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Nerdsniping, sellout style

There’s a certain type of brain that’s easily disabled. If you show it an interesting problem, it involuntarily drops everything else to work on it" — xkcd, the popular web comic.

I am a nerd through and through. I love math and physics. What is the tension in the middle of a rope hanging between two trees? How many subsets of the set of integers from one to 15 have no two consecutive elements? My idea of fun is an afternoon spent grappling with a hard problem. I am happiest when I am faced with challenging work.

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At the same time, I want to do something beneficial for the world. I want to do meaningful work — to know that my day-to-day struggles are producing some value for society.

Despite this, I find it easy to tune out — to forget about the whole world, all the people and suffering and injustice and everything outside the Orange Bubble, to work on a single math problem.

From this perspective, it’s easier to understand a fact that initially shocked me: a lot of nerds end up going into finance and consulting.

Under the Office of Career Service’s “What can I do with my major?” site, at least half of the jobs listed, taken by recent physics, math, and molecular biology majors, are in not their respective subjects, but in finance or consulting. The same is true for at least one of the jobs listed under every other science major. Moreover, according to Career Services’ Annual Report 2012-2013, about 25% of the class of 2013 went immediately into finance, insurance or professional, scientific and technical services, including consulting, after graduation.

At the Science and Technology career fair, I was drawn to the poster that said, “Challenge your assumptions.” On it was a seemingly simple math problem with arrows drawn between circles and numbers, filling in the blanks. I was thoroughly nerdsniped — the next thing I knew, I had spent 15 minutes just staring at the board.

I also checked out the Goldman Sachs booth, just to see what the work was like. The rep intrigued me with descriptions of complex models of markets, of the excitement of not knowing the answer to the question and the challenge of tackling that problem.

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Finance appeals to nerds because it’s a game, and nerds love to compete. We relish the feeling of doing something difficult and doing it well. A Stanford applied math major described to me his passion for finance: “In the market, you, before anyone else, have to glimpse truth. You have to be the first and be the best.” Perfect, rational precision, with a strong dose of hard work, is a nerd’s cup of coffee.

Moreover, finance can sometimes seem like the only option. One alternative, research, can be an unattractive career path. Academia is steadily receiving less funding according to the National Science Foundation, the portion of the federal budget allocated to basic research has been steadily decreasing. Decreasing funding means decreasing salaries; combined with the already hyper-competitive environment of academia, this can make research seem bare of opportunity.

So, highly-skilled nerds end up simply going to Wall Street. It seems like a huge waste of their talents. While financial and consulting firms are not necessarily unproductive for society (some are strongly invested in social work), nerds could be doing more. Nerds deserve the opportunity to contribute to society in the best way they can. The United States should invest far more in basic research. There are fundamental questions to be asked, and nerds want to answer them: Why not let them?

At the same time, we nerds should look beyond our world of super-difficult, hyper-competitive problems. Problems in more applied disciplines, like engineering robots, discovering drugs and writing software, can be just as fulfilling, if not more so, since we would contribute to the world more immediately. It doesn’t even have to be quantitative. We could work on making science accessible for the public, like Neil deGrasse Tyson. We could work in education and ensure that the next generation receives all of the critical thinking and problem-solving opportunities they want.

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Within the Orange Bubble, we have the fortune to be able to study the problems we want to study. The same cannot be said for the real world. That doesn’t mean we should join investment banks simply to continue solving obscure, difficult problems within our own little bubble. There’s a world out there, nerds. Let’s take it on.

Jonathan Lu is a freshman fromFremont, Calif. He can be reached at jhlu@princeton.edu.