Looking at the Canvas One Step Back

When I was in San Francisco, I met people who lived their dreams. People who took the risk of turning what they loved doing into their profession. Most probably regarded these people as quixotic… silly, delirious, as they made their climb to success. I met Toni Schneider, who described living off a few thousand dollars a year eating cups of ramen, who now sits as the creator of Wordpress and Partner at True Ventures. Prior to meeting Toni, I met Andrew Kortina, founder of Venmo, back at Penn who described going around in Philadelphia after graduating, knocking on houses, asking if they needed a website built for their personal bio or business.

Then I came back to Penn. As a third year, I started to see my peers dressed in suits, blindly hustling to On Campus Recruiting info sessions every other day. “You just gotta play the game,” one of my friends told me. I went to an info session. I looked around the room, students dressed impeccably in black and navy suits with crisply knotted ties, nodding their heads overzealously as they honed in on the recruiters speaking. After the info session, lines form as students take the chance to express just how excited they are for an opportunity to work at X company, swiftly asking for a contact email or business card. Done. Check. Off to the next info session.

This was an eerie experience. 18-21 year olds are expected to have their act perfectly together and understand what career they want. Colleges like Penn do a phenomenal job as feeders for top firms. I can’t get enough emails from Career Services and clubs about the next info session and resume workshop. How, in the midst of all this, do these undergraduate colleges forget to emphasize the most important focus– the focus on personal development? The focus on improving, refining ourselves personally and mentally, not just professionally. The occasional emails about superficial student health events that we dismiss at the blink of an eye don’t really do anything.

This is not a call for students to say no to corporate work experience and go off working at a random tech startup or drop out of school. It’s a simple observation that so many students today, including myself at times, in hyper competitive environments like Penn forget to take a moment to take a step back and assess what we really want to do beyond college. It does not help that we are constantly inundated with emails, pressure to be high achieving, to get the best internship/job possible. The standard path is simple and a six figure salary is most certainly within reach if you play the game here right: lock down a good internship in finance/consulting. Do well, work hard, secure the full time offer. 80-110 hours a week? Suck it up. Pay your dues. Next step is venture capital, private equity, or a hedge fund. Then we’ll be working 60 hours a week and life will be beautiful. We’ll be financially stable; this is exactly what our parents wanted for us: a nice, comfortable life. Who wouldn’t want this?

This is most certainly not a disapproval of taking on a corporate finance/consulting job. Getting that kind of experience is invaluable, and I can imagine so many firms provide incredible work experience and open infinite doors professionally. Hell, there is a high chance that I strive for a job in those industries. The unfortunate point here is that in this kind of environment, our nose is touching the canvas- almost the only thing we can see ahead of us is the aforementioned standard path to financial success. In the process of securing that job, we forego the time and effort we could spend looking at the canvas one step back. Getting out of our tunnel vision, understanding what kind of life we want to lead, what kind of people we want to become.