Will Work for Food

By Ram Murali | Wednesday, January 20, 1999

I'm sitting in a room on the second floor of the Hanover Inn.

'So, describe an instance when you were in a leadership position and things weren't working out for the best. What did you do?'

'I, uh...' I begin to stutter wildly and look around the room, racking my brain. I can't think of anything to say at all. 'Well, um...'

I suddenly scream, 'I can't take this anymore!' I run to the window and plunge through the glass, my body falling down, down, and smashing onto a Dartmouth Minicoach.

I wake up in a cold sweat.

This is what recruiting does to you.

Corporate recruiting is at its best slightly fun, but generally pretty wretched. Imagine a college interview administered by the Marquis de Sade and you'll get some kind of an idea.

Basically, I feel like a 5'10" slab of beef in a suit and tie, with a resume taped to my chest and my GPA tattooed on my forehead. People walk around me, poking and prodding, wondering if I will be right for the company, asking me an occasional random question like 'How many cups of coffee do you think the Dirt Cowboy sells in a day? Don't just guess, but deduce it rationally.'

I wouldn't say that recruiting is demeaning - that's probably taking it a bit too far - but it is distressing and self-esteem destroying. Never have so many judged you on so much based on so little. The average interview lasts twenty-five minutes and could permanently alter the course of your life.

Even though the interviews are so short, recruiting is an enormous time suck. It's more time than a fourth class for me, even though I'm barely doing it. You have to do research for the interviews, or at least you're supposed to.

You have to go to first round interviews. You have to sit by your phone and hope for second rounds. You have to go to second rounds. You have to write thank you letters. You have to schedule flights to strange places. It has so far taken me about ten hours a week and I am only recruiting with seven companies. I know people who are recruiting with forty companies. Either they are much more efficient than I am or they are all Robocop.

Sometimes I wonder why I am doing this, then I realize: it's because it's what I'm expected to do. I've had four financial internships, about each of which I could tell you a story of Triumph and a story of Defeat, because I'm supposed to memorize these things. I can also tell you my greatest strength (I learn fast) and my greatest weakness (I'm impatient).

What's the point?

Well, they do have to learn a lot about you in a really short time, and how you work under pressure. So maybe they do have some value.

Actually, what's the point? Socioeconomicoculturally speaking?

The point is that we have been told that the only way we will make anything out of our lives, at least in the corporate world, is by working one hundred hours a week in a sweatshop, oops, I mean investment bank, for the next two years.

I'm tempted to say in an interview, when I'm asked why I want to be an investment banker, because I invariably am, 'Because I want to make a lot of money.' Pure and simple. That's the only reason for anyone to want to do it.

That's the only thing there is to do. Investment banking is just playing with money. There's no meaning behind it.

Not that that's a bad thing of course, because money is good. I'm just sick of the dishonesty, sick of the pretense. And the worst part is that I am lazy. I don't want to work one hundred hours a week for the next two years. I want time for a life.

Is it best to defer life until when you have money? That's what you do if you're an investment banker. You retire at forty, rich, but is it worth having lost your youth?

I don't have enough options, or I have too many. Graduate school, yes. I should hear back from them soon. What else can I do? Work at Club Med? (I am applying.) Teach at a boarding school? (See strengths and weaknesses above.) Write a screenplay and try to be an actor? (See my other article, p. 8.)

What I love is when people start asking me lots of questions about the Review when I'm in interviews. Like they're scared because I'm a 'Conservative.' If they are liberals, they are hypocrites, because they are selling their souls for greed.

Too many questions, too few answers. I just want to do the right thing. Can't we all just get along?

Corporate recruiting absolutely has its fun moments though. When you walk out of an interview thinking that you nailed it, when a prestigious investment bank calls you and offers to fly you down to New York for a day, when things go your way, when you catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror on your way there and think, 'Damn, I look good in a suit,' then you're glad that you're recruiting.

It's fun. For a couple of minutes, I feel like I'm playing dress-up, and then I realize it's my life.

This message hit home when I interviewed for some investment bank last week. After a couple of interviews, they all blend together.

Except for the fact that I knew one of my two interviewers.

I didn't know him too well. He was a '98. I had known him since my freshman year, but we hadn't really talked that much. But we had a lot of friends in common, enough so that I had heard that he was absolutely miserable with his job.

He was just waiting to get his bonus, then he was going to quit.

Needless to say, this information made the interview very uncomfortable. All of my usual questions, like, 'So, why do you like working for such-and-such bank' were out the window, because I knew that he didn't.

The girl interviewing me along with him was a real horror. She had one of those high, annoying voices and asked horrible questions. Visualize her face twisting with distaste during the italicized words: 'Well, if you're so interested in finance, why did you decide to be a government major?' This question came minutes after she told me that she had been a sociology major.

I looked over at the kid I knew, or whom I used to know. His eyes were depressed and dead, his entire demeanor suggested a man who has been beaten. I had known him well enough to know that he used to be really funny, he was a really good writer, was just an all-around nice guy. This bank broke his spirit. I looked at him and vowed that that would never become me. I will never let a company break me.

I don't know what to do.

If you have any advice, please blitz me. And in the meantime, keep your fingers crossed: I should hear from grad school in less than a month.

Will Work for Food

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