<
p class=”p1″>People think I look young.
Usually, I average 15 — 16 on a good day. It’s mortifying in a lot of ways. In compensation, I use big words. I am trying to sound older, but really, I am merely playing at profound. Despite my best efforts in aging myself through language, something about my baby-faced features and short haircut still combine to form the perception that I have yet to qualify for a driver’s license. My parents insist this is a gift in the long term (you’ll appreciate this when you’re 40, you will!). But it feels like watching through the window as the big kids go out to play.
According to the Preliminary Cornell Class of 2015 Postgraduate Report, 58.4 percent of Cornellians are employed after graduation. Of those employed graduates (those who responded, anyway), 21.9 percent work in finance. 17.5 percent are in consulting and 12.9 percent fall under “general business.” That’s a whopping 30.5 percent of the Class of 2015 that ended up in high profile, top-dollar corporate jobs when they left this campus (that’s right, I did the math). Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Deloitte Consulting and Bank of America Merrill Lynch are listed among the top employers hiring our graduates. That’s nearly a third of our people. I’m no statistician, but I’d be willing to bet that a third of our students aren’t AEM majors. How do so many of us end up working these kinds of jobs?
Well, for starters, it’s what Cornell tells us to do. It’s a safe move, it’s a salary and, most of all, it feels like we’ve won. This was the end goal, right? That was what all those career fairs and resume critiques were all about. That’s why you did that internship. A good job with a big company — it’s just for a few years, we say. And then we can do something we like. But the way I see it, if ever there’s a time to suffer for our art, it’s now.
I will acknowledge that there is something to be said for hard work and earning money. But this sort of ugly internal compromise seems to be everywhere, and once you start to see it in the world, even the oceans look shallow. It’s short over long term; it’s power over passion. It’s Machiavellian, really — the ends justify the means. Forget life being a journey. We treat life as a race, and we are our own worst competition. It’s a terrible commentary on the way we live — but the reality is, we are all doing this; it is Survival of the Hypocrittist. Trying to trick the world — and ourselves — into thinking we have seen and done and know. Trying to be older.
I want to urge my fellow Cornellians to live of life of means, not ends. To feel like they don’t always have to take that high-profile internship or join that resume-boosting club or work in finance fresh out of graduation. I want to tell people they should open restaurants and write novels and paint their way across the country. But I’d be a hypocrite myself, because I’m still deciding if I have permission to shake off the Ivy League destiny and rearrange my preset priorities. “When I have children someday,” I think, “I’m going to make sure that they know they can do whatever they want with their life.” But maybe that’s what our parents said too.
It took me longer than normal to write this column. I couldn’t shake the idea that everything I was feeling was cliché, normal and pathetic. And perhaps it is. I say this now, but in two years I could easily be selling my soul to avoid sleeping on my parent’s couch. Every adult I’ve ever met tells me to relish in college life, because “the real world” is a reality check. Best four years of your life, right? Maybe I am deluded. Maybe I am cliché. But I get to be — I’m young.
So I’m not sure I mind when people underestimate my age anymore. It seems better than the alternative. Right now, I get all the “when I grow up, I’ll be…” that I want. My future is still fiction, and I like that. Our youth affords time, possibilities and the idea that we could still open that restaurant, write that novel, paint our way across the continent. We are still writing in pencil here! There is no reason to etch our future in stone before it arrives.