Examining the Big Career Problem Part 2: New York or Hong Kong? Does It Even Matter?
As recruitment season for summer internships is coming up, I’ve been getting some inquiries about a number of issues concerning interning in finance in Asia. One question in particular pretty much tops all lists as the most-frequently-asked question: Did you ever contemplate working in New York instead of Hong Kong? If so, why did you pick Hong Kong over New York? My answer is probably the same as most people that have studied in the US and have an interest in China: Yes, we all have.
Why you are asking, and why I asked the same thing about a year ago:
Understandably, choosing a job or a career is probably the single most important decision you have ever had to make. The last big decision you had to make was probably which college to attend, but parents usually had a pretty big influence on that.
This time it’s different. Our parents might have had some knowledge of how colleges ranked and how the application system worked, but they know almost nothing about how to find a job in a big firm or how campus recruitment works when it comes to finance/consulting.
The most they’ve heard of is that this kid or that kid got hired by some big-name firm even before he graduated – because nosy family friends love to gossip about this stuff, as if those kids didn’t even need to apply and some company CEO just magically arrived on a helicopter and handed them job offers on a silver platter.
After debating with your parents for a year or two, hopefully demystifying the recruitment system and discrediting your aunts, uncles, and friendly neighbors, you realize that you are pretty much on your own. Depending on your parents’ level of English and financial literacy, they may think that becoming a banker means that you’ll be sitting behind a cashier and helping people with their deposits and withdrawals; if you’re lucky, they may think you take rich people’s money and help them buy and sell stocks; if you are really lucky, they may actually understand that you are going to take companies like Groupon and Michael Kors to an “IPO.” The term “consultant” is even more ubiquitous and difficult to explain because there are simply too many different types of consultants out there. Unless your parents work in the industry, there is very little chance that they will understand what kind of job you’re really applying for. So regardless of how lucky you are, your parents are of little help. And for the first time in your life, a big decision is pretty much all on you.
What to do about it:
I’ve said this many times before but here it is again: The best way to answer any question about this type of stuff is by actually trying it out. I highly recommend taking a gap year to really dig deep. But not everyone wants to/can do that. So what you can do otherwise, is to build a mental model of what it would be like if you worked in Hong Kong or New York (or Beijing, Shanghai, London, Dubai, São Paulo - anywhere for that matter). If you can convince yourself that the outcome of one place is better than all the rest, you can go ahead and pick that one. After all, you just need convince yourself that your final decision is the “right” one - whether or not it’s actually better than the rest doesn’t even matter and isn’t even relevant because you will never get to test it out.
In reality, we overestimate how much impact a major decision like this will have on our happiness. If you are able to make it into finance or consulting in any of these big cities, you are already in good shape to become a high-earning white-collar and retire with plenty of vacation money (unless something like the current financial crisis happens). And if all you wanted was to do a two-year stunt in a prestigious firm just to show that you can, doing so in New York vs. anywhere else doesn’t matter nearly as much as how prestigious the firm is. Just as your educational outcome may not have differed much had you gone to Princeton instead of Yale, so too your professional success may not be all that different if you decided to pick Barcap ECM over BAML NRG.
However, if you think your life’s dream involves much greater ambition than just becoming a white-collar, then your task is a little bit harder – you’ll need to figure out what that dream is first, before you do anything else. School, I find, is a terrible place to discover one’s true passion, because school is nothing like the world you will have to deal with once you are outside of it (unless you go into academia).
For one of my business school classes, we were assigned to a book called Managing with Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer on the importance of power when one desires to make impact on this world. A section entitled “Lessons to Be Unlearned” summed up a few very important points that all college grads should keep in mind:
- Despite what we have learned all our lives growing up, life is not a matter of individual effort, ability, and achievement. How well you do in school is a result of your individual academic efforts and capabilities, but it’s independent from your classmates. This is even more evident in the Chinese education system where the final exams account for 100% of your course grades, and your gaokao exam score is the sole determinant of which university you end up in. As the author puts it, “the private knowledge and private skill that are so useful in the classroom are insufficient in organizations. Individual success in organizations is quite frequently a matter of working with and through other people, and organizational success is often a function of how successfully individuals can coordinate their activities.” In short – drop your books and join some clubs.
- In most classes, there are always right vs. wrong answers, but real life doesn’t work that way. I like to think of school life vs. the real life as an Venn diagram, where there is a portion of school life that can be applied to real life, but a large chunk of it is pretty irrelevant (such as how to register for class and memorizing the difference between Doric and Ionic order columns).
But here comes the more important part – the reality of decision-making:
- A decision by itself changes nothing
- At the moment a decision is made, we cannot possibly know whether it is good or bad
- We invariably spend more time living with the consequences of our decisions than we do in making them
So instead of pulling your hair out trying to decide “New York or Hong Kong” before graduation, focus on implementing the decision and maximizing your returns whatever you decide to do and wherever you decide to go. John Legend became a singer after three years at BCG; Peter Peterson went from Secretary of Commerce to co-founder of Blackstone. Anything can change after a good start. As self-righteous homo sapiens, we will always find ways to justify our decisions later and play 事后诸葛亮, but the most important thing is that we do everything we can to make the most out of every situation.
Examining the Big Career Problem: Is Finance/Consulting Right or Wrong?
So the recent Occupy Wall Street movement got me curious to look into what percentage of people at Columbia go into finance. I flipped through the CCE (Columbia’s Center for Career Education) website to see if they’ve got this sheet of statistic on where Columbia students end up working after graduation. It turns out they still have it. And the numbers have escaped me since I last saw them back in 2007 during my CCE orientation as a freshman…
Part I – The Stats
An astonishing 24.9% of the Class of 2010 in CC and SEAS ended up working in financial services, with an additional 9.1% in consulting. SEAS graduate programs yield a whopping 32.9% for finance and 9.2% for consulting. (For a school as specialized as “engineering,” this could almost warrant a change in the school’s name.)
Now I got really curious and, before we begin to judge Columbia, let’s take a look at Harvard.
Source: Seniors Survey, Office of Career Services, Harvard University
On the Charles River, over the past five years, we see a few trends: smaller percentage of students in finance/consulting, fewer in military, more in non-profit, health/medicine, communications/media/arts, and business (presumably this is where entrepreneurship would fall).
Since we don’t have trend data by industry for Columbia, it’s hard to make trend comparisons. But just taking the 2010 data alone, 33% of Harvard seniors planned to work in finance or consulting – almost at the same level as Columbia’s 34% (though showing a noticeable difference where consulting firms historically have a stronger preference for Harvard than Columbia). At its height, 47% of Harvard seniors planned to work in finance or consulting in 2008 (just before the financial crisis). I’d assume Columbia’s 2008 numbers were probably similar.
You can check out UPenn, Princeton, and Cornell. (Might do a more comprehensive research later see other schools).
So I’ve been asked this many times and have wondered this myself – why do so many students from top universities end up in finance or consulting?
Here’s why.
Part II – The Qualitative Analysis
Let’s admit it – for most of us, we have no idea of what we want to do after college. For starters, we all know that this campus is skewed toward finance and consulting (because that’s all that we hear about) – but for the average-over-achieving-Ivy-Leaguers, it’s just too difficult to accept that we will end up pretty mainstream and pick what everybody else picked – finance and/or consulting.
We think somehow there’s a destiny awaiting, a path beckoning, a road less travelled-by, and honor, glory, and fame are within our grasp – and right now is the moment to capture it before we are stuck forever in some cubicle in some office building in some major metropolitan area somewhere on this planet. We misperceive the fact that we have made it to the top 1% of the higher-education population (a system based on getting good grades, being well-rounded, and/or excel in one particular area) should be automatically translated into becoming the top 0.1% of the higher-income population (a system based on hard-work, inheritance, networks, economic conditions, and chance). After all, if we have beaten the odds at getting into the best schools, shouldn’t we also beat the odds at making the most amount of money and impact? We assume that life is supposed to get better and better – the same assumption for economic growth, stock indices, and real estate prices in the long-term – and look where that’s gotten us today.
Some of us will actually take action to address this dilemma – picking the main street of being the maverick – most of us will just wait it out and succumb last minute. But even for the brave few I’ve seen, it is usually the same story: They get super excited about something, invest a lot of time and energy into this new thing, but a few months later, when miracles fail to surface (e.g. no venture capital is throwing down millions of dollars for them to play with, or the realization that being a real [read: poor] entrepreneur is too big a step-down from their dream lifestyle of beach-house and Lamborghini), they quickly loses interest and rethinks – Epiphany hits and they come to the realization that finance/consulting, and not something else, is the way to go.
But it’s not just the Ivy League, it’s everybody. To quote Seth Davis from the opening scene of Boiler Room (2000):
I read this article a while back that said that Microsoft employs more millionaire secretaries than any other company in the world. They took stock options over Christmas bonuses. It was a good move. I remember there was this photograph of one of the groundskeepers next to his Ferrrari. Blew my mind. You see shit like that, and it just plants seeds, makes you think it’s possible, even easy. And then you turn on the TV, and there’s just more of it. The 87 million dollar lottery winner. That kid actor that just made $20 million on his last movie. That Internet stock that shot through the roof. You could have made millions on it if you’d just got in early. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do: get in. I didn’t want to be an innovator. I just wanted to make the quick and easy buck. I just wanted in.
Notorious B.I.G. said it best: Either you’re slinging crack rock, or you got a wicked jump shot.’ Nobody wants to work for it anymore. There’s no honor in taking the after school job at Mickey D’s. Honor’s in the dollar, kid. So I went the white boy way of slinging crack rock. I became a stock broker.
[Fast-forward to the 2011 version] “… so I went the Asian kid’s way of becoming a stock broker. I became an investment banker.”
The movie version of the finance world is a bit exaggerated because it focused on the worst portion of the industry. But the dilemma of being a maverick or choosing the main road nonetheless exists.
Part III – Is this a problem and, if so, is there a solution?
Trends are difficult to resist. It’s how they ended up becoming trends in the first place. You use an iPhone? Own a pair of boat shoes? Ever noticed how many Macs users are on college campuses? We follow trends. Because trends exist to appeal, because most people want to be liked, and because there is very little justification for not following trends.
When I spoke at the GCC-Carnegie Conference in June, Chenggang Rui, CCTV’s star anchor who goes around interviewing prominent businessmen and politicians, wrapped up his keynote address with a serious concern over the world’s (and China’s) talent pools. “If the guys working for Wall Street are more well-rounded and always had better grades in college than the guys working for the government, then how can the regulators ever outsmart the regulated?” He asked the audience. This talent dynamics is a losing proposition for the government and can only result in more problems in financial regulation down the line.
While Rui’s concern may be an over-simplification of the US political system, his concern is right in that too many people want to work in finance… especially in China.
In China, everybody and his grandma wants to major in finance and work in an investment bank. I’ve seen people with Masters, JD’s, and even PhD’s in fields completely unrelated to finance/economics dishing out resumes to banks and consulting firms.
Sadly, we should probably acknowledge to ourselves that our generation will be a generation of financial professionals – at least among the ethnic Chinese.
So we’ve identified the problem, but very few solutions – encouraging students to participate in government, non-profit, education, and business sectors outside of finance/consulting? But what’s the best way to “encourage”? Run a calculation on the expenses associated with college education (especially at the top schools) and you’ll find justification for why everyone wants to make more rather than less. Teach less about finance and teach more about happiness? Maybe, but it needs to become mainstream to make a real impact (e.g. One day becoming part of the CORE).
But here’s the good news: most people stay in finance or consulting for only a few years before moving onto something else. So perhaps the solution isn’t at the student level but rather, at the white-collar working level, capturing those career-changers and guide them to making more social impact. Perhaps there can be organizations that group ex-bankers and ex-consultants together to create businesses, to consult non-profits, and to sit in workshops to discuss how to find the meaning of life through exploration and self-actualization.
Whatever the solution may be, the problem isn’t going away any time soon – especially not in this economy.
Closing Up the “Gap Year” Chapter
The Sentimental Part
I took one last look at my comfy bed, my wooden floor, my coffee table, and my picture windows. Two suitcases, one briefcase, ticket in hand booked from Beijing to Hong Kong.
Ready?
I closed the door.
Eight months ago, I took a leap of faith and decided to take a year off from my life as a student. It was the first time that I was not one since kindergarten. Schools are fun, and having been through 10 different schools growing up, I can confidently say that I was not so afraid of switching out yet again to a new environment.
People gave me all sorts of reactions to my decision. At first, I cared a lot. My parents were vocally against it, and my closest college friends thought I was doing something terribly stupid. But I was not without support. And looking back, I must thank those that inspired me to take this step.
Eight months passed. When I now tell someone that I took a year off, I get lots of questions:
“Why did you take a gap year?”
Because I wanted to.
“What did you do?”
A lot.
“What did you learn?”
A lot more.
I wish there was a simple way to describe it all. With words. But words do a terrible job at capturing emotions and self-actualization efficiently. The most I can do is to list out my projects and achievements in a resume-like fashion as if it was an interview. But that’s not the whole story; it’s just the cover, and maybe the table of content.
It wasn’t the professional experience from Bain, the leadership experiences from GCC, the cultural experience from Beijing, the philanthropic experience from Heart2Heart, or the entrepreneurial experience from a company I founded with my buddy back at Columbia. It was living the unpackaged life, displacing the self from the support system that it has gotten so used to. It was testing assumptions, be wrong, be right, and formulating a view less breakable, a mind less shakable. It was introspection.
How often do you think to yourself, “I’m not like that,” “That’s not who I am,” “That’s not how I do things,” or, “That’s not what I want”? If you think like this pretty often, then congratulations, you seem to know yourself pretty well. For me, these lines didn’t come up often enough throughout my three years of college. True, it was important to keep an open mind, but open-mindedness is hardly self-awareness, and one doesn’t always lead to the next, because too many different experiences at one given time can sometimes confuse you and make you less aware of the self.
Exactly one year ago, I was struggling between the idea of becoming an entrepreneur and taking the traditional corporate path. I had trouble deciding if it’s better to make a thousand acquaintances or maintain a dozen close friends. I couldn’t decide if I should dive into China as early as possible before the window of opportunities closes on me, or spend more time in the US to develop myself before doing so. I sometimes relied on the judgment of others because I didn’t trust myself enough. I had a strong desire to take my path to China and reconnect my roots but I didn’t know how.
I had a lot to reconcile.
In the past eight months, I have done each of these conflicts some justice. I’ve found some valuable insights to these questions – some answered in full, some waiting to be solved.
Eight months later, I look into the mirror, and I see someone that I know better. After all, it’s me that I have to deal with for my entire life, and getting to know myself better is probably more useful than knowing anyone else.
My Advice
I made a few summaries below based on my above-mentioned experiences in China. Hopefully, if you ever decide to take a gap year, you too can discover its magical effects.
Beijing/China - The real life doesn’t give out award certificates. No one is obligated to be your friend and to spend his or her precious time with you “hanging out.” Real life is filled with individuals who are pragmatic, materialistic, and pretentious; and most people have got an agenda of some sort behind his or her actions. Useless relationships die after one meal; useful relationships rekindle even after months-long gaps. This is true whether you’re talking to entry-level employees or attending a high-profile networking cocktail watching corporate executives do their dances. (Students, fortunately, may be the only exception here.)
Beijing is a tough place to be. It focuses the many desires of China into a tip so sharp that you can sense it in the directness of how people approach you for things. Local Chinese don’t get paid very well, so in order to make it some day they must do what it takes – sometimes things that would be considered unethical in the West. Office politics are layered in matrices of personal relationships. Sentences can be delivered in ten ways but interpreted in twenty. Thinking too much is better than thinking not enough. And never trust someone that you can’t verify through another friend.
Age/淡定 - As students we honestly don’t think much about age. We are in a system called “school” which places us in the right places at the right age. But in the real world these restrictions are looser. How old are you? How old do people think you are? How old would you like to be? How old would you need to be? But really, how old can you be? Sometimes you are at the right place at the right time, but you might be at the wrong age. In the West, youth is good. Youth is energy, opportunities, and possibilities. But in China, youth is immaturity. It equates to inexperience, which to most people screams unreliability (i.e. 不靠谱).
We often think of discrimination in terms of gender, race, and other common distinctions. But age is just as key, and twice as severe in a country that has a hierarchical system by age. What I’m trying to say is this: Don’t let age limit you, but also don’t misperceive your own mental age. At what age does one find oneself exactly? Maybe one never does. But with age, you acquire a sense of 淡定. The nirvana stage of life. The moment when you have gained full control of the self.
Management Consulting - Mergers&Inquisitions posted an excellent article about PE in China a few weeks ago. I would borrow the general idea from there and say that the difference between working for MBB in developed markets vs. their emerging market offices is just huge. I was talking to a friend who is working at the McKinsey New York office and was told that he never had trouble finding market segment data about the industries that he was covering. They just email the research department and open Outlook the next morning – and voila!
Well, the bad news is, data mining is virtually the bulk of your work in China as an intern in consulting. Industry data don’t really exist because there is not a developed set of research companies that gather these data and make profits off them – asking Chinese companies to pay for data is like asking Chinese college students to pay for .mp3 music. So instead of buying it from someone, you hire cheap labour (i.e. The PTAs) and have them find the data for you via all possible methods. (I’ll leave the methods to your imagination. And you can think of the reliability of the data given those methods.)
Purpose/Meaning of Life – I would be megalomaniac if I think that I can somehow explain the meaning of life. But the general idea here is to find it. Something. Anything. The problem with most college grads is that once one has reached the college level (or grad school for that matter – once one has finished one’s education), one is lost. One gets a job. One meets a boy/girl. One marries, has kids, and realizes it’s too late to change careers because the opportunity costs are too high.
So we all know how serious it is to take the right step right now. Without going any deeper and making this whole post about the meaning of life altogether, I want to say that whatever you do, do it for a virtuous purpose. Virtuous is the keyword here. Money, fame, bottles-and-models, are not virtuous purposes. Honor (not fame), pride (not ego), and the well-beings of others (family, friends, even strangers) are.
The Resume Version
Below, I decided to list out the milestones of this past eight months, with pictures and videos, to demonstrate that, no, I did not just waste time in China to 混. I did many things that I would’ve never been able to do without spending those eight months in Beijing. (The external photos are all linked to Picasa, so feel free to contact me if you cannot get access.)
So really, what did I do?
- October 2010 – Tsinghua University – Enrolled in an adult education program about Chinese capital markets and how SMEs can capture these opportunities.
- October 2010 – Began working at Bain & Co. as a Part-Time Assistant.
- November 2010 – Finished settling down in Beijing and began helping out GCC China Affairs Division. Arranged a series of meetings with potential partners/sponsors for GCC in Beijing (GCC website).
Meeting with 徐小平 in Beijing
Hosting meeting for GCC China Affairs Division
- December 2010 – Embarked on the fourth trip to Guizhou, China, on behalf of Heart2Heart Society, filming a short documentary denoting the society’s success story in donating to Guizhou (10min video):
优酷版本 if YouTube inaccessible：http://player.youku.com/player.php/sid/XMjc2MTI5MjEy/v.swf
- January 2011 – Helped secure a $10,000 sponsorship from American Airlines to GCC
- January 2011 – Invited as a delegate to the RENET Inaugural Sanya Conference (link)
Attending RENET Sanya Inaugural Conference
- January 2011 – Invited to attend the Sina Weibo Night (link)
Sina Weibo Night with Jack Ma
Sina Weibo Night with Zhiqiang Ren (任志强)
- March 2011 – Spoke and presented at GCC’s Third Annual Conference and Convention in New York City (photos).
Attending GCC's 3rd Annual New York Convention (formerly "GCC Day")
- April 2011 – Initiated and spearheaded a joint delegation between GCC and the MBA class of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The two-week delegation visited Baidu, Lenovo, Innovation Works, SAP, Monitor Group, KPMG, Freshfields, Da Cheng Law Offices, Jun He Law Offices, Huiyuan Juice, Tudou.com, and the Wall Street Journal (Photos: corporate visits, cocktail).
Hosting the GCC-CKGSB Cocktail at the Beijing Raffles Hotel with the GCC Alumni Association
Led the GCC-CKGSB MBA Class Delegation to 14 Corporate Visits (photo taken at Baidu)
- April 2011 – Invited to attend the Phoenix Television 15th Year Anniversary (link, video)
Attending Phoenix TV 15th Year Anniversary Award Ceremony - Photo with Lord Wei, youngest Life Peer in the British House of Lords at age 33
Award Ceremony
- April 2011 – Visited the Guang Ai Orphanage in Beijing with RENET Beijing Chapter (link)
Visiting Guang Ai Orphanage with RENET
- April 2011 – Visiting Fudan University in Shanghai. Helped to coordinate the then-upcoming GCC-Harvard Conference in partnership with ASES of Fudan University.
Visiting Shanghai - Meeting with Fudan University ASES Representatives 张小雨 and 金山. ASES was a strategic partner of GCC-Harvard for a conference in May 2011
- May 2011 – Attended Heart2Heart’s Fifth Annual Fundraising Banquet. This year’s banquet committee invited JJ Lin (林俊杰) as the event’s special guest performer. The event attracted over 300 audience members and raised over $100,000CAD for charitable causes (website, photos).
Speaking at Heart2Heart's Fifth Annual Fundraising Banquet with Co-Founder Marco Chen
JJ Lin (林俊杰) auctioning off an autographed guitar to raise money for Heart2Heart
- May 2011 – Attended Columbia University’s Commencement.
Attending Columbia University Commencement for the Class of 2011
- June 2011 – Attending the first annual GCC-Carnegie conference in Beijing. The Carnegie-Tsinghua Center is the earliest Western think-tank with an office in the PRC. Chenggang Rui (芮成钢, third from left), a well-known CCTV anchor, was invited as a keynote speaker along with GCC Senior Advisor John Holden (fourth from the left) (photos).
Speaking at the GCC-Carnegie Conference on US-China Trust
The Here and Now
So I’m off the plane, checked in a hotel, and ready to start the 10 weeks on my dream internship. I launched my gap year leaving this place exactly ten months ago. Same office, same hotel, same taxis, same routes, same elevators, and many of the same people.
But this time, it’s a different me.
The Beauty of Last-Time’s
I walk down the stairs of Low Plaza. As far as Columbia is concerned, I stand at the center of the universe.
Unknowingly, I filled in the scantron, signed my name under the honor code, finished my last sentence with a period, packed up my backpack, handed in my exam, and walked out of the classroom…
… for the last time.
The gate of memories swings open. Freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.
A part of me just died. Officially.
Ironically, for my very last paragraph of my very last essay on my very last final exam in my college career, I was writing about Jonathan Evan’s theory of the dual-process account of reasoning. Two processes live in our minds, one that is quick, efficient, intuitive, and prone to mistakes; the other slower, effortful, evolutionarily recent, and reliable. The latter accounted for our normative and rational decisions, while the former our irrational and emotional ones.
My last paragraph essentially attacked the field of economics and bashed the assumptions that humans are, for the most part, rational agents and utility maximizers – we are neither. We know to collaborate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, to be altruistic even if it goes against our own well-being; we are situationally adaptive yet universally categorizable; we are at once emotionally rational and rationally emotional.
The philosophers championed reason, enabled by the second system and credited for transforming this planet from soil and plants to concrete and skyscrapers. Yet reason, who has been convincing me that this moment shall be a happy, triumphant one, cannot explain to me my feeling of loss. By tomorrow this moment will seem like a dream, rationalized by reason, and stored away into memory’s abyss.
But right now, this moment is beautiful.
If the second system is distinctively human, then it is the first system that makes us human at all.
Beta NYC Alumni Chapter Inaugural Event
Beta NYC Alumni Chapter Inaugural Event, a set on Flickr. Beta Theta Pi, one of the nation’s premier fraternities, is starting up its NYC Alumni Association. The association’s inaugural event took place tonight at the Alpha Alpha Chapter at Columbia University.
A Random Walk Down (Occupy) Wall Street
The title of this post is inspired by the well-known investment book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel (1973). I’ve never read the book, but the idea that Malkiel tried to convey is pretty easy to summarize:
Since stock prices cannot be predicted in the short term, argues Malkiel, individual investors are better off buying and holding onto index funds than meddling with securities or actively managing mutual funds. Not only will a broad range of index funds outperform a professionally managed portfolio in the long run, but investors can avoid expense charges and trading costs, which decrease returns. [...] His witty, acerbic style and persuasive arguments will delight readers but, alas, leave Wall Street unmoved.
- Amazon.com
In honor of the Zuccotti Park eviction, below are pictures of my random walk downtown about two weeks ago. Hope you enjoy.
[Updated] You Sure You Still Want to Use That iPhone?
Update:
You’ve got to be kidding me. This guy (or his good friend) came back!
Security Alert today:
On November 21, 2011 at about 11:50 p.m., a student was the victim of an attempted robbery on W.114St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. The student accompanied by another person was accosted as she was walking on the north side of W.114 St. towards Broadway. The suspect pushed the victim against a fence, threatened her and demanded her I-phone [sic]. When the suspect learned she did not have an I- phone, he fled east towards Amsterdam Avenue without taking any property. The suspect is observed on video walking back and forth on W. 114 St. prior to the crime. Moments earlier, he followed a student into Ruggles Hall but left the building immediately. If you have any information about this crime or this suspect, contact the 26Pct Detective Unit at 212-678-1351 or contact the undersigned. If you observe this person on the street, call the police immediately by dialing 911.
The incident is so serious that the University’s VP Public Safety wrote a letter addressing this issue:
In the past few weeks you have received several Security Alerts regarding crimes in our community. In particular, there has been a series of robberies and attempted robberies on W. 114th Street. I am writing to let you know that the safety and well-being of our students, faculty and staff, as well as others in our community, is our top priority. I would also like to share with you some of the things that the Department of Public Safety is doing to safeguard our campus, and the 114th Street area in particular, in order to help allay any concerns that you may have on the issue of safety here at Columbia…
I’m looking forward to the “iPhones Cause Crimes on Ivy League Campus” article in the next edition of the New York Times.
———————————-
At 4:11pm today, I received an email from the University entitled “Security Alert 11.12.11″. Below is the email message:
We have been notified by the NYPD, that on November 12, 2011 at about 7:30 p.m. two males were the victim of an attempted robbery in the lobby of a brownstone on W. 114 St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave. The suspect [...] was sitting on the steps of the brownstone and followed the first victim into the hallway. He displayed a gun and demanded the victim’s I-phone [sic]. When the victim stated he didn’t have an I-phone, the male gave it back to him. The second victim entered the hallway and the suspect demanded his Iphone. Once again the suspect handed it back when he found out it was not actually an Iphone. The suspect left the building and fled on foot down Amsterdam Ave.
For your information, “W. 114th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave.” is exactly where I live. The robbery might as well have taken place “on campus.”
This is about the third or forth crime reported this year around the school, but I am particularly shocked at this one.
The robber wanted one thing and one thing only – the iPhone. And when he didn’t get one, he left.
I’m not sure if I should laugh at his failed criminal act or admire his steadfastness to Apple products.
He was already pointing a gun at somebody, committing a crime, and because the victims didn’t have an iPhone, he fled, empty-handed. He basically said no to the watch (~$120), no to the TI-83 (~$100), no to the laptop (~$1000+), no to the iPod (~$200), no to non-smart phones (~$100), and really, no to every other smartphone ever invented besides the iPhone!
If I were Apple’s spokesperson and had to make a public statement about this, I’m not sure if I would apologize for creating an unprecedented mania in the history of consumer electronics, or pat myself on the back for a job well done. I couldn’t decide if this was funny, sad, or both. Who is at fault? The bad economy? New York City? Apple? Steve Jobs (RIP)? The student (for letting a stranger in the door)? Consumers?
Regardless of how I resolve my cognitive dissonance, if you have an iPhone, consider putting it back in the box and take out that Blackberry you retired from last year.
Watch out RIM, here’s your chance.
Not really.
Why Dog Lived and 2-Year-Old Girl Died
Before reading anything, please watch and contrast these two videos:
As you can probably expect from the videos, the injured dog lived, and the 2-year-old girl died on October 21st, 2011.
Enough has been written about the Chinese incident online. The WSJ reported that Chinese observers and journalists have blamed the apparent apathy on “everything from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution to fear of legal action to Chinese culture itself.”
In observing Chinese culture, James McGregor, former CEO of Dow Jones & Company China and one of GCC’s Senior Advisors, gives a revealing explanation in his book, One Billion Customers:
Firm control from the top has always been considered the only path to peace and prosperity in China. One reason is that China is a shame-based society, very different from the guilt-based West. In the West, with society’s religious orientation, many controls are internalized. Guilt, which is ultimately the fear of sin and eternal damnation, puts a check on bad behavior. In China, it is the fear of exposure and the accompany shame that tarnishes the entire extended family. As a result, the Chinese can feel pretty good about doing almost anything as long as they don’t get caught. In that atmosphere, the only efficient form of law and order is a strong and omnipresent government that increases the likelihood of getting caught if you do something wrong.
- One Billion Customers (McGregor, 2005)
If we borrow McGregor’s frame and project it onto a gross generalization of the whole Chinese population and all of their possible actions, it is a scary thought that people aren’t killing each other and stealing each other’s money only because they don’t want to be caught doing so.
An equally depressing blogger concluded that “China seems to have become so utilitarian that it can’t understand or even tolerate people who do things for altruistic reasons” (emphasis added).
But even with an ultra-utilitarian system, not everyone’s sociopathic or else we wouldn’t have the society we have today. Altruism isn’t nonexistent in China, and utilitarianism isn’t the main problem. The Chinese may be overtly obsessed with money and wealth, but even that doesn’t warrant the actions witnessed in the first video.
The problem, in my opinion, is trust. And there is none.
Chinese cities are infiltrated with deceptive and malicious schemes aimed straight at your wallet: phone calls, texts, and even strangers calling for “help.” This accompanied by the media whose job is to sell these stories that keep people on their feet. Take a look at Baidu’s Top Ten search items daily and you’ll learn what catches the Chinese people’s attention – not how to make money (surprise!), but what to watch-out for in China: poisonous food & beverages, corrupt government officials, ineffective legal system, natural disasters, prostitution, random stranger stealing your new-born child from the hospital.
There are few Good Samaritans in China not because people have no faith or belief or have lost their souls, but because the Good Samaritans have either been tricked in the past or have heard too many horror stories to maintain their confidence in strangers.
The basic rule to survival, as anyone who has traveled the country would quickly learn, is to trust no one. People are constantly living in an environment where they feel unsafe. It didn’t need to be a 2-year-old girl; it could’ve been a full-grown adult lying there. People would need to start gathering around him, starring from a distance, muttering conjectures in each other’s ears; finally, when enough people have gathered around to make it feel “safe,” when it feels like there are enough witnesses and no one is going to hold you responsible for what has happened, someone would jump in and do the right thing – help. That’s typically what you’d see if someone is dying on the streets in China. Populated streets with many pedestrians.
In China, you can expect help from a friend, a colleague, a distant relative, or anyone that has the slightest knowledge of who you are or who you might be. But don’t expect the help of a stranger.
Was This Occupy Wall Street?
The Scare
I was in Philadelphia two weekends ago, when Occupy Wall Street had just popped up on my laptop screen for a few days. I was attending an info session for GCC-UPenn and was about to head back to New York. I was in a suit and carried a briefcase.
I was buying a bottle of green tea at the bus stop stand when the guy, after ignoring me for a full 30 seconds chatting with his friends, offered me $18 for the bottle. I startled. He laughed and said it was only $2. He then checked me up and down and asked his friends, “How much do you think this guy makes? $300k a year?” He turned toward me. “Ain’t that right? $300,000?” I paused. At this point I think my sympathetic nervous system was fully at work.
In the interest of self-protection, I said, “No I’m still a student looking for a job, that’s why I’m dressed like this.” Not far from the truth. At least not as far as the difference between 300k and however much I might be making if I were actually working right now. Did I look that old? Or did he just have no idea how much men-in-suits typically make?
Blame me for being overly sensitive but, I’ve wore a suit in the US since 10th grade MUN conferences, and this was the first time that I felt a bit threatened because of it.
The Interview Room
A few days later, a friend of mine went into an interview and was asked a question about Occupy Wall Street.
“So what do you think of the protest?”
“I think it’s a big waste of time. These people should spend their time and energy finding a job instead,” the interviewee said.
Lucky for him, the interviewer actually felt the same way. But such response is far too risky at a sensitive time like this. What if you met someone who liked everything in politically correct terms?
And if this article from last week’s the Atlantic didn’t convince you to never mention “money” as one of your motivations during interview, I don’t know what will.
What This Mean to You
Regardless of whether or not Occupy Wall Street ever took place, people in finance are going to be making less in the foreseeable future. Banks are already downsizing their risks as well as number of employees. To borrow from Mergers & Inquisitions‘s recent blog on Occupy Wall Street, “nowadays people go into Wall Street expecting to get rich, whereas in the 1980s they went to Wall Street hoping to get rich.” So if anything, the recent protest should really make those who are still “thinking” about going into finance to really dig deep and examine the core motivations behind their career choices.
And when all else fail to answer your inquiries – take a gap year.
New Look
Switched up to a more minimalist theme. I realized the previous theme was difficult to read with the gray font.
If you’re reading this stuff I would really appreciate any comment or other feedbacks so that I know there are actually people out there reading and I’m not just talking to myself.
Working on a few blogposts right now hope to publish soon!
Thanks =)
“Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal.”
So I stayed up almost all night watching Pirates of Silicon Valley. It’s a docudrama aired in 1999 about the founding of Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corporation.
Featuring Bill Gates the Nerd and Steve Jobs the Egomaniac
I must admit, even for a non-computer science major, I knew too little about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Probably because the dominant assumption is that they made their wealth back in the 80′s as personal computers took the world, and the computer/software/OS train has gone too far for our generation to catch its tail. That and the fact that I’m stuck at Columbia where the highest career aspirations are becoming bankers and consultants.
But as we are all graduating and trying to figure out where we’re headed, a documented display of how the two walked their paths from nobody to Forbes top 50 sheds light on a few things.
The friendly competition between Gates and Jobs is prevalent in most of our worlds – our classmates, our best friends, our frenemies. Like it or not, we are all competitive. We all like to check out how other people are doing and benchmark ourselves to see where we’re at. But that’s good and bad. Sure, it gets us going and injects a fair dosage of motivation every time we fall behind, but it only motivates us to do whatother people are already doing.
And here I thought: That would be a big problem if one wants to be original and create something. Right?
Not so much. At least not according to the film.
Jobs basically copied the user interface and mouse ideas from Xerox to create the Macintosh, and Gates pulled the exact same trick on Jobs and copied the Macintosh to create Windows.
So are these two men great visionaries? Or are they just great copiers? I can’t decide. Was it their ambition to take the world that got them where they are? Or was it their creative ideas?
Without these two, you wouldn't be seeing any of this right now.
Society wants to extol creativity because in our minds, creativity is a virtue. Theft is not. But ideas aren’t worth a dime if there’s no one to take it to the next level. The tricky part is: Who gets a cut out of the deal. Perhaps that’s where the more recent entrepreneurs, the Mark Zuckerberg‘s of the world, are encountering many more difficulties, because this generation has learned the lessons of Jobs and Gates, and will not walk until they’ve put up a serious fight.
