Ahead of the Curve (19 page)

“I know what you mean,” said Justin. “I met a guy the other day who spent his summer internship last year at Goldman Sachs. He said he spent sixty-seven straight days in the office. Basically he arrived on day one and never left.”

The race for summer jobs began the moment we returned to campus. Ruback’s stress curve, I recalled, had hit its peak during the recruiting season. A good summer internship was regarded as essential for a good post-HBS job. For some companies, especially the top-tier banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds, if you did not spend the summer with them you had no chance of working for them later. At others, a good performance over the summer meant a guaranteed job afterward and a stress-free second year. For many in the class, the coming weeks would determine not just their summer but also their post-HBS career. It was an opportune moment for
The Harbus
to republish an article headlined “Being Depressed at HBS.” It had been written by a student who had battled with depression and was intended to help others who felt unable to admit to their condition in this competitive environment. The author wrote that she almost killed herself three times during her first year at HBS. Everything had been fine at first, but then one day she started to feel different. Soon this feeling morphed into an unrelenting sadness. She could not fathom why everyone else seemed happy. She was simultaneously battling with the great question—what do I want to do with the rest of my life?—while fending off calls from recruiters. Seeing the same faces every day in her section was wearing her down. She began crying herself to sleep and staying in her room. She stopped exercising and began second-guessing every comment she made in class. The cases dragged on. “I started hating myself for ever applying to HBS,” she wrote, “and then one day I just didn’t get out of bed. I stayed in bed all day and just cried and cried. Then a strange calmness came over me. ‘Everything would be alright if I just killed myself,’ I thought. ‘Then it would all go away.’ So I made my way to the bridge and stood there for nearly an hour. But I couldn’t jump off.”

Thankfully, the author of the piece recovered, but HBS knew that her experience was not unique. We were a class full of insecure overachievers, a term I heard again and again. None of us was facing unemployment or working for the minimum wage. Instead, we were searching for identity and meaning in all the fine grades and career achievements that filled our résumés. The school had taken measures to calm us down. They gave us pep talks before the first-year midterms, telling us that however we did on them, we were still high up the MBA totem pole. There was Podolny’s lecture on serendipity. Even the magnificent gym was there to help us relax. A mental health counselor kept an office in Spangler, and her help was sought by eighty or ninety students in each class.

Through Cedric, the West African in our section, I had gotten to know Hasan, an Arab student from another section. His family had come to America but found it hard to assimilate and had returned to live in the Middle East. Hasan had attended international schools and eventually won a place at Dartmouth. He was captivated by America and decided to stay, taking a job as a technology consultant. He loved the academic work at HBS but found the social atmosphere stifling. “I’m used to having two personalities, work Hasan and social Hasan, and they’re very different,” he told me. “At work I’m very serious and professional, but socially I like to be really relaxed. Here I feel people are so obsessed with their place in the network, with their own personal brand, they never let go. You are expected to be the same person in every setting. I can’t really blur my personalities.” He complained that he was ridiculed for being so serious in class. “People use very passive-aggressive methods, like the skydecks, to control behavior. They don’t confront you, they’re really politically correct about that, but their attitude is closed-minded. It’s supposed to be an open environment, but I feel like everything you say or do is being scrutinized so they know where to put you on the curve.”

I had not had the same experience as Hasan, but I was beginning to feel the pressure to conform, to pick one of the paths floodlit by HBS. When I first arrived at the school, I was halfway to convincing myself I could be an investment banker. There was the money, of course, and the status. But there was also the sense that it would be an exciting kind of life—in the thick of things, forever transacting, dealing with different people and companies at a pace I had never experienced. Some of my cleverest and nicest friends had become bankers and had done very well. But none of them seemed to love it. Whenever I suggested I might try to join their ranks they insisted, “Don’t!” They told me that I would never survive, that I was too impatient. I would find it tedious and repetitive and the people humorless. But what about the money? It palls, they told me. They all had a figure in their heads and once they had made it, they would retire. Still, I didn’t believe them.

During the first semester, the section hosted lunches in which the ex-consultants talked about consulting and the ex-investment bankers about investment banking. The overwhelming lesson from both was, don’t go into either. They pay you well but leave you with no life. During the consulting session, Max, a brainy ex-management consultant, said that at his firm, and at most of the other big consultancies, if you arrived single you would stay single, and if you arrived married you would end up divorced. “They pretend to support people with families, but the moment hard times hit, it’s the people with families who get fired first,” he said. Other consultants talked about the unending round of meetings, the way their bosses knowingly ripped off clients by offering useless advice wrapped up in fancy presentations. It was a culture, they said, of intellectual arrogance and extreme cynicism. They described the four days of travel every week, starting on a Sunday night, ending on Thursday, if you were lucky, and the prison of the hotel conference rooms where they spent their time. They spoke of their bosses’ wrecked personal lives. The best thing, they all said, was that their companions in this purgatory tended to be intelligent and like-minded.

In the session on Wall Street, Stuart, the hunk who had described the psychological contract regarding taxis and Chinese food at his firm, said that whenever he told his family back in Nevada how much he was earning, they whooped and slapped him on the back, congratulating him for milkingthe system. “There was only one person getting milked, though,” he said, “and that was me.” It was not unusual for him to leave the office at four in the morning, sleep in the car home, have the car wait while he went inside and showered, and then get back in and return to work. He recalled working after 9/11 to help reestablish his bank’s operations and being in a meeting with a senior woman banker. Her phone rang. It was her daughter’s school. There had been a bomb alert and the school was being evacuated. “And what do you expect me to do about it?” the woman screamed. “You’re meant to be looking after her.” She slammed down the phone and continued the meeting. Stuart said he tried to be as discouraging to us as possible about Wall Street, because if people still wanted to do it, they must really want it. If you accepted the money offered by these firms, then you had to accept that your life was theirs. They had no respect for your time.

Another sign of how draining consulting and banking could be was the effort the industries had to put into recruiting. It felt as though the consulting firms and the Wall Street banks had buried encampments on campus from which they deployed their fresh-faced recruiters. They made unsolicited calls to our homes offering to describe their work. It was like being badgered by the Church of Scientology. Barely a day went by without the firms offering free drinks in the campus bar or dinners in Harvard Square to try to lure people down their chute. They referred to their former employees in each class as their “alumni” and used them as moles to glean information about potential hires.

A story went around about one investment bank that liked to humiliate MBA students working there over the summer by greeting each on arrival with a small folding stool. The student was told to set it up each day in a certain department, rotating every couple of weeks, and simply observe. Sometimes the student would be given a task to do, in which case he would take his stool to whatever desk space he could find and set to it. The work would be time-consuming and trivial, involving the extensive manipulation of spreadsheets to no apparent end. The poor MBA would be ignored, jostled, and occasionally abused before finally being graded on his performance in consideration for a full-time position. The ordeal of “the stool” summed up the indignity and absurdity of the summer internship.

Nevertheless, when the banks and consulting firms came recruiting, there was a stampede. The first time this happened was during a week in February called “hell week,” when classes were suspended for the full-time pursuit of summer jobs. During the days leading up to hell week, Spangler was filled with students hunched over the blue void of their screens, completing applications and scouring the alumni database for contacts. One woman in our section applied for sixteen jobs, all in banking and consulting. She quickly found that there was no way she could schedule the interviews. She drifted through the cafeteria like a wraith, muttering to anyone who would listen: “If I get a second round at Lehman Brothers, it will clash with the second round with Bain, New York, so what do I do?”

Even Stephen, my study group friend, was swept up in the hunt. I thought he would be more sanguine. “You have to do this, Philip. You can’t be cynical about it,” he told me. “For people like us, who don’t have business experience, it’s even more important. You have to show you can do this.” I struggled to take it all so seriously. Could my future really depend on whether or not I went to this consulting firm or that bank for a ten-week summer placement? It was as if no other jobs existed. My peers wanted these jobs in the way that contestants on television game shows want the jackpot prize, and they were ready to submit to any kind of humiliation to win it.

My range of summer job choices had shrunk by early February when we discovered Margret was pregnant and due to give birth in September. She now also had a part-time job in Boston that she enjoyed. If I was going to work over the summer, it had to be in Boston, and my sights had settled on investment management. Two executives from one of Boston’s largest fund managers had come to campus a few weeks before and painted a rosy picture of their work: you looked around the world and the companies in it and tried to deduce which were worth investing in and which not. The size of the funds the company managed meant that the managers could meet almost anyone in business they liked, while their investors did not expect them to do anything too radical. Most days, the managers were home by 6:00 P.M. Several people told me that my background as a journalist would serve me well in such an environment because much of the work involved sizing up people and situations and truffling for useful facts. I also hoped that since large mutual fund companies were not sexy at the time, I would not be competing with the finance propeller heads who would be pitching their wares to the Greenwich and New York-based hedge funds.

The more I read about investment management at one of these big mutual funds, the easier the work seemed to be. All most of them did was track the market and if possible beat it by a few basis points. Even when they failed, the inertia of their investors was so great that they rarely suffered. The fund managers talked about having great investment ideas and theses about the direction of the world—buy alternative energy/social networking sites/coal/barges!—but most of their work seemed to involve computer-driven weighting of large holdings in blue-chip companies that lumbered along with the market. For further inspiration, I read Peter Lynch’s books about running the Magellan Fund, one of the largest pots of money at Fidelity. Lynch’s approach seemed simple. He took notice of the most ordinary marketplace signals. If his wife started buying a new detergent, he found out which company made it and bought its stock, preferably cheap. He looked for stocks he thought could multiply three, four, or even tenfold—“three-baggers,” “four-baggers,” and “ten-baggers,” he called them. This was in a time before CNBC and the other stock-picking guides on television and magazine shelves. As far as I could tell, Lynch was remarkable for his energy and open-mindedness in an industry whose dominating culture lacked both.

I also read Roger Lowenstein’s biography of Warren Buffett,
The Making of an American Capitalist
. Buffett had come to campus in the first semester to talk to the Democrats Club five days before the presidential election. When he stepped onstage, the entire auditorium of nine hundred gave him a standing ovation. He had been rejected by HBS as a young man and had gone to Columbia. Thirty-five billion dollars later, he had the last laugh. He was as charming as a seventy-four-year-old could be. His clothes fit awkwardly around his paunch, and he held a bottle of Coke throughout his talk, while taking barely a sip. “We own eight percent of the company, so you should drink lots of it,” he said. “Or at least, open lots of it, even if you don’t drink it.”

He did not have a prepared speech but said we could ask him about anything we wanted. I thought my classmates would ask for investment advice or stock tips. But instead they asked big political questions. What can U.S. business do about Iraq? What can U.S. business do about global warming? Buffett’s answers were bland and predictable. Then Marnie, my section neighbor during the second semester, came to the microphone. She was tiny and hated speaking in class, so it was surprising to see her so exposed. But speaking in a strong voice, she asked Buffett how he would resolve the inequity created by America’s inheritance tax policy. He came to life with a long riff about what he called the Ovarian Lottery. Imagine you’re in the womb the night before you’re born and a genie comes to you and says you can design the world however you like. You can lay out the rules of society. But you must also know this: Before you enter the world, you will have to grab a ticket from a barrel and that ticket will say man or woman, United States or Bangladesh, crippled or athlete. How does that change how you design the world? He said it was ridiculous that a $3-trillion economy like that of the United States, with an average GDP of $40,000, couldn’t afford health care for seniors. He said good fortune in life and success was basically good luck. “If my friend Gates had been born two hundred years ago,” he said of the founder of Microsoft, “he would have been some wild animal’s lunch.”