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.
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.
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 my take on 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” or being a 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 a seemingly brilliant idea and invest a lot of time and energy into it; a few months later, when miracle fails to surface (e.g. no venture capital is throwing down millions of dollar 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-houses and Lamborghini’s), they quickly loses interest and rethink – Epiphany hits and they come to the realization that finance/consulting, and not something else, is the way to go. Because it gives you “a good training.”
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 s*** 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 2011] “… 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 vs. 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 became 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 usually 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 and Wall Street, 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 best educated people 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. How about 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 curriculum at Columbia). During my time at Columbia, a new major called “Financial Economics” emerged, and a new minor in “Business Management” is on its way to become one of the most popular selections. Corporate Finance and Accounting and Finance expanded into two sections due to popular demand, and the neighboring Barnard College also began to offer more courses in economics.
College students like to blame the banks for spending money to recruit on Ivy League campuses. But the relationships between college caree officers, banks/consulting firms, and the student job-seekers are a matter of freedom of choice. Government and non-profits can either pay the same kind of money to recruit on college campuses, or they can shift people’s opinions to a point where the honor associated with working for government/non-profit is greater than the monetary gains of working anywhere else. Until then, those percentages shown at the top are unlikely to move significantly.
There is a bright side to this: most people stay in finance or consulting for only a few years before moving onto something else. So perhaps there is an alternative solution, not at the undergraduate level, but at the white-collar working level, capturing those career-changers and guide them to making real 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.
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.
