Eight College Seniors Face The Future

Check out a new blog from The New York Times written by eight college seniors who are “[facing] the future.”

The first entry posted is by Dartmouth’s Alice Mathias (also a columnist for The Dartmouth), who writes quite insightfully on her theory why Ivy-educated kids feel so much pressure to go corporate. Here’s an excerpt:

When we were kids, my friends and I played a game called MASH. This game forecast whether we would grow up to live in Mansions, Apartments, Shacks, or Houses, what our jobs would be, where in the world we would live, which of our celebrity crushes we would marry, and most importantly, what kind of pet we would have…

Back in our MASH days, our dream jobs were firefighting, I-banking, sales and trading, consulting, wealth management, mergers and acquisitions, and real estate finance … O.K., fine –– no one actually knew what “I-banking” meant when we were kids. We still don’t understand the specifics, but roughly translated it means: “getting rich.” Whatever it is, a stunning percentage of my generation’s most promising brainiacs are doing it. They could be curing diseases or discovering alternative energy sources or living at their parents’ houses, but instead, they are making millions for the Man over at the bank-tank.

I respect my many bank-bent peers who feel the need to make a lot of money for one glaringly freaky reason … Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq have underscored the notion that money is the common citizen’s only viable safety net. It doesn’t take an econ major to recognize basic applications of supply and demand. When helicopter rides out of danger zones become limited, they go to the rich. When the American Army finds itself with limited resources, it goes to the poor. If my classmates and I are going to live forever, we can expect to face many natural and man-made disasters. If these problems are not somehow avoided, it seems they will be escaped only by those who can afford a one-way ticket to that castle on the moon.

Mathias explains that young adults nowadays are turned off from politics because our generation has only seen leadership in the model of the Bushes and the Clintons. As graduation nears, public service is eschewed and “all the smartest kids in the room have instead elected to go Mr. Moneybags à la Monopoly.”

Thankfully, though, there are those who have managed to “[sneak] through the corporate cracks” and Mathias closes by saying that there’s certainly hope for a political revolution among the seemingly young and jaded. I’m just happy that there’s someone out there who’s talented, perceptive, and fully aware that we all deserve much better than a cubicle.