By Maggie Cassidy

After leaving the comfort of her home to move into into an unfamiliar city and start a new life with new friends, Terri Schwartz had survived the first few weeks of her freshman year at Northeastern.

Now all she needed was a job.

“My mom was pushing me to get a job on campus,” she said. “I needed to pay her back money for bills for college.”

Schwartz, a freshman journalism major, turned to the Northeastern Student Employment website, accessible through the myNEU portal. In addition to on-campus jobs, the website lists job postings submitted by off-campus employers.

Dean of Financial Services Seamus Harreys, whose office oversees the Office of Student Employment, said the website is to benefit students.

While job searching, Schwartz saw modeling positions that she said paid well, including one that paid $50 an hour. Although she had no plans to build a modeling career, she said it would be easy money and expected the job to involve advertising and marketing.

What Shwartz found, however, left her upset and shaking, she said.

Schwartz e-mailed the poster of the $50 an hour modeling job Sept. 10. At the request of the poster, who only identified himself in e-mails as Gary, Schwartz said she sent three “generic Facebook pictures” of herself and hoped for the best.

Gary responded the next day with another e-mail that read: “If money is what you are looking for, I may be able to offer you a rate of pay even higher than what you saw in the ad.”

Schwartz e-mailed him her phone number upon request.

During this time, Schwartz said her friends joked about what the job might entail.

“I was telling my friends about it and they were joking like [it might be] some sort of porn deal and I was like no, it’s going to be fine,” she said, explaining she assumed so because the job was posted on a Northeastern website.

Schwartz said Gary called her from a blocked number later that day, vaguely calling the job “really artsy stuff” before she eventually demanded its requirements.

It turned out her friends were right.

“[He said] it’ll be pictures with sheer clothes or just in a bra or naked,” Schwartz said. “He kept talking about it, being like, ‘Oh well, you can use your hair to hide your face and no one will know it’s you, and it’s a private membership website,’ trying to act like it wasn’t porn when it obviously was.”

Gary offered to pay Schwartz $200 an hour for a minimum of two hours of work, she said.

Shaking, Schwartz ended the conversation and left her room to be comforted by a friend. A few hours later, she received another e-mail from Gary with a jpeg file attachment illustrating what she would be asked to do. In the photo, a girl pulled down her camisole top to expose her breasts.

“I felt completely violated at that point. I felt humiliated,” Schwartz said. “It wasn’t traumatic, and it’s not like I’m never going to leave my house, but I felt pretty violated through the whole day, just that it happened.”

Harreys said Gary was able to pass a preliminary screening and post on the student employment website because “how that person represented himself [to the student employment office] was very different to the actual case.” Harreys did not have immediate information on how Gary portrayed himself.

Harreys said Northeastern and the Office of Financial Services takes no responsibility for the jobs posted, as stated in a disclaimer upon entering the student employment job database.

“I think that there’s two responsibilities here,” he said. “We’re doing initial screening. It’s not a criminal background check, and that’s not what’s expected and not what’s posted [in the disclaimer]. This is something that students should approach with a high degree of caution.”

In the interest of full disclosure, Schwartz wrote an article for The News in September but she is not a staff member.

Schwartz said she did not remember seeing the disclaimer when she logged on. Harreys said he believed it had been in place “for a while,” estimating at least since the office began posting external job postings. two years ago.

Harreys said that since Gary’s posting was taken down immediately, the system “worked as it’s supposed to work,” and that screenings and evaluations for job posters will continue as they have. He said he did not know of any other situations similar to Schwartz’s.

“We continue to be vigilant about looking at each employer and trying to get a website from them and look at what’s really going on, so I think it was a reminder to us that we need to continue to do that and be very careful,” he said. “When somebody’s doing modeling, what does that really mean?”

With modeling jobs still posted on the site, Harreys said there are no plans to prohibit them in the future, but only to ensure the descriptions are “legitimate.”

“It’s a service that we’re providing,” he said. “If students don’t want to look here, they can look at a variety of other services, externally.”