Beyond Good and Evil at OCS

The debate surrounding the pursuit of jobs in investment banking and consulting has become polemical, to the point where it is no longer constructive for those in search of some answers. Every year, two extremes seem to emerge: the first, that many hundreds of graduating seniors who go through recruiting are betraying their obligations to humanity; the second, that the positive externalities of working as a banker or a consultant justify such a career choice.

Two recent articles in The Crimson define this spectrum. With all of the idealism of a social studies concentrator, Jonathan T. Jacoby '99 challenged his fellow seniors to choose career paths we could justify to Third World peasants ("Anti-social Behavior" Opinion, Nov. 4). Then Kaustuv Sen '99, with the pragmatic individualism of an economics concentrator, argued that I-bankers and consultants may be the actors in society in the best position to do good ("In Defense of Business Careers" Opinion, Dec. 1).

Unfortunately, neither of these points of view helps us on our collective endeavor to figure out what we are or should be doing here. Flirting with ideas for four years in a liberal arts institution is not even justifiable to most citizens of the First World (in fact, it is a peculiarly American luxury), so to a Laotian or Burundian peasant the moral difference between working 80 hours per week at Goldman, Sachs and studying at Harvard or paying to participate in World Teach is negligible (or more likely still, completely irrelevant). As for the worth of business people, investment bankers and consultants may add to GDP and still end up rich corporate drones, serving nobody but themselves.

But searching for ways to bash or praise seniors who choose to drop their resumes to the Office of Career Services (OCS) in search of a job in the business world does not go to the heart of the matter: It does not serve to explain why many people whom we respect and whom we know to be good people choose to become bankers and consultants. As someone for whom corporate America holds no allure, the fact that so many of the people I entered Harvard with are now going through recruiting is sort of baffling to me, but I find it neither despicable nor praiseworthy.

Instead, the dominance of recruiting as a post-graduate option seems to be the result of a number of concrete factors, including the ease with which one can get a banking or consulting job, the large amount of money one can earn in these fields, the Herculean efforts of the recruiting companies to bait intelligent 22-year-olds (coupled with OCS' compliance with them) and, most importantly, confusion on the part of those who apply.

It is a strange, scary and wonderful thing to find yourself with a Harvard degree in a wide-open world. You have to begin making decisions about where to go, what to do, who to be with and so on; and the most challenging part of facing your future, but also the most exhilarating and privileged aspect of it, is the very freedom we have to choose. In a world littered with social inequalities between nationalities, tribes, races, etc., this freedom cannot be justified to the more than one billion people living in poverty, because there is nothing just about it.

All we can do for the moment, then, is try to make sense of the options before us and question our place and privilege in the world. The most pernicious aspect of the entrenched recruiting system is that it precludes this challenge to a large degree. Flipping through the advertisements in The Crimson or paying a visit to OCS creates the absurd impression that there is only one thing to do next year--make money.

The best advice I have received regarding my immediate future has come from my father (and I have heard it repeated by several other mothers and fathers): What you end up doing for the next year or two, he said, is not as important as you think it is, because anything you do will be adding to your experience.

Making a meaningful contribution to society is not easy, particularly when armed only with a freshly minted college degree and a big heart. If nothing more, it is our task this year, before moving on from this four-year indulgence, to contemplate the inequalities before us and trust that our peers are doing the same.

Daniel M. Suleiman '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.