Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 56

formation sessions that he would miss gaining "marketable
skills" if he didn't bite, he bit hard and prepared his file.
In addition to formal presentations, firms also work
with student-run organizations to have an omnipresence
on campus. One Stanford student named Sadie revealed
that consulting firms "are really good at getting an 'in' with
various student group leaders and saying 'Hey, can you forward this information out to your networks?' "
According to another Stanford student, Devon, who
is an officer in one of the pre-professional clubs on campus, banks "come and they do presentations for the general
population, but then they'll have sessions with just the finance kids. Things like that really help them get connected
and get noticed and already stand out before the process
even starts because they have us for approval."

Highly competitive, statusconscious students go to
these firms because of the
structured pathway that
leads straight to them, even
as they rationalize that
they are on their way to
some more noble end.
This, and the flyers that cover campus during high
season and the emails flooding students' in-boxes, means
that "students get to know these recruiters and see them
around-a lot," said Noelle from Harvard. All of this enhances the sense that the jobs are a natural fit, since no
other employment sector comes close to this level of visibility. Understating recruitment's effects, one Harvard
grad said drolly, "There's a lot of pressure in the whole recruiting system: 'Oh my god, I have to get a job at McKinsey! I have to get a job at Goldman!' "
Six weeks after the presentation phase begins, recruitment momentum shifts to résumé drops. Here, too,
career service offices play an essential role. When students at elite universities go through recruitment for finance and consulting jobs, they have a direct path to
these firms that students at other universities do not.
Harvard résumés are reviewed only against other Harvard
résumés, Stanford only against Stanford. Career services
sets deadlines for these résumé drops, collects students'
cover letters and transcripts, and bundles the pieces of
information together for delivery to the firms. The next
few weeks are tense as students wait to hear if they have
cleared this hurdle.
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September/October 2014

he next phase of the process begins when firms send
out first-round interview requests to selected applicants and begin their series of meetings with seniors.
These meetings, which are held on campus in career services facilities, mark the beginning of the headiest phase of
competition (and concomitant anxiety) in the whole process. Students running around in suits prevail on campus;
they annoy their professors by skipping weeks of classes in
order to make their appointments; they hope for an invitation to do second rounds on campus two weeks later, and
pray for an eventual invitation to fly to the corporate offices to seal the deal.
The joke, according to some of our interviewees, is that
in September and then again in January and February, students going through recruitment are "part-time students,
full-time recruiting." This is a reflection of the amount of
time they spend living in the career services offices doing
interview after interview after interview.
Noelle's description of her own successful navigation
of this stage of the process at Harvard mirrors the experience of many:
You do maybe one interview onsite, two interviews onsite, maybe one phone interview, and then they fly you
out to New York, and that takes up a lot of time. I mean
it's great. You get airplane miles, you get paid for your hotel, they're treating you like royalty. You get great meals,
you get reimbursed, everything like that. But the thing is
that you miss so much class. There are kids who are literally flying down to New York three times a week for three
different interviews. It's nuts. And it's really stressful.
It's really competitive. I've heard stories of roommates
who don't talk to each other because they're competing
against each other for the same jobs.

hy are so many Harvard and Stanford students vulnerable to getting caught up in such competitions?
Most are well aware that they are competing for a
narrow band of jobs, and that however boring and purposeless those jobs may be, immediate prestige will go to the
winners of this highly structured competition.
To say that this creates cognitive dissonance or, at
the very least, ambivalence for many students is putting
things mildly. They both accept and abhor that being recruited by Wall Street or certain consulting firms has become a measure of how smart and talented they are. Much
of this ambivalence comes from the tension between, on
the one hand, wanting an ideal job that would take advantage of their individual interests and passions and, on the
other, landing a position that accelerates their careers and
fits well within the prestige system as it has come to exist
on campus.
Both Opal, an engineering student at Stanford, and Kacie, a senior at Harvard with a concentration in the social sciences, expressed such ambivalence. At Stanford, Opal said,

Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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