The finance freight train

This year, many Wall Street investment banks, including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse moved their application and interview processes for summer internships even earlier in the fall. As part of a continual effort to hire the best talent ahead of other industries, this change will prompt students to make decisions about their summers and eventual careers sooner than ever before.

Many are paralyzed by the fear that if they graduate from college without a job or graduate school admission lined up, they’ve made some cataclysmic mistake and are destined to have mediocre pay and monotonous misery for the rest of their lives. As a result, many students give into this fear and end up taking respectable, well-paying jobs, but ones that deep down, they know probably don’t suit them.

The great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson weighs in, “If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”

Emerson wrote this more than a hundred years ago, but it’s probably more applicable to our mentality today than it was even then. Today there are more ways than ever to develop your own skills, determine your own career path, create your own job, and get involved in meaningful and enjoyable work.

The epidemic of worry and job insecurity threatens to affect students’ psychologies and outlooks. During frosh week, the first question often asked after, “How was your summer?” is “Do you know what you are doing next summer yet?” The student is rarely allowed to live in the present with the work that is presented to them. Even a high-powered banking or consulting intern spends a great deal of time distracted from the work given to them because they are compelled to consider how they are coming across to their superiors.

Few students believe the truth that if they operate entirely in the present for these four years, taking care to do justice to the myriad of opportunities Princeton throws their way, they will graduate, actually get hired, and be successful in whatever opportunity they are next given.

The insecure student who takes the job they know isn’t right for them might ironically work to bring about their own fears. They want a well-paying job, financially secure future, and potential for social mobility. We all do, especially the English major behind this column desperately trying to convince himself he’s not going to be unemployed for the first two years after college.

But if we accept a job that does not genuinely feel like it is the work for us, we may have delayed the certain symptoms of failure we are so terrified of being associated with — moving back in with our mom, unemployment, an embarrassingly low-paying job — but we really are only delaying the start of our own lives. When I talk to students who are heading into finance, many of them are actively eager to finish their two years of being an analyst first. Far from being excited for their first job, they soon express that what they are really looking forward to is not this job, but the one they hope will come after. Like Emerson says, they are postponing, waiting to begin what they imagine as their real lives.

I hope that it does not pass you by. I hope that two years and then sanity in private equity does not become, “three years then I’ll be a CEO,” or “five years then I’ll be a millionaire,” and then “15 years till I can retire to Malibu.”

If an illustrious and taxing (and taxable) career path is the one for you, then really live that. If how you spend your days is how you spend your life, whatever job you take, do not wait for that life to slip away; start this very moment. Be here. As C.S. Lewis writes, “The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life.”

Luke Gamble is an English major from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@princeton.edu.