All roads lead to ... i-banking?

Investment banking analyst. Financial analyst. Corporation analyst. Product marketing consultant. This is not Wharton. This is Yale—bastion of liberal arts, land of progressive education—and this is, apparently, my future.

HYURA CHOI/YH

As a general rule, I hate any conversation that involves the topics "investment," "banking," or "consulting." It's not that I don't like money. I like money a lot. It pays my tuition. It pays for pizza. It pays for those little tissue packets you can stick in your pocket when you have a cold. I appreciate those tissue packets. I appreciate the $1.99 that pays for an eight-pack of those tissue packets. I also appreciate that some people need to spend time investing, banking, and consulting so that I can continue to buy eight-packs of tissue packets at the fair market price of $1.99. But what I didn't appreciate before a few months ago was that, absent a mind-boggling talent that would whisk me off to Broadway or the determination to spend another three or four or 10 years sleeping in library carrels, I would be expected to be one of those people.

When I made my fatal decision last January to ditch my half-hearted march to medical school and abandon the eight-hour torture chamber that is the MCAT, I had the highest of hopes. Forget 36-hour shifts in the ER: I would find my own way! Move to an Italian villa and write the Great American Novel! Move to a remote village in Zimbabwe and teach the Great American Dream! Move to Paris and discover a cure for AIDS while drinking café au lait! But as my final blue book arrived in the mail, I snapped back to earth. I may like pizza, but I can't speak Italian, and my French has gotten a little rusty since that AP test four years ago. As for the remote Zimbabwean village, well, let's face it—FOOT is one thing, but when you're talking long term, what it comes down to is that I like flush toilets.

So what does that leave? "Plenty!" I thought. There were tons of other things I could do, career-type things, things that real people did in the real world. It didn't matter that I had no idea what those things were; I had already paid almost $100,000 to prepare myself for them—surely some of that money counted toward actually attaining them. I would put myself back in the hands of Mother Yale, and she would guide me.

And guide me she did—straight into the hands of those tissue packet traders. "On- campus interviewing!" she said, cramming it down my throat before I even stepped onto campus this fall. "Fantastic!" I said. This was just my style. Hundreds of mysterious employers out there were going to come to me, and all I had to do was scroll through the newly web-accessible list of employers and take my pick. Sure, I had heard the rumors that Undergraduate Career Services (UCS) was all about money and nothing else, but here was a woman telling me that a great variety of companies were going to recruit me, yes me, straight through the Internet. "Gone are the days of flipping through endless disorganized binders in a stuffy little room and photocopying, photocopying, photocopying," she promised. "Now the companies are going to come directly to you, in your dorm room, at 3 a.m." I was enthused. I decided to interpret the term "company" in the most liberal of manners. Company could mean anything. A baseball team is a company. I like baseball.

There were approximately 140 listings for fall interviews on the super-duper-user-friendly-pride-of-UCS interviewing system. Of those 140 listings, six did not include the words "investment," "banking or "consultant," or at least a variation on these words ("financial analyst" does not, in my book, count as diversity). Out of these six, two were advertisements for engineers (I've never taken so much as EE 101), one was an ad, and one was for the Peace Corps (more peeing in outhouses).

Desperate, I searched for an alternative. Surely this was not all there was out there. But the UCS webpage yielded few other options. An advertisement for a non-profit career fair at Dwight Hall? I had heard horror stories about non-profits—mostly involving offices in shambles and a failure to receive a paycheck. A minority recruitment fair in New York? I'm as white as they come. Finally, I spotted an advertisement for a fellowship meeting. My spirits rose anew. Cure for AIDS! Great American Novel! I sat patiently for an hour, waiting for them to tell me the super-duper-user-friendly method of acquiring a fellowship. "Of course, for specific information, you'll have to look through the binders," the woman finally said.

A week later, I spent three hours between the hours of nine and five leafing through big blue binders full of fellowship advertisments that hadn't been updated since 1995. Of the hundreds of fellowships I looked at, approximately three did not require that I was a minority, a genius, or already headed to graduate school. The room was stuffy and claustrophobically small. I photocopied. On my way out, I took a peek into the main UCS library, where I could only dream of some day finding a piece of paper somewhere in that mess that would tell me how all the educated people in this world who are not doctors, lawyers, or investment bankers somehow seem to earn a living. And then a little voice gnawed at the back of my head, beckoning me toward the dark side. I went home and opened up Interviewtrak. After all, doesn't Mother always know best?

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