Dartmouth Gal To Not Spurn Well-Paid Future
If you have no Times Select, you may not have noticed a new Times blog called "The Graduates." It's written by a bunch of college seniors who are all columnists or editors at their schools' newspapers. And, whoa, they're totally nervous about the future! Haven't these people ever seen Kicking and Screaming? There's this one chick from Dartmouth, Alice Mathias? She's written a lot of words about—well, we're not totally sure. Fuck corporate America! Hurricane Katrina! Iraq! Confusion! She seems torn about what to do after college, since most of her Dartmouth friends are going to be "crunching numbers at places like J.P. Bored-Again, Bored-Again Stanley, Merrill Lynching, Deutsche Bag, or Lame-Man Brothers. The other option is to do consulting at Bane." Those names sound funny, don't they? Well! "Note: these are fake names. Real names have been withheld to ward off any more competition for my well-paying job."
Yes, fuck corporate America indeed. Let's free Dartmouth and her peers from the TimesSelect moat!.
When we were kids, my friends and I played a game called MASH. This game forecast whether we would grow up to live in Mansions, Apartments, Shacks, or Houses, what our jobs would be, where in the world we would live, which of our celebrity crushes we would marry, and most importantly, what kind of pet we would have. All we had to do was pick a number 1 through 10 and our destinies would unfold before our eyes. If we didn't like these destinies, we could just play the game again.
Back in our MASH days, our dream jobs were firefighting, I-banking, sales and trading, consulting, wealth management, mergers and acquisitions, and real estate finance. We wanted to live in the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Greenwich or Great Neck. We understood that if we failed to find true love after the first shot, we could marry/divorce every crush on our lists. The pet issue was the only one that was really up for grabs. (I'm still crossing my fingers for that designer Labradoodle.)
Then our Dartmouth darling starts to get a little confused. Real life=confusing!
My class is graduating into a world that is changing faster than ever before. We're living in a weird society today that will most assuredly be weirder tomorrow. By the time my generation takes over the reins, we'll be steering an entirely different pony. Probably a robotic pony. (Oops! That Labradoodle just got bucked off my wish list.)
