<p>Sorry, but if you have spent time on ANY of the campuses you are slamming, you will realize that you are describing a very small subset of a very small population.</p>
<p>A high percentage of kids spend zero time at Career Services during junior and senior year. Zero. The jobs they want- in education, at foundations, policy analyst in Parliament or Congress or in the State House of where they grew up-- don’t recruit on campus through career services. Arts organizations? No recruiting presence. Journalism, NGO’s… not recruiting on campus.</p>
<p>The kids who want to be I-bankers go through the recruiting process and some of the end up in these jobs. But to claim that the culture of these universities is what creates the thinking of a small subset who want these jobs… and an even smaller number of them actually gets these jobs… that’s just absurd logic.</p>
<p>I work for a company that hires new grads. We use campus recruiting services of all these top schools. We also lament (pretty constantly) that we aren’t seeing the tippy top of the class. Why? Those kids are going off to Teach for America, Peace Corps, med school, working at Brookings or Cato or the ACLU, getting a journalism fellowship to cover the conflict in the Sudan, or working in fine arts conservation at a museum. As a non-bank, we don’t compete with the I-banks for talent-- we compete with the rest of humanity. The culture at virtually all of these schools is highly supportive of doing something for society when you graduate.</p>
<p>For every MIT kid who went off to price derivatives in the last 10 years, you could find 10 kids doing medical research, working at a start-up developing green energy sources, or completing a dissertation on how to eradicate malaria.</p>
<p>I’m tempted to do a little “piling on” of those 44% and 41.5% groups of social potential who “waste” themselves in Finance or Consulting. But the fact is that the kids didn’t create the system – they’re merely reacting to the system that’s in place. Now maybe I’m feeling overly generous this afternoon, after having spent the day in Court trying to undo the damage done by a poorly worded legal document. But can I really be blamed for wasting a day of my life that way? I looked at my options and said “I don’t like it, but this is my best option.” How is that different from a 22 year old MIT math major looking at his options and saying “Well it isn’t the London School of Economics, but after a few years on Wall Street I should be pretty well set?”</p>
<p>That’s a cutesie quote, but I don’t agree with it. The hours and lifestyle can indeed be horrible, but many features of the jobs themselves can in fact be quite challenging and intrinsically rewarding.</p>
<p>There is plenty to like in many Wall Street jobs. Intellectual challenge; work on important ,visible projects, work that impacts the financial health and even at times the very existence of major companies. Business-related travel to many parts of the nation and the globe. Having to come up with better ideas than your competitors, who may be some of the smartest people around, and then convince hiring clients of this, requires utilization of more brain and personality cells than many people get to use in their jobs. The intensity. The work environment filled with the most brilliant collection of people I’ve ever seen together.</p>
<p>Above-average compensation is certainly warranted, due to the personal sacrifices the business requires, and the huge financial significance to their clients of the matters at hand. And the cost of living where those businesses are located; which may be more cause than effect, but these have become intertwined.</p>
<p>I am far removed from that world now, and will never be back. But my work in that field was certainly the most challenging, and most significant, work I’ve ever done. Which has nothing to do with money.</p>
<p>I’ll agree with monydad and hmom. I spent one year as an investment banker and four years working for a wealthy family in their direct equity investment arm and worked with alot of investment bankers. Aspects of the work were very interesting, though for me the proportion of the time devoted to sheer effort driving things through was higher than I liked. After I left and started a consulting firm that occupies most of my time, I helped start a couple of hedge funds. What the hedge funds did was less interesting for me than the i-banking advisory work so I never was that active in them, except for contributing ideas and talking to investors. [There are areas of the hedge fund arena like global macro that I would probably find fascinating but don’t think I’d be any good at]. I sold my interest in one fund and we shut the other one a few years ago. But, I think there are areas of investment banking that are really interesting. There are others where you just cookie-cutter a kind of transaction and slam them out. The latter areas aren’t for me.</p>
<p>OK…I also worked for a top IB for a few years. Made good money. Worked horrible hours. Some of the folks I worked with were terrific…but many were arrogant self-absorbed jerks.
I think I read one post about how it changes people. Personally, I starting walking faster, talking faster, and developed a more abrasive style than usual. Survival.
But after I while, I hated it. I flat out quit and went on my own a few years ago. Never looked back. Lots of my old buddies have recently been laid off. Not a good time to be out on the market - with inflated pay levels hanging around your neck. It’s ugly. </p>
<p>As to whether or not elite schools contribute to this culture, I don’t know. There were certainly many entitled Ivy types around. But the business DOES seem to attract a certain type. You would get a sense for it…it’s hard to describe…but you would know in the first two minutes of a interview if you were dealing with someone who could make it in that environment. You just knew. </p>
<p>Again, I’m glad to be out of it and working in a totally different industry. But I do keep and treasure old friendships from those years. And I believe the experience helped me excel in other environments. Kind of like “boot camp” I guess, although I did my “training” at a mature age. I’m also able to recognize what was warped about the experience. And I don’t want my son going in that direction.</p>
<p>I read in the NYT today that a lot of Wall Street people are saying that it is not their fault for the collapse of the amercian economy. But the outsized bonuses, the entitlement, and the key point is that NO ONE in Wall Street questioned the business practices and casino attitude with other people’s money is like saying just because someone was in the Nazi Party, that they don’t have some responsibilty for the bad things that happened.</p>
<p>Nazi party? Are you kidding me? Talk about going extreme to make a point.
As someone who worked in this business, I find this to be an incredible statement.
Yes, there are jerks and crooks in the industry. Perhaps more than in most industries. Yes, some contributed to the collapse of the economy. But to throw everyone in that bucket is crazy. I know some really fine people from that industry who have been out work now for many months and are suffering. Remember, not all who work in these places are moving the money. Some are in IT, HR, Operations, even clerical support jobs. Was everyone at Enron evil too? Very simplistic thinking here…</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind when looking at stats about what percentage of a college class goes into finance is that some new grads play the game of “Work on Wall Street for a year, save up a bunch of money, then go to grad school or professional school or work in some other industry.”</p>
<p>Another thing to keep in mind when looking at those stats is that consulting != finance, even though they often get lumped together in the stats (sometimes it is in finance, sometimes it isn’t). My friend who has an internship for a company that does consulting for the UN is not doing finance work. The company that I interviewed with as a senior that does scientific computing consulting work, has nothing to do with finance.</p>