Get a Real Job

As a senior with no plans for graduate school, I figured it was high time I started to think about my future. After all, it's only seven and a half months away. And what better place to find a good career could there be than the Harvard-Radcliffe Career Forum? So last Friday I threw on my raincoat and walked to Memorial Hall, where I was told I would find numerous prospective employers on parade. The place was abuzz with my classmates, who were busy trying to make good impressions on one dark-suited individual or another, getting names and telephone numbers, hoping to ease the transition from academia to employment. They were intent on sending the right message to their prospective employers.

I sauntered about from booth to booth, absorbing all of this intensity, wondering what message the Forum was sending to me. Chase Manhattan Bank, First Boston Investment Banking, IDS Financial Services--there certainly were a lot of big names here to harvest Harvard's most-eager. Merrill Lynch, Corporate Decisions, Price Waterhouse--was I detecting a pattern? Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Management, Boston Consulting--hold on. I stopped to get a list of exactly who was wooing and being wooed by Harvard's ripest undergraduates. The companies were grouped by field, with consulting, financial services, and investment banking making up almost two thirds of the attendees. The remaining third included advertising, commercial banking, insurance, and others; Teach for America and the Peace Corps were inserted, it seemed, as an afterthought

If you took the Forum at face value, you might think that the only careers Harvard students are supposed to consider are ones in secondary or tertiary service industries where they would manipulate and live off assets other people created. College graduates, it would seem, are not supposed to concern themselves with creating new wealth; they should simply find careers where they can make money by manipulating other people's assets. In essence, the Forum was saying that Harvard students should not be producers.

Let's review some basic economics (if you've taken Ec 10, keep reading, because I don't think they taught us any of this). If a country wants to be prosperous it must produce goods and services that people want. In the short run, it can produce only for its own market, but in the long run the country must export its production to other countries if it wants to increase its standard of living. Exporting brings new money into the country, which allows the nation's companies to build more and better products, which will increase the wages it pays and the number of people it hires. Increased wages and employment lead directly to an increase in the standard of living. Pretty simple.

The question is, which companies produce? Investment banking doesn't help to increase our nation's standard of living. It just provide jobs for a few people who move around the assets other people worked hard to create. We can't export investment banking. Most importantly, investment banking doesn't do much to create new, non-investment banking jobs.

On the other hand, think of our automobile industry. Not only is it our nation's largest direct employer, but it also accounts for hundreds of thousands of indirect jobs. Jobs for tool and die makers, jobs for plastics workers, jobs for truckers, jobs for fork-lift operators, and, yes, jobs for investment bankers.

It is chilling to suggest that it's wise to send our college graduates to work at companies that live off our nation's core industries. But that's exactly what the Career Forum was saying. At the vast majority of the companies that were there, students would have the opportunity to make a living but not to create new value. Only a few manufacturers, like Proctor & Gamble and Merck, showed up at the Forum. Shouldn't more businesses like P & G have been there to seek out bright people to help them run their companies and design their products? If more talented, qualified people worked in management for our nation's producers, would there even be a need for management consulting?

I've been told that we don't need manufacturing jobs in this country anymore because our "sphere of expertise" has shifted towards service industries like banking and high finance. On the surface, that sounds pretty good. We don't need to create new jobs for fork lift operators or truckers because those are "bad" jobs. Instead we need to create more "good" high-paying white-collar jobs in tall office buildings. The problem is, our deficient education system continues to churn out people who are not qualified to do the "good" jobs. Consequently, there is an intense need for positions for honest, hard working people who didn't go to Harvard. And it should not be surprising that the companies that offer these types of jobs also need well-educated people to help them compete in the global market. In fact, they're the companies with the greatest reason to recruit on college campuses. Unfortunately, the Office of Career Services, which organized the event, missed this point and created a Career Forum that offered us a very narrow view of the careers that are open to us.

So, my advice to my classmates and to those who will follow us into the job market is this: Forget what you saw at the Career Forum and look for a real job at a company that is directly involved in the creation of new wealth, a company that also employs people who didn't go to college, a company where you can build a future for yourself while helping to build one for your country. That is, after all, what a career should be all about.

Daniel H. Schumann '93-'94 is a photography editor at the Crimson and an Engineering Sciences concentrator.