When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a sniper. Not just any sniper I aspired to be the next Simo Hayha. (For all you newbies out there, Simo Hayha, aka "the White Death," was a Finnish soldier who racked up 505 confirmed kills in the 1939-1940 Winter War against the USSR. Not bad for a guy from a place best known for its reindeer population.) But after a few years spent fantasizing about ghillie suits and field craft, I moved on from my slightly disturbing dream of being an assassin to dreaming of becoming a pilot. I maintained that career aspiration until a turbulent puddle jumper flight from Boston to Burlington in eighth grade made me reconsider the whole working-at-30,000-feet thing. That near-death experience steered me towards less adventurous career goals. By the time high school rolled around, I aspired to become a lawyer or a writer.
So when I hopped off the Dartmouth Coach in September 2009, I did so with visions of novels and tort reform dancing in my head. But after a few weeks in Hanover, I quickly discovered that many of Dartmouth's campus leaders seniors who I admired and respected were headed in another direction. They were heeding the siren song of Manhattan's concrete canyons, flocking south to work on Wall Street.
In general, Dartmouth students are type-A go-getters. Because our society values money-making, the most lucrative jobs are the most desired. Dartmouth students are well-positioned to obtain and succeed at those positions, so why wouldn't we seek them out?
The thought process of the typically overwhelmed soon-to-be Dartmouth graduate goes something like this: do something that you might not be particularly passionate about right after college (e.g. investment banking, consulting, whatever) in order to "learn the ropes," pay your dues and work your ass off. Then down the road, you might move on to your true passion, which will presumably be discovered along the way. This mentality is driven by a number of factors. Our competitive drive is what got us here, and in the end no one wants to feel less successful than their classmates. In a society that uses wealth as a metric for achievement, who wants to be the one ballin' on a budget while your friends are rolling in Bimmers? Being surrounded by your peers can also be calming and reassuring. High-powered, high-paying jobs are populated with people similar to ourselves driven, motivated over-achievers, often from Ivy League or equivalent institutions.
Coming of age in such an environment, many of us conduct career searches with a set of blinders on. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. When I went into Career Services last year to learn how use the online career networking system, the first employer I searched for was "Goldman Sachs," followed by "Morgan Stanley." The exasperated career counselor informed me that there were other career paths out there and proceeded to pull up a list of educational non-profits. When we were searching for job titles, my initial request was for "CEO." She probably thought I was the biggest douchebag ever.
Dartmouth had clearly changed me. I had evolved from the excited freshman dreaming of being a writer, to plotting my path to being a future finance mogul. Since then, however, my dream job has come full circle in a way. Upon graduation I plan on commissioning as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. I'll be wearing MARPAT camouflage instead of an Armani suit. I'll be earning somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 a year. And I'm OK with that.
So if what you really want is to backpack around Southeast Asia after graduation, start pinching those pennies and go east, young man. Teach for America. Work on an oil rig. Join the Marines. Be a starving artist. Or, if you really want to, send your resume to Mr. Goldman and Mr. Sachs. Whatever you do, do it reflectively. Don't be a lemming.
