Of course, I was going to accept my noblesse oblige of sorts and go further in my pursuit of “higher truths,” but the story was going to be similar, just with prestigious graduate programs instead. It was nice to daydream about those oh-so-difficult decisions I was “certain” to face, like choosing between Harvard and MIT and Stanford and Cambridge. I miss those good old idiotic days.
Obviously, it’s not like that, never will be like that, and reasonably so. But who knew it would be THIS hard? I know we’re just barely recovering from a recession and all, but still, come on, are we that unemployable, unskilled and useless to society? No, not quite. It’s more like that we are a bit stupid, cliche, needlessly competitive and hence susceptible to being played and manipulated by the marketers.
Try going to an info session given by one of the big management consultancy firms. After an hour, you come out really wanting to work for it. What kind of work would you do? Who knows? Not you. It doesn’t matter. It looks like an almost indispensable next step in your career. But maybe that’s precisely their expertise: making buyers badly want something even though they don’t quite know what it is.
Whatever they’re doing, it apparently works. Based on my conversations with several people in the industry, the number of Princetonian applicants for each of the top management consulting firms is between 300 to 600, for one to nine spots. This is not unique to Princeton either: The number of applicants at Harvard for the most prestigious of these firms, they say, is around 800 to 900, or 50 percent of its graduating class. I still can’t quite believe these figures after three years. The “admission rate” is like a full order of magnitude lower than Princeton’s!
So whenever I went to an info session and saw that philosophy guy and that chemical engineering girl and that politics guy and that music girl — and myself, that math guy — it did invariably leave a bitter taste in my mouth. Are these “careers” — “not jobs” — the best a full half of us can hope for our lives? I was going to prove the Riemann Hypothesis. Weren’t you going to cure cancer or fix North Korea?
Networking events are even worse. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure all you prettied-up girls are smiling because those VPs and M.D.s are such fascinating and captivating conversationalists — the same guys you’d consider as some creepy 40-somethings if they were to glance for a moment at your skirts at any other occasion. And yeah, you awkward guy shoving your way an inch at a time into the circle of conversation to ask the trite questions like “What is a typical day at work like?” and “What is a typical career path for a new hire in this position?” Yeah, I’m sure you’re dying to hear the answers. Because, you know, a third of Princetonians find mergers and acquisitions, and exotic options pricing, and portfolio management, and the S&P 500, and FICC analysis so interesting. I mean, who doesn’t these days, right?
Who do we think we are fooling, pretending like we’re completely comfortable dressed up in suits with name tags, introducing ourselves to as many bankers as possible, trying to charm them in just a couple of minutes with such keen, sharp questions and confident, charismatic body language? No one but ourselves.
I suspect this to be a classic case of pluralistic ignorance: a situation where a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but assume incorrectly that most others accept it, which in turn provides support for the norm that may be, in fact, disliked by most members.
One potential solution would be to be brutally honest with ourselves. Most of us look to these jobs because of the money. And because we have little idea what we want to do with our lives and find that unsettling. And because everyone else is doing it, which by some unknown mechanism gives it prestige. These are distasteful to admit, but collective self-hypnosis is not very honorable either. When such statements are outwardly expressed, perhaps we could curb some of the sheep-like behavior.
If we construct a largely shared value set which by definition is valuable because it excludes most people, then it necessarily follows that most of us won’t be happy. On what basis and at what cost do we keep setting these statistically highly unachievable goals? I don’t think it’s a strategic play. In fact, I think we are being played by our silly egos and the HR divisions with huge budgets.
We thought getting into Princeton would sort out our lives, but it didn’t. Most likely, getting into McKinsey or Goldman Sachs isn’t going to sort out our lives either. We’re never going to know exactly what the hell we’re going to do with our lives, and frankly, we probably don’t want to.
Eric Kang is a math major from Christchurch, New Zealand. He can be reached at eakang@princeton.edu.
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