Viergutz ’01 eschews consulting career

“The name McKinsey came up at the age of 18: I sort of glamorized it in my head,” Viergutz said of her early interest in working at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. After arriving at Princeton, Viergutz looked into what she needed to do to make it in that company. “Where do all the McKinsey people go? What do they major in?” she recalled asking herself.

Following her plan, Viergutz became an economics major (on the math track) and loaded up her sophomore-year schedule with departmental requirements. Looking back, she said it was “amazing” that she was taught by some of the most distinguished names in American economics. Still, she noted, “I would’ve taken a lot more English classes. I would’ve loved to write an English thesis.”

Instead, Viergutz wrote an economics senior thesis titled “Student Sensitivity to Cost and Other Financial Factors in the College Application and Enrollment Processes.”

“The senior thesis should be fun — it should be something you’re really excited about, an attempt at your next intellectual pursuit,” she said. “If you’re writing your thesis on something that you feel will never be useful to you and you’ll never revisit in the future for graduate work or something else,” she added, “then maybe you’re in the wrong field.”

After graduating, Viergutz went on to McKinsey, as she had planned, working as a business analyst. “I followed that business passion to New York, and I went to McKinsey and realized you can be good at something but just hate it,” she explained.

And as she spent more time at McKinsey, Viergutz said, she began to realize that the work there “drains your energy away.”

“I didn’t love going into client meetings, didn’t enjoy crunching numbers,” she said. “I really enjoyed creating stories” through presentations, thinking about “what story am I going to tell to these businessmen.”

Her initial drive to enter the business world, she added, may have been a product more of ambition than of desire. “My passion was about what I thought I could achieve: conquering the business world, going out there and being good, really good, at it,” she explained. “I don’t think that’s the right sort of passion.”

So Viergutz decided to work at Saks Fifth Avenue as a project manager after leaving McKinsey. “I thought I would like it better if I liked the product, even though the job is the same,” she said, but “better hours and clothes I love” did not translate into happiness on the job.

It was not until she entered Harvard Business School that Viergutz finally realized her true calling. And at around that time, her husband, Philip Viergutz ’01, noticed her “sense of dread and apprehension at the notion of returning to the business world post-graduation,” he said in an e-mail.

Indeed, Viergutz did not return to a career in business, instead taking a dramatic turn into writing. “The idea of a novel sort of popped out at the end of my time at HBS [Harvard Business School],” she said. Her focus these days is on “Another Series,” which retells classic stories in modern contexts and is set at the fictional Marlowe School in New York.

The series, which she co-authored with her brother, is intended for teens so that they “would be interested in reading classics,” Viergutz said. The first installment, “Another Faust,” was released in August, and “Another Pan,” a retelling of the tales of Peter Pan, is Viergutz’ next project. And she is also working on her own novel about sisters in Iran.

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These days, in the Koffie Salon, “I spend my evenings in writing groups, having my work dissected and critiqued,” Viergutz said. “The life of a writer is incredibly unstructured. But it’s also very satisfying and full of creative and logistical freedom.”

Still, Viergutz said, her time in the business world — at McKinsey, Saks Fifth Avenue and Harvard Business School — was useful. “I actually really loved my time at McKinsey, and I learned a lot: how to handle the real world, become a better speaker and agent for myself,” she said.

But she encouraged undergraduates not to choose a major based on their career goals. “A Princeton education is a damn rare thing, and expensive, and a sort of privilege that you’ll never have again,” she said. “Use it to study something that excites you. Don’t mistake the excitement you feel for that future dream job with the excitement you should be feeling for the subject matter.”

Viergutz will visit Princeton on Oct. 22 to talk about careers, writing and her new series.