in 62 countries, Peace Corps literature points out. In fact, according to the November-December ’85 issue of Black Collegian magazine, the Peace Corps is the single largest “employer” of recent college graduates in the country. California campuses are by far the most fertile grounds for harvesting new recruits, Peace Corps staff members said.

Ratigan and other recruiters in the San Diego and Los Angeles offices, whose turf runs from the Mexican border to San Luis Obispo and throughout Arizona, offered a variety of reasons why a recent college graduate might want to make the commitment to a minimum of 27 months in the Peace Corps. (An Illinois man, Odilon Long, 83, has the longevity record, having served for more than 15 years in the African countries of Gabon, Togo, Sierra Leone, Upper Volta, and Burkina Faso. He is now in Haiti.)

Perhaps the main criteria and incentive for a good volunteer are that he “wants to go out and help people,” Ratigan said. He and other recruiters agreed that with recent media attention on hunger in Africa, altruism is again becoming fashionable.

They added, though, that today’s volunteers tend to be more pragmatic than their counterparts were in the idealistic ‘60s.

Ratigan said: “In the last two years I’ve noticed more people are asking, ‘What really is being done about hunger? Is it reasonable to assume that I can go and do something that will make a difference?’ ”

Most volunteers’ altruism is tempered with careerism, recruiters said. The Peace Corps, in turn, has been emphasizing what a stint with the organization can do for a person’s resume.

For instance, recruiters are quick to point out that “Peace Corps positions are very responsible, much more so than those most other recent college graduates are given,” Ratigan said. “Also, because you’ve worked overseas, there’s a tremendous amount of credibility that goes with being a Peace Corps volunteer. It shows you’re flexible.” And then there are the language skills Peace Corps volunteers acquire.

Served in Sierra Leone

These are all things that impress employers, said Ratigan, who spent his 27-month tour as a volunteer in the West African country of Sierra Leone, helping farmers develop new methods of rice farming.

But the less tangible rewards of the job are probably what persuade most people to make the big decision, said the recruiters, all of whom are “returned volunteers.”

“Word of mouth is our most effective tool,” Ratigan explained, adding that testimonials don’t come only from people who are paid to seek out new talent.

For instance, when a young woman at the UCI function expressed interest in the Peace Corps, Ratigan steered her over to Rick Passo, who had spent 27 months in the Philippines as a volunteer.

Although his job description in the Philippines was “local development administration”--which translated mostly to data gathering--Passo explained that, like most volunteers, he also worked with people on the basic level. He said, for example, that introducing the local population to a simple, efficient type of cooking stove was particularly satisfying.

‘Important Life Experience’

Since returning to the United States, Passo has worked as a financial management specialist at General Electric and earned a master’s in business administration. But, as he said at the UCI function: “It’s been five years since I got out of the Peace Corps, and it’s still my most important life experience.”

A couple of weeks later, at Cal State Long Beach, Greg Roche, 28, of Huntington Beach offered similar unofficial testimony. While the official recruiters were at some of the 30 classes they addressed during a recruitment blitz on that campus, Roche sat at a table laden with Peace Corps literature, answering the questions of students who dropped by.

Roche himself had never heard of the Peace Corps before he came across a flyer at UCI in 1981, he said. But the flyer persuaded him to talk to a recruiter, and after receiving his bachelor’s degree in linguistics, he signed up.

He began to understand how thoroughly that decision would change his life when, at 3 in the morning one day in 1981, he stumbled off a plane and into the culture shock of the Central African nation of Niger, on the southern rim of the Sahara Desert. “I remember walking down the street the next day and just taking it all in,” he said, “the old people selling things on the street, kids playing outside buildings made of mud. . . .”

After completing a six-week training course, in which he learned teaching skills and the native language, Hausa, Roche was sent to teach English to schoolchildren in the dusty little town of Madaoua.

Back in the United States since 1983, he is now completing his master’s degree in applied linguistics at Cal State Long Beach and teaching English to foreign students at Long Beach City College. As soon as he graduates, he hopes to rejoin the Peace Corps and return to Niger. And he doesn’t hesitate to tell others about the job he enjoyed so much.

“Where are the places an engineer could go? Anywhere?” Steven Kariya, 19, asked, having slipped out of the passing stream of students to take a look at the table.

“Not anywhere,” Roche replied. “What kind of engineering are you studying?”

Like many of the students who wandered up to the table, Kariya--who said he is studying mechanical engineering--seemed surprised that the Peace Corps can afford to be choosy. But with the exception of an odd mix of specialties--math teachers and bee keepers, for instance--the supply of Peace Corps hopefuls now exceeds the demand, recruiters said.

Following the lead of the recruiters, Roche probed Kariya a bit to find out more about why he might be interested in the Peace Corps. “I think I might get burned out on a 9-to-5 job,” Kariya said. “. . . I’m a Christian, and I was going to be a missionary, but I don’t think I’d be able to use the skills I’ve gone to school to learn.”

“What can you guys do for English majors?” another student asked.

Back from a classroom talk, Rick Mead, 29, the area manager for recruiting, answered: “The only place we don’t have English teaching programs is in Latin America.”

“Do you have any information on pay?” the student asked.

“You’d be a volunteer,” Mead said, explaining that Peace Corps volunteers are given a place to live, free medical and dental care and a stipend that will allow them to live at the level of the people in the host country. At the end of their service they receive a $175 readjustment payment for each month served.

“The benefits have a lot more to do with what you get out of it personally than the monetary rewards,” Mead said.

“Yeah, the travel is something that interests me,” the student said.

“That’s something you do, but you also have to be aware of the frustrations,” Mead replied. “Except for vacation time, as a volunteer you go and you stay in one spot. And it may be a backward area that’s not entertaining in the way Long Beach is.”

‘Not for Everyone’

“I spend a lot of time talking people out of joining the Peace Corps,” said recruiter Mathew Chasanoff, 26. “It’s not all positive and rosy. It’s not for everybody,” he said, explaining that someone who makes it all the way to Botswana before deciding to abandon the program does a lot more harm than good. (The dropout rate is about 25%, according to recruiters.)

Chasanoff, who was a business major at the University of Rhode Island when he joined the Peace Corps, said that chronologically he belongs to the Me Generation. He also said that his friends’ responses to his decision to forsake the traditional scramble up the corporate ladder were similar to responses of the students he talks to today.

“A lot of people thought it was wonderful and were envious even, and a lot of people thought I was nuts--that I’d be missing out, that I’d be behind everybody else when I got back,” he said.

But Chasanoff’s goals had evolved while in college, he said. “The Peace Corps seemed like a good way to use my degree to help people who really needed it, rather than just to make more money for myself and a corporation.”

So he went to Gambia in western Africa, where he helped the people develop small enterprises and taught them marketing and money management. Chasanoff said he got a lot more out of his time in Gambia than the ability to impress people around the office by launching into conversations in Malof, the distinctive, guttural dialect in which he became fluent .

“I think that I broadened myself . . . more than you could possibly imagine. I developed a whole different outlook and a more realistic view of the world,” he said. And as the recruiters tried to impress upon all the students they met, a realistic world view is becoming increasingly important for altruists and careerists alike.