Smart: Student Invents “Director of Reverse Philanthropy” Position for Club Board

It’s club/organization election time again, and the competition is fierce. As all Penn students have come to know, getting into college is just the beginning of the cutthroat application process. Students may get disheartened by the scarcity of opportunity for so many qualified applicants.

But like any good entrepreneur, Brendan Shinbaum (W '20) thought of a new way to beat the system.

“I realized that the best way for me to guarantee getting a position would be to make up a new position. But it needed to be different enough from the positions that already exist, and sophisticated enough for the current club leadership to approve. I really like money, so I wanted it to revolve around money - but I didn’t want to be too blunt. That’s when I thought of it - a position that simultaneously gets money from people and sounds really impressive and socially impactful.”

The new position, Director of Reverse Philanthropy, is in charge of collecting money for the club to fund social events and group swag. A perfect combination of ambiguous wording, false importance, and money management makes this position a must have within the leadership of every campus organization.