The coolest college clique to join this year isn't a sorority or the lacrosse team. Students from the University of Southern California to Dartmouth College are lining up to become on-campus volunteer marketers for technology start-ups.
Students are slipping into lecture halls to write brand names and company URLs on professors' white boards, making cold pitches to strangers on college-town streets, creating Facebook pages, producing videos and lobbying school newspapers to plug the businesses of entrepreneurs in New York City and Silicon Valley.
Students earn neither cash nor college credit. Instead, ambassadors say they garner a different type of currency: résumé fodder. Many "ambassador programs" are modeled after those run for decades by music labels in which students got free records and cassettes in exchange for splaying posters around bars and libraries promoting album releases and concerts.
Read more | Katherine Rosman | "Big Marketers on Campus" | Wall Street Journal