*
Honestly, I think UCS is an easy scapegoat. The real reason so many of us pursue careers in consulting and finance is far more complicated than that. Of course, the word scapegoat is problematic to begin with. Are consulting firms inherently evil? Probably not. Are banks inherently evil? Probably not. Frankly, I don’t know enough about everything to make a statement like that one way or another. So is there anything intrinsically wrong with the fact that 25 percent of employed Yale graduates end up in this industry?
Yeah. I think so.
Of course this is my own opinion, but to me there’s something sad about so many of us entering a line of work in which we’re not (for the most part) producing something, or helping someone, or engaging in something that we’re explicitly passionate about. Even if it’s just for two or three years. That’s a lot of years! And these aren’t just years. This is twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five. If it were a smaller percentage of people, perhaps it wouldn’t bother me so much. But it’s not.
What it boils down to is that we could be doing other things. Sure, working at Bain or McKinsey or J.P. Morgan might be one way to gain skills to help us get hired elsewhere, but it’s obviously not the only option. There’s a lot of cool shit we could all be doing—and I don’t need to enumerate the clichés.
Obviously, some people need to make money. They have school loans to pay off and families to support. For those of us with an actual need to make money quickly, these industries might make a lot of sense. In fact, I think that working hard to earn a decent amount of money can be quite noble. I’m still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won’t have the same opportunities I had growing up. For most students, however, I genuinely don’t think it’s about the money. It’s a factor, sure. But it just feels like a factor.
What bothers me is this idea of validation, of rationalization. The notion that some of us (regardless of what we tell ourselves) are doing this because we’re not sure what else to do and it’s easy to apply to and it will pay us decently and it will make us feel like we’re still successful. I just haven’t met that many people who sound genuinely excited about these jobs. That’s super depressing! I don’t understand why no one is talking about it.
Oftentimes at Yale, I’ll be sitting around studying or drinking or hanging out when I’ll hear one of my friends talk about a project they’re doing for a class or a rally they’re organizing or a play they’re putting on. And I’ll just think, really, honestly, how remarkably privileged we are to hang around with such a talented group of people around here. I am constantly reminded of the immense passion and creativity of those with whom I get to spend time every day.
Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe it really is a fantastic way to gain valuable, real-world skills. And maybe everyone will quit these jobs in a few years and do something else.
But it worries me.
I want to watch Shloe’s movies and I want to see Mark’s musicals and I want to volunteer with Joe’s nonprofit and eat at Annie’s restaurant and send my kids to schools Jeff has reformed and I’m just scared about this industry that’s taking all my friends and telling them this is the best way for them to be spending their time. Any of their time. Maybe I’m ignorant and idealistic but I just feel like that can’t possibly be true. I feel like we know that. I feel like we can do something really cool to this world. And I fear—at twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five—we might forget.
* * *
* Yale’s undergraduate public service organization.
The Art of Observation
The old couple in lower berths C and D stared at us for at least twenty of the thirty-two hours between the City of the Dead and India’s south coast. We read books, rolled dice, and looked out at rice fields and rivers. The woman was plump and wrapped in a saffron sari, the man thin and clothed in a starched white shirt. We traveled with them in a curtained compartment as the train wove past scruffy monkeys and starving cows, but they gazed instead at our pale peculiarities. The way I braided my hair. The way he bit at a nail. The way we smiled and laughed across our top bunks. We didn’t mind, really. Not when they watched us eat oily lentils with forks and not when they spoke in hushed Hindi as we took off our shoes. So we looked out and not down as Calcutta wound to Chennai and the monsoon heat broke: five weeks in and we were used to being watched.
When Luke and I landed in India, we discovered our celebrity before our passports were stamped. Our backpacks rolled through baggage claim and a middle-aged man held out his cell phone and clicked. At first, the attention was surprising. I’d been warned by blogs and travel guides, but I didn’t expect such explicit persistence. “One photo, one photo,” they’d coo from streets and stands: “One photo, please, miss, one photo.” On our first day in Delhi, the circles in the Jama Masjid mosque forced us off its hot marble and our trip to the spice bazaar yielded three or four photos. Thrust into a city where chaos prevails, we were dizzied into frame after frame with beaming locals. We’d agree to one shot and be trapped in five others, avoid followers at lunch only to get them at dinner. By the time we’d traveled west into the desert, Luke was getting fed up. He’d refuse cameras and yell off those who stared, exhausted and appalled by the endless annoyance.
I liked it.
When a rickshaw driver turned around or a schoolboy held out his phone, I flattered myself beyond the obvious parameters. I knew, of course, that my white skin and light features were responsible for the attention, but some part of me still took pleasure from being stared at on trains and photographed in city gardens. I didn’t quite mind posing for all the pictures and felt, rather disgustingly, like some kind of movie star, forced to pause for snapshots outside shops and on the streets.
The sentiment sickened me. Each time I felt a twang of pleasure from the stares or picture requests, my ego was kicked down by my very revulsion that it had been boosted in the first place. I pondered my own narcissism as I smiled again and again next to Taj Mahal tourists from Hyderabad and Mumbai. “One photo please,” they’d ask, and I wouldn’t know how to say no. Luke would walk ahead and I’d inevitably stay behind. If it made them happy, after all, why not play along?
I confessed such sentiments to two Irish girls on the rooftop restaurant of a cheap hostel in Jaipur. We complained about the stares on trains and in rickshaws, comparing stories of extremes as the sun set and kites flew up from the pink city’s nearby roofs. After a few glasses of Indian wine, I offered that maybe, sometimes, it really wasn’t so bad. Yes, they responded, nodding and thinking. They agreed with the emotion, they saw what I meant. I laughed at our deprecation as the light faded, but searched their eyes in earnest nonetheless.
Yet as the weeks wore on, it became harder to see fascination as flattery. In the Buddhist town of Dharamsala, Tibetan monks pulled cheap cell phones from within their thick maroon robes and asked grinningly for pictures against the Himalayan skyline. In a rural village near Jaisalmer, a man had me pose with each of his skinny children. In the City of the Dead, no cameras were allowed. The dying come to die in the holy Ganges River, burning on its banks and escaping reincarnation in its waters. Walking through the chaos of bells, human ashes, stray dogs, and bones, I felt a kind of double relief. Not a single Indian requested a photograph, and not one time did I snap my own lens. One night during the monsoon, we wandered down the shore to watch the cremations, standing beside bald men as they threw powders into fires that raged despite the rain. Not a single person was looking at us.
The next morning we boarded a thirty-two-hour train. In the afternoon, Luke climbed down off his berth, past the thin aged man and his saffron wife, wandering out between the cars to see the jungle fade to palms. I opened my journal to begin writing and caught the corners of my eyes watching the woman watch me. My prose was jumbled and distracted and I was reminded for an instant of a performance-art piece at the Public Theater. An actress worked on a typewriter in a corner of the lobby—claiming art through the action of everyday observation. I’d left the theater with an almost angry indignation. There was nothing to be fascinated by, nothing to esteem, nothing to romanticize in this everyday examination of our immutable solipsism.
That night, when the train was dark, the woman’s eyes smiled up at me before she faded off to sleep. I heard the rain break and the men vending dosa and chai slowly fade from the aisles. Far from my months stumbling through markets and holy land, I wonder how many photographs of my pale limbs line the walls of strange Indian homes. Embarrassed, I fumbled off my flash from within the stained train sheets, capturing the woman to bring home to a tiny box on my shelf.