Business Notes

Etiquette: the word evokes images of crinolines, cotillions and debutante balls. But at Chicago's DePaul University, good manners are essential weapons in the arsenal of the young job hunter. For four years now, undergraduate training has included a formal "etiquette dinner," where $25 buys graduating seniors a multicourse meal at a ferociously fancy hotel -- and a crash course in social grace from experts in the art of power schmoozing.

Advice runs from the obvious ("Avoid statements like 'The food looks pathetic,' " urges a guidebook) to the arcane (a third of the predinner cocktail hour is devoted to group instruction in the body language of handshaking and other niceties). The three-hour banquet is awesomely all inclusive: "Soup, salad, what do you do with this fork, coffee, napkins, excusing yourself, dessert, any final questions and then we break it up," says Jane McGrath, DePaul's career-planning and placement director. Thus, as DePaul students enter the backstabbing world of business, at least they will know on which side of the plate they can find the knife.