More than the Princeton stamp

For the past eighteen years of my life, I have lived a blissfully "job-free" life. Before coming to Princeton, I had never filled out a tax form or received a paycheck. The only time I came near to being an entrepreneur was when I sold Old Orchard's pink lemonade in my front yard to the same five customers who kept paying for refills until I sold out. Obviously, I have not yet suffered the hardships of an economy in recession a small business usually deals with.

Despite my lack of job experience, there has always lived a voice in the far recesses of my mind that constantly squeaks, "Find a job, now! It's time to take action and be independent!"

I have always appeased this voice by fantasizing about my future dream job. Something with prestige, power, and money.

I have not yet found this job.

So, in hopes of sniffing out the trail leading to this dream job, I attended the Finance Internship Panel held last Tuesday. I walked in thinking, "What is there to know? You just hand over a resume and voila! A job walks right up to you."

I walked out thinking, "I am never going to get a job."

During the discussion, panelists threw around terms such as "high-risk bonds," "home equity rates" and "IPO's," blending them into their conservational talk as easily as candies blend into Thomas' Sweets ice cream. I sat in shock, listening to the whooshing noise all the fancy, high-tech business vocabulary made when quickly passing and leaving the hollow in my head. I had heard of many of the words before but had never heard them used so lightly anywhere else besides CNBC and the Wall Street Journal — big, distant monuments of the financial world.

Listening to the panelists speak about their own experiences in investment banking and its other various forms, I realized that I knew nothing about how to get an internship or job. I hadn't the slightest idea of how to prepare a resume or what to say during an interview. Why would a company bother hiring me if I couldn't tell the difference between their "Institutional Finance and Operations" and "Institutional Equity" departments?

Princeton claims that its students need not concentrate in only one field or study topics related only to their concentration because although students graduate having gone through the rigors of a true liberal arts education, they also graduate with topnotch analytical and logic skills. Companies willingly hire Princeton students even if their field of study is completely unrelated to the companies' daily business transactions.

Although various members of the Princeton community have thrown out this tidbit of knowledge in hopes of allaying my job fears, it has not produced the desired results. I continue to worriedly knit my eyebrows together and nervously pick at my fingernails whenever the word "job" or "summer internship" is mentioned. No matter how much power and "oomph" the Princeton name carries, I still cannot rid myself of the fear of not finding a job.

But perhaps this is just as well. Realistically, I cannot expect a six-digit income job much less a paying job waiting for me right outside the FitzRandolph Gates in four years. Stamping "Princeton" all over my resume does not entitle me to a job. Businesses will consider factors other than where I went for my undergrad such as experience, GPA, activities, etc., when deciding whether to greet me with a congratulatory offer or a sorrowful rejection over the phone.

At Princeton, we are all encouraged to take classes completely different from our proposed majors, and we do. The civil engineer reads the poetry of Emily Dickinson and develops his own in a Creative Writing course; the English major plods through a thick analysis book, eloquently composing not analytical essays about the great authors of our past but mathematical proofs.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

But fulfilling the core requirements at Princeton is not enough to find a job even if it does broaden your horizons and expands your mind. You need to act beyond the basics and learn the actual going-on's of a prospective job. By no means should you trade in your education for a job, but at the same time, you shouldn't naively assume that your education at Princeton will buy you a job.

Graduating from Princeton with sharp, analytical skills is important, but even more important is actually using and implementing those skills once outside of Princeton. Otherwise, you won't have truly learned and used your Princeton education to the fullest.

Anna Huang is a freshman from Westlake, Ohio.