Major Decisions
As the mom of an Eph who has not yet decided on a major, I thought the subject might make for a worthwhile discussion.
When first applying to Williams, one of the things my son noticed, was that he didn’t need to declare a major. Since he had no clue as to what to put in that blank space on the application, this was, in his opinion, a plus.
There seem to be people who know from an early age, exactly what they want to do with their lives. He is not one of them. And in his case, the old adage, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” does indeed apply. His parents have spent a lifetime in search of what they want to do when they grow up. Thank goodness all of our endeavors have been fairly interesting, as well as lucrative enough to pay the mortgage.
But he will need to declare eventually, and though he has not asked my counsel, I am trying to prepare myself to be of service should he seek it. There are endless sources for advice on this subject, and in my opinion, EB might as well be one of them.
How many of you are of that ilk who knew from an early age, what their life’s work might be? If not, were you inspired by a professor, or a particularly great class? What kind of guidance did the college provide in your quest?
And the other thing I’d be curious to hear, is how many of you ended up in careers that were closely associated with your majors? It seems more typical, that one hears otherwise. Was that the case for you?
In the hopes of inspiring some levity, I close with the words of Dave Barry. According to Mr. Barry…
“Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:
1. Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
2.Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).”
So, since I am paying the tuition on all 2000 of the hours of which Mr. Barry speaks, I am hoping that your stories will convince me that the subject matter on which you chose to focus those hours, was well worth every penny.
David Foster Wallace on the liberal arts
From a commencement address given at Kenyon in 2005:
Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what’s going on inside me. As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
CC has $35,000 to spend - ideas?
The following was sent to students yesterday:
We hope everyone is doing well and successfully adjusting back into class mode.
College Council is writing to get your advice and give you a chance to help make a major financial decision for the campus.College Council raised $35,000 by closing the college accounts of defunct student groups. We now want to use that money for a large campus improvement project and we are giving the student body the power to decide how to spend it.
Professor Dudley W. R. Bahlman
Inspired by the “Good People of Williams” post (but not wanting my story to be lost in comments), I figured I’d write about Professor Dudley Ward Rhodes Bahlman. (Although to be fair, he went by the less formal “Dudley W. R. Bahlman”). Now that’s a name for a college professor. He looked the part as well. Easily 6′2,” he was a big man. Rumor had it that he’d played on the Yale football team. I never found out whether it was true, but he certainly had the build of a linebacker. A linebacker who wore three-piece suits to class; on his days off he’d wear a tweed sportscoat or a Shetland sweater.
Between the name, his build, and the way he dressed, he was an imposing man. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down in his class, my first class in my freshman year at Williams: History 101. “Good morning, class,” he started. “My name is Professor Bahlman. It’s not ‘Dudley’ or ‘Dud’–it’s Professor Bahlman. You will be ‘Mr. Creese’ and ‘Miss Coolidge.’ Maybe when we all die and go to that big Heaven in the sky I’ll be Dud and you can be Chip or Buffy, but in this class we will address each other formally. Is that understood?” We all gulped and nodded.
“Now, you’ll notice that I walk around a lot in class,” he said, striding forcefully back and forth across the front of the room in Greylock. “I have a lot of energy and I find it useful. I used to twirl my pocket watch on the end of its chain, but the chain let go one day and beaned a student. Knocked him out cold. Took several minutes to bring him around. So now I just walk back and forth.” Once again we gulped and nodded.
I learned a lot from him, but two lessons stand out. The first paper we had to write for him was a five-pager answering the question, “Was World War II inevitable?” Like many students at Williams, I had been a straight A student in high school. Needless to say, I was shocked when I got the paper back with a big “C+” on it. Everyone else was pretty much in the same boat, so the general demeanor in the class that day was total disbelief.
He started out, “I suspect that many of you are disappointed in your grade–as well you should be. Frankly, many of the papers were not well argued. It’s fair to say that your first mistake was to answer the question I posed.” We’re looking at each other, going, “Huh? What was that again?” He went on. “Look at how I posed the question: ‘Is World War II inevitable?’ You need to qualify the question. Inevitable when? In 1935? In September 1939? Furthermore, the word ‘inevitable” is a trap. It’s too absolute. You should have started your paper by saying something like, ‘I will answer the question, “Was World War II inevitable?” by answering the more specific question: “At the beginning of December 1941, was it probable that the U.S. would have eventually entered World War II, even if Pearl Harbor hadn’t happened?”‘ Remember, it’s your paper; you’re in control of what you write. Don’t blindly follow the professor over a cliff.”
Thirty-seven years after that class the lesson is still burned into my brain: Recast the question if necessary.
My junior year I took Professor Bahlman’s class on Victorian England and learned yet another lesson. He was a big believer in making us read “the definitive works,” some of which were quite dry. We had a quiz at the start of class one day and although most of us did pretty well, the entire class was stumped by one specific question. (We all compared notes during the break, since it was a three-hour class.) We ganged up on him once we got back in class, all of us claiming that that we’d never seen that answer in the assigned reading. “Ah,” he said, his eyes sparkling. “That was in the footnotes. You should always read the footnotes.”
I carefully read footnotes to this day.
Finally, to give a hint of his softer side, a story from outside of class. One Winter Study I did an oral history project about Williams during the Baxter and Sawyer administrations. I went around and interviewed faculty and staff who’d worked for Presidents Baxter and Sawyer, and Professor Bahlman was one of them, since he had served as Dean of the Faculty under Sawyer. At one point he got onto recounting some student pranks during the 1960s, and made the comment, “You know, I think students take themselves way too seriously these days. We haven’t had a good student prank in the past several years.”
Partly emboldened by his offhand comment–and somewhat distressed that the future Sawyer Library was being built without the obligatory construction sign listing the architect, construction firm, etc.–my roommates and I decided we would correct that omission. We created a large plywood sign, white with purple letters, that said, “Site of the Future Smilin’ Jack Sawyer Library.” We attached it to the fence surrounding the construction site in the dead of night (and got caught by Security in the process–but that’s another story). The sign suddenly appearing out of nowhere caused a minor sensation, since many people couldn’t figure out whether the sign was official or not. (We’d worked hard to make it appear professionally done.) Its appearance was written up in the Williams Record, and the college sent a picture of it to alumni in a newsletter, attributing the sign to “student humorists.” Several days later, I ran into Professor Bahlman at a hockey game as I was scooting past him to get to a seat. He looked down at my sneakers with dabs of paint on them, smiled, and said, “That’s an interesting shade of purple paint, Mr. Creese,” and winked.
In my mind, a great professor.
Good People of Williams
I was poking around on EphBlog looking for something, when I realized I’d never really looked at the Ephblog Quote Wall. Looking over it, I saw this:
In some respects what we say may never matter, yet history has proven time and again that there are sometimes cases where one voice has made a difference. The most successful of these though were always the ones who were compassionate in their cause and careful with their words. — M. Esa Seeglum ‘06
I’ll be honest that I have no idea what inspired this quote or who the author is (the link on the page was broken). But it lead me to reflect on my time at Williams and some of those who had inspired me. It also made me contemplate Larry’s suggestion that we might discuss people at Williams that had great influence on us, be it professors, fellow students, townsfolk, staff, or otherwise. I suppose this could be for the better or for the worse, but I’m hoping better. For any recently admitted students who have stumbled upon us, I hope this can give you a flavor of why we Eph Alums are so involved (sometimes overly so) in our alma mater. As you can see from this blog, our fierce loyalty involves sometimes equally fierce criticism because we want Williams to continue to improve. But I think it is safe to say that Williams has had a great impact on the lot of us, and it is good to periodically step back and remember why.
For me, there are quite a few people who had great influence on me, but I’ll start with one here. Professor Bill Darrow, Chair of the Religion Department and all-around great guy. Of course, he is a brilliant professor, but I had a number of brilliant professors at Williams. There was something extra in the way he managed to welcome students to explore complex questions, to challenge us and yet make us feel “safe” in some way to do it. He taught tutorials in his cramped office in the Stetson maze with books surrounding you on all sides, wearing what can only be described as “Cosby sweaters.” He was like a caring uncle or grandparent - but a really, really smart one. For those of you out there who know him, you’ll also recall his particular manner of speaking where his voice dropped when he made a point and how he would kind of look upward as he reached for words sometimes.
I came to Williams as a little overachiever, as most of us did. I didn’t do so well in my first Religion class - at least for me - and my confidence was shaken. Indeed, my first semester grades were my worst by far at Williams. But I was lucky enough to have Prof. Darrow as my advisor. He was encouraging, gently pushing me to still take his 300-level tutorial as a freshman the way I had originally planned (coming in, I had quite big plans for myself). What possessed me to think I could handle it, I don’t know. What possessed him to encourage me to keep going with it, I don’t know that either. It was remarkable. I was challenged every week, struggling with texts that I only partially understood, trying to put together a 10-15 page paper or critique another student’s each week, and I’m sure looking like a complete idiot. But it was one of the most valuable experiences of my time at Williams. I got through it, proved to myself I could stack up with other students despite the immense self-doubt I was feeling at the time. It also lead me to major in Religion, the subject where I, on average, had some of my lowest grades. But Professor Darrow convinced me that was okay, he was one of the first people to help me realize the value of just thinking, and thinking hard about things. There didn’t have to be a problem to solve, the pursuit itself was worthy - and the grades, while important, were not the best judge of a successful course.
I stuck with it, and “Papa D” continued to challenge me, and comfort me, through my time at Williams. During our senior major seminar for religion, the group of 10-12 of us spent Wednesday afternoons together at the top of Hopkins Hall discussing birth and death (yes, the actual topic of the seminar), and often staying late after class still discussing the issues. We also managed to use the Sixth Sense, Bladerunner, and the Neverending Story in our presentations in that class, showing the sense of humor he also exhibited toward us! He encouraged us to gather for lunch beforehand (and came to my co-op once for it, to my great thrill), to continue these discussions, to explore the flights of ideas hatched in the mind of 21-year-olds late in the afternoon.
It was his office I cried in the spring of my junior year when everything seemed for the moment to be falling apart around me. I was trying to serve on the JASC, had a suicidal first-year in my entry, a paper due in his class and another, some other student-activity related issue happening, and it was the first anniverary of an old friend’s death. I went in to ask for an extension on the paper (which he always gave to anyone), and ended up spending part of the afternoon there with him, the stacks of books, and a box of kleenex. He probably doesn’t even remember it, but his compassion reflected all that was good about the close student-faculty relationship at Williams to me.
I had the good fortune to serve as his TA in my final semester. When we talked about the job, he mentioned the value he saw in going back to those texts from Religion 101, the ones that he knew had given me so much trouble at the beginning. It was a way to complete the circle of my time at Williams. He actually thought about things like that - the full cycle of education and growth, and how it impacted his students.
Going forward in my life, I have sought to model that combination of encouragement and support - with a little push to challenge oneself. I also have to pause sometimes and remember the value of things that aren’t so task-oriented. Reading important books and thinking important thoughts are good things. So there is my (somewhat sappy) anecdote for you all about someone at Williams who influenced me. I hope that others will add their own posts in the commentary. And if you don’t, I’ll be forced to add more of my own!
Alternate Spring Break
Bloomberg reports on students using Spring Break to do community service:
Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has seven public service field trips this year, involving about 65 students, said Rick Spalding, the college’s chaplain and community service coordinator. The ranks of student volunteers swelled after Katrina, and the numbers have remained high because of students’ awareness of their own impact on issues such as climate change, he said.
“This is not a selfish generation,” Spalding said. “If their parents — people in my generation — had been as conscious, we might not be in the mess we’re in.”
I was drawn into my first such trip during freshman year because I was told that dorms would be closed over spring break, and I needed an inexpensive way to spend two weeks 8000 miles from home. Cabo was not an option, but going on a service trip was free. It turned out to be one of the most worthwhile things I did during my time at Williams.
I would be extremely wary of for-profit companies such as STA Travel who “market community-service themed trips”. Given the generosity of existing institutions at Williams, you really shouldn’t have to pay much out of pocket in order to do community service; our trip was funded entirely by a combination of an alumni gift and the Chaplain’s Office.
I also found a tremendous amount of help from Rick Spalding in getting funding to spend a summer working for SOME in Washington, DC. As this was a mostly-unpaid position with a small charity, I remain grateful to Rev. Spalding for his support. Students interested in doing similar projects, whether over spring break or summer or during the academic year, need only approach the Chaplain’s Office with their idea.
Continuing Discussion on Textbook Use
What began as a follow-up comment to our recent discussion about textbooks at Williams got rather long. As I confessed in that thread, this is a topic near and dear to my heart: I was a student on hefty financial aid, and while my parents would have paid for books or I could have afforded them myself, the cost of books had I bought all new and all “required”
editions would have exceeded the sum of my spending on all other things over the same period of time. This includes travel, entertainment, restaurant meals, whatever. Once your room and board are paid, it is possible to live frugally at Williams, and I did.
That’s not some kind of crazy boast(?), it is just an effort to put this discussion into perspective. Knowledge is nearly priceless. A good, unduplicated reference in a subject you care about is worth its weight in gold, and it would be crass of me or others to argue that I and other students scrimp on books in order to, say, go snowboarding over Winter Study. But should we, as Uible suggested, regard buying the newest editions a “petty matter” to be “treated by the students as merely a surcharges on tuition”? I answer, emphatically, no.
Below the break are my thoughts on this matter, derived from an experience with the topic that is arguably as broad as a student could have, beginning literally before my first day of classes, when I went to the 1914 Library seeking my first textbook: Saul Kassin’s 3rd edition of Psychology.
Note to current Ephs who’ve signed on with Bear Stearns
I know there’s usually a few seniors who get a job there, and a similar number of summer analysts; for them, here’s some unsolicited advice from Dealbreaker:
who needs summer [analysts] when they don’t know if they’ll make it through spring? your best bet is to dress up the resume and restart your search process. if you managed to get an offer from bsc, I’m sure you’re still marketable - however, the field just got a lot more crowded. ditto for full time offers. back in 2001, banks deferred or withdrew offers outright. this is no different
I don’t mean to panic anyone, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.
Learning from History: The Social Honor Code Proposal of 2004
Readers may recall that I have made the point a few times that, when it comes to social issues, controversies, and student self-governance at Williams, there is a certain circularity that seems to escape the notice of most on campus. The last time I wrote on this it was to cover 2007’s resurrection of the idea to “lock down” campus dorms to non-residents after a certain hour, in the name of descreasing vandalism. This same idea had been almost foisted on students four years ago, nearly to the day. Thankfully, Security showed forbearance in 2003, and student voters showed good sense in 2007.
The present project of a large group of students to consider adopting a Social Honor Code is another case of nothing new, and as intrepid and proud of their work as today’s students rightly feel, I hope proponents and opponents alike are aware that their peer predecessors had the same concerns and solution. Once again, nearly precisely 4 years ago, a draft of a Social Honor Code was on the floor at College Council. Sabrina Wirth ‘05 was its author and main proponent, and she brought it to the floor during the 14 January 2004 Meeting of College Council. The text of her draft and the debate over it are recorded in the linked minutes from that meeting, and included below the break for (highly) interested readers.
Back then, the project was allowed to be forgotten. A number of people including myself volunteered to work with Sabrina on the project, but it was never followed up on, due to a combination of timing, disinterest or suspicion by some in Council, including myself. Then and now, I did not believe in implementing such a code, largely because I knew it would be actually enforced by the dean, and not what I considered a true representative body of the community. The ability to “enforce community standards” is the most broad and vague source of disciplinary power for the Dean, and I had no desire to see it strengthened.
I don’t at all wish to impose my views or arguments on the students of today, though I do hope this:
- Students will read Sabrina’s work and the discussions of their predecessor peers.
- Students will not make the interpretation of community standards the discretion of a dean, who is already the executor and need not be made judge or jury as well.
- If they draft a code, students make it one amendable by students alone. The Academic Honor Code is amendable only by faculty and, in this way, is not a good model for a code of the community. Only a tiny percentage of the faculty are any meaningful part of the social community.
- The code be publicly deliberated and voted on, and written records kept of all deliberations. All of this will be crucial to properly implementing and revising such a code in the future.
Awful as scrawling “nigger” is, arguably worse incidents took place shortly before and after Sabrina’s code proposal, and it was not taken up by enough believers to continue her effort. I’d have to bet on the side of the idea of this code being eventually dropped—doing it right would take so much time and thought, and doing it wrong would be awful—but if a code is implemented, one thing is certain: administrators now and ever after will describe it as a mandate, as “the restrictions students convened to place upon themselves.”
They had better be smart ones. When you hand over the freedom to determine community standards informally—through public shame and subtler private mechanisms—no one ever hands it back to you.
Read more
Undergraduates Everywhere Ignoring David Kane’s Advice
The WSJ reports that, in spite of EphBlog’s tireless efforts, love is, in fact, dead:
Remember the movie “Love Story” and its star-crossed student lovers? Such torrid campus romances may be becoming a thing of the past. College life has become so competitive, and students so focused on careers, that many aren’t looking for spouses anymore.
Replacing college as the top marital hunting ground is the office. Only 14% of people who are married or in a relationship say they met their partners in school or college, says a 2006 Harris Interactive study of 2,985 adults; 18% met at work. That’s a reversal from 15 years ago, when 23% of married couples reported meeting in school or college and only 15% cited work, according to a 1992 study of 3,432 adults by the University of Chicago.
Gone are the days when sororities and dorms marked engagements with candle-passing ceremonies while men serenaded beneath the windows.
Seriously, when did people ever do that?
If you’re a parent, as I am, you may be wondering what all this means. Such sordid campus-life portrayals as Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons” aside, the news about students’ social lives isn’t all bad. To be sure, the “hookup culture” — the campus trend toward casual sexual behavior, usually linked with alcohol and no expectations of a continuing relationship — is rife. Some 76% of college students have engaged in hookups, which usually stop short of intercourse, according to a study of 4,000 students by Stanford University sociology professor Paula England.
And this is different from the ’60s, ’70s, or ’80s how? If anything, students are a great deal more prudish now than they were 30 years ago, and they’re much more concerned about staying safe than the generation that brought us the sexual revolution. Plus ça change…
Way to an Eph’s heart
As a practical follow-up to David’s exhortation, Bess Levin (Amherst ‘07) at DealBreaker summarizes how to woo Erin Burnett (Williams ‘98):
1. Buy me a vacation.
2. Let me pick a vacation, and then buy it for me.
3. Buy my parents a vacation.
4. Buy me a yoga instructor.
5. Buy me an expensive stationary bike.
6. Buy me a couple of famous authors to dine with (simultaneously).
7. Buy me a personal chef.
8. Buy me a vacation.
In case you’re interested, you can read Erin’s original list. And here’s Bess in a more forgiving mood:
There comes a time in every Amherst student’s life when she must put aside the feelings of hate that stir in her body for the vile weed that is Williams College and say, in the face of Williams alum Erin Burnett: this chick is hot.
And as a Williams grad, I must admit that Amherst alum Bess Levin is probably the funniest writer in the financial world. Here is a marvelous interview with Ms. Levin.
Lessons from the Lockdown Debate of 2003
Four years and three days ago College Council debated this very issue, and decided overwhelmingly against restricted card access. Direct input from a large number of students was the basis of the decision; we had an unusually high influx of opinions that week.
I urge the leaders of campus today to remember the debate of four years ago, links to its records are in the extended entry. I urge them also to remember that no decision that provides Security with a new tool that they feel prevents danger and damages can be easily reversed. In other words, restricted access in even some dorms this year is highly likely to lead to at least as much restriction in future years, and likely more, and even if no benefit from such restraints were to materialize the restrictions will remain in place.
We are looking at not just an inconvenience this semester but likely an enduring change in campus culture. Students may well have this forced on them someday, but they ought not to take it by choice.
Where to go? How about joining our armed forces?
How many people missed this news?
Williams is an interesting place, where student athletes excel. I know David flogs hard and fast for the Corps, which is great. Given the level of talent and athleticism at Williams, perhaps some more of you may be interested in something like this?
Something to think about…. other Ephs have, why not you?
To the Class of Oh-leven
This week marks the arrival of new frosh on campus, about to embark on one of the best times at williams: First Days. Remember that experience? Awkward first encounters, first entry dinners, surviving solely on name tags, thinking that 550 people in your class was a large number (hah.), walking around campus when the weather is warm and everyone is happy, just before schoolwork kicks in, the weather turns colder, and it starts to feel like, well, school. I like to think of it as Camp Williams: bonding, fun, new experiences- it makes me tingle inside just to think about it.
Being at Mystic this fall (WOOT) and having friends become proud new mamas and papas to their own baby entries, advice to these folk from those who’ve been there and done that is much appreciated, (and probably needed.) Regardless of whether you enjoyed your first days experience or not, there are many things to pass on to the next generation of ephs: here’s your chance. (Though I’m only going into my third year at school, here’s what I’ve learned to do, to avoid, and to love in Williamstown. Enjoy.)
(in no real order)
1) Flip-flops can be all-weather shoes.
2) Don’t go to the B during first days, especially if you’re a girl.
3) Sleepover in Sawyer library (preferably before they tear it down in 2009)
4) Just because the name has the word ‘yogurt’ in the title doesn’t qualify having fro-yo everyday.
5) Following suit, if you plan to avoid the freshman fifteen, don’t do the Mission park dining experience everyday for dinner.
6) Driscoll lunches= amazing. Driscoll dinners, on the other hand, are not.
7) Stargazing down at Cole field on clear nights is breathtaking.
8) Make the dining hall staff your best friends, and you won’t regret it.
9) Play hide-and-go seek in Paresky.
10) Go on the roof of Schow to watch the sunset.
13) Facebook is not a good excuse for not doing work. (Trust me.)
14) Keep track of your id! And make good friends with Kristi in security. That ten dollar replacement charge adds up.
15) Join Clubs. A lot of clubs. Meet people. Waffle club? Varsity four-square? Chinese yo-yo? Sports and a capella (!) and dance and meditation- you have no excuse.
15) Sleep is overrated- you’re only in college for so long (and that’s what summers & breaks are for.)
Feel free to add.
Monkey Business 101
I should applaud the nice alums from Morgan Stanley coming to visit.
Join Morgan Stanley for WALL STREET 101: A GUIDE TO INVESTMENT BANKING, Wednesday, April 18th, 7 PM, Griffin 3. Panelists will include John Greenwood, Josh Conner ‘96, Chris Malone ‘81, and John Kelly ‘03.
But most of me wants to warn younger Ephs about the perils of life as an investment banker. Be careful what you wish for! Although dated and a bit over-the-top, Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle provides an not-too-inaccurate description of an industry that most Ephs don’t want to join.
I do think that these thoughts on hiring from Chris Malone ‘81 are (mostly) accurate.
When we hire, we look for people who have the ability to be facile with numbers, but that’s not the only thing…The ability to convey your thoughts succinctly and persuasively is extremely important. That’s one of the things a liberal education teaches you to do…We also look for well-rounded people. Relationships are very important in our business. As you get more senior in the company you start dealing with CEOs and CFOs from other companies, most of whom tend to be very well educated. When you meet at a conference or in a non-business situation, it helps if you know something about the arts, architecture, music, history. You have to have a good product and be cost-competitive and do good work, but if you have all that and you’re also intellectually curious and able to talk intelligently on subjects other than business, you often end up becoming good friends.
Comments:
1) The very best investment bankers are experts at making CEOs think that the bankers are their best friends. See The Accidental Investment Banker for an insider’s tour. Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst provides useful perspective as well.
2) Facility with numbers is key. Morgan Stanley doesn’t care if you major in philosophy or art history, as long as you demonstrate that numbers are your friend. They will not hire someone who “hates math” or who is frighted by spreadsheets. Do you need to be an economics major? No! 95% of the economics taught at Williams is useless in the business world. But you need to convince the recruiters that you won’t mind working with numbers, that you majored in art history, not because you dislike numbers but because you love art history.
3) Morgan Stanley isn’t really looking for well-rounded people. They are looking for personable people, people who can talk and charm and get along with everyone. Investment banking is a sales business. If you can’t get people to like you, you won’t succeed.
4) It helps if you “know something about the arts, architecture, music, history.” Hah! Give me a break. Newsflash: CEOS and their investment bankers do not sit around, drinking Merlot and discussing Debussy. They go to Red Sox games and play golf. Of course, if the client does want to talk about classical music, you should be able to nod your head at the right moments and fake it. But, no worries! This is unlikely to happen.
JP Morgan is also stopping this week.
Get a leg up on fall & summer recruiting. Join JP Morgan for How to Read the Wall Street Journal, Thursday, April 19, 7 PM, OCC Library.
Are there alums making the trip? Probably. Non-alums would have little interest in coming to Williamstown. It might just be the human resource people. If so, don’t bother.
Also, what a ridiculous topic! Does anyone need a class in how to read the Wall Street Journal (or any paper)? I doubt it. In fact, with each passing day, the WSJ becomes less central to the business world. What’s my advice for Ephs who want to get a “leg up on fall & summer recruiting?” Easy. Take intro CS CI 136 and as many STAT courses as you can handle. More on course advice some other time. Also, read a few of the items from Abnormal Returns each day. Highly educational and free.
If anyone goes to these events, please report back.
Let’s Not Forget It’s the Teachers and the People
This blog has been pretty weighty recently, what with posts about Diversity Makes a Difference, Where Have All the Poor Kids Gone?, and Merit Aid. In the face of those pointed arguments, the pros and cons, and the soul searching, it’s easy to forget amongst all these policy debates that Williams is about people: the teachers, the students, the administrators, the support staff, and the people of Williamstown.
This was brought back to me as I read through the post about Hodge Markgraf ’52’s passing. Prospective students, you should read that post. This is about a Williams graduate who returned to teach at Williams so he could educate legions of graduates with his knowledge, his humanity, and the twinkle in his eye. If you don’t believe me, watch this video of Hodge describing his view of what a professor’s life was like. As you read the comments to the blog post, it’s clear that to some graduates Hodge was Williams College.
Wistful for Williamstown
George Bernard Shaw famously said that “youth is wasted on the young.” Sometimes, when I am feeling wistful and thinking about my days at Williams, Shaw’s words come back to me. This Boston Globe travel article on Williamstown from a couple of weeks back naturally got me thinking about my days in the Purple Valley. The descriptions of Spring Street, the image of St. Pierre’s Barbershop at twilight, the reminders of the college’s bucolic setting — all of these brought me back to another time in my life.
Yet here is an admission that I wonder if I am alone in feeling: I missed out on so much of Williams, of Williamstown, of my college and my community. I was 18-22, headstrong, not as good a student as I ought to have been, too concerned with the superficial, not as open-minded as thought I was, and even though I grew up poor in a town that simply did not send kids to Williams College, I remarkably managed to take Williams for granted. I spent too many of my Saturday nights partying, too many of my Tuesday mornings sleeping in, too many hours on the inconsequential.
I think of Dave Kane and see a man who, as often as I disagree with him vehemently, seems to have grabbed the Williams experience by the collar and shaken everything he could out of it. I read Frank Uible’s comments about a halcyon age and think that there is a man with few regrets about a time when Williams was different, and, he truly believes, in some ways better. I see Diana Davis making to-scale models of a full Williams crew, in motion, and while I see a little bit of obsession I mostly see an homage, in wood and paint. I consider the always-thoughtful comments from Ken Thomas and I realize that this is a classmate with whom I shared a place, a campus, an experience for four years and yet we never knew one another. And I wonder again if I missed too much, and daydream for a few minutes about how I’d do it differently if I could be twenty years old again.
I do not believe I wasted my Williams experience. I was a captain of a damned good track team for which I was a solid contributor for eight seasons and four years. I sang in the Octet and double-majored (Being mediocre at two majors seemed somehow more noble than mediocrity at one). I participated in a host of other activities, including a semester of jazz band and some academic organizations. I made lots of great friends, some of whom still rank as vitally important people in my life. I was not a waste of oxygen, although like a lot of students in my position, I probably always wondered if I really belonged, fears that I promptly buried beneath a patina of cockiness and an outsized personality. Act like you belong and no one will think you are a fraud. Or at least they’ll think you are a clever and amusing enough fraud not to say anything.
But then I remind myself that college, like youth, is indeed wasted on the young. Of course I’d do some things differently if I went back. Of course my winter days would be spent bundled in tasteful layers, studying for hours in the Snack Bar, thinking deep thoughts and caring for my fellow man, or at least my fellow Eph. Of course I would spend more time in the mountains, and at the Clark, and going to see films and speakers and art openings. Naturally I’d take track a bit less gravely, school more seriously, spend some Saturday nights nestled in with that rarest of Williams phenomena, a date.
But that is the thing about recreating an idealized past. You can script it. You can airbrush the blemishes. You can take on the role of a you that isn’t the you that you were but the you that you would like to have been even if right now you aren’t the you you would like to be. We turn the person we wish to have been into something of a movie character, saying all the right things at all the right times while wearing a flattering wardrobe and bathed in perfect lighting.
Life does not work this way. Instead we live the life we live and in so doing create regrets alongside the memories that grow within us and help us to become who we are. I’ll always look back on Williams with overwhelming fondness. But there will always be that little hint of regret about not doing and being more. I guess what I am trying to say is that I miss it.
“The Field Is the World”
The EphNotes that I just received pointed to Elizabeth Andersen’s (Class of ‘87) convocation address. I highly recommend that you read it. As a teaser to get you intrigued, I’ll point out that she says being jobless in Brussels for five months was one of the best career moves she ever made.
One more example of “the examined life” — Williams-style.
Seniors: Embrace Serendipity
While seniors worry about what they’re going to do in “the real world” — two examples here and here
– they need to take into account that they’ll probably end up in a job or occupation due to a random conversation and serendipity.
Several notable Williams examples:
Bernard Bailyn ‘44: Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard, President of the American Historical Association in 1981, won two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, … you get the idea. When applying to Harvard graduate school, he was worried that they wouldn’t admit him because he hadn’t majored in History at Williams (he was an English major). His faculty advisor told him, "Don’t mention it; if they don’t ask, don’t tell." Happily for generations of historians, they didn’t ask.
Bethany McLean ‘92: Reporter at Fortune, credited with being one of the reporters who first pointed out chinks in Enron’s armor, co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. As to how she got to Fortune:
I have never been a person with a huge plan. I was on my way to business school as a third-year analyst at Goldman. And I just got this idea in my head that I wanted to be a business journalist. But there was not this big mission to be a magazine journalist. Frankly, no one would hire me. I had no clips, no experience. People were like, "yeah, right." I was willing to get a job sending faxes somewhere. Honestly, I got lucky and got a job at Fortune.
At that time, Fortune hired people as fact-checkers. So it was okay that I hadn’t been a reporter before. They were just looking for someone who could calculate compound annual growth rate and read a balance sheet. So I really got lucky.
The guy I was dating at the time, his father knew someone at Fortune. I said,
"Why don’t you send my resume there," and he’s like, "yeah, right." But through
the fact-checking door, I got in. So it was purely random.
Jimmy Lee ‘75: Vice Chairman of JP Morgan Chase, known as a major dealmaker on Wall Street, the subject of a cover story in Forbes (April 17, 2000) entitled, "The New Power on Wall Street." His business journey started at Williams when his girlfriend at the time, Beth Brownell ‘75 (now his wife), realized she couldn’t make her job interview with Chemical Bank and urged him to take her place instead.
I’m sure Ephblog readers have had similar experiences. So seniors, take a deep breath and trust a bit of your life to fate. As Steve Jobs notes, “Life is random.”
Time to tone down academics
Oren Cass ‘05 has an interesting opinion piece in this week’s record by this name. From a brief summary of his essay — he thinks that the most meaningful part of college occurs outside of class, so professors should realize this and expect less from students in terms of focus on classes and homework — one might think he is being sarcastic. But his tone suggests that he is serious. He writes:
The presumption of obligation has always rested with the classes - “academics come first,” as the slogan goes - but I wonder if that should really be the case.Most Williams classes are uninspiring and unimportant…. But they usually represent learning for its own sake and have little long term applicability.
While some may disagree with him there, I think that the alumni reading this blog would tend to agree with something else he said:
Most people who actually come through Williams will agree that time outside of the classroom was the most valuable, and most will wish they had even spent more time pursuing those experiences. Rare is the graduate who mournfully reflects upon the days he could have spent in the library but didn’t.
This is illogical — he argues against the worth of classes by drawing a caricature of a student who wants to have spent more time in the library — and it is certainly not unimaginable that some graduates do wish they could have taken more classes while at Williams. Cass goes on to argue that while students, parents, and future employers “realize” that time spent outside of the classroom is more valuable than time in class or time spent doing classwork, professors believe that classwork is more important simply because they have dedicated their lives to academic pursuits. But even if this is the case — and I doubt that everyone would agree with his argument — should we really try to decrease the level of Williams academics to allow for more time with friends?
I think this would be a bad idea, as it would undermine the emphasis on studying and learning upon which Williams College depends, and which convinced most of us that Williams was the place for us. After all, if we decrease the importance of classes and professors, what is the use of decreasing class size and hiring new good professors? We might as well have gone to a school where the classwork would be easy and we would have ample free time to pursue other interests.
Appendix
Here’s some helpful advice, especially for those between the ages of 10 and 30.
If you have a stomachache that’s been hanging around for a while, and it doesn’t feel any better after you’ve been to the bathroom, feel around your stomach. If there’s a small region of tenderness about 24 hours or so after the pain or discomfort started, go get it checked out by a doctor. It may be appendicitis, and that’s not something you want to wait on dealing with.
Trust me on this, I just got back from the hospital yesterday afternoon after going in on Sunday evening, and I caught it early. Chances are that if it is appendicitis, you’ll end up having surgery sooner or later, but if you wait, it’s much more likely that they’ll have to cut you open, rather than doing it laparoscopically.
Considering Teach for America?
Teach for America is a non-profit group that places liberal arts graduates in schools with a need for qualified teachers. A few Williams graduates participate each year. The idea is that the students receive energetic and knowledgable teachers, while the liberal arts alums receive an eye-opening experience in the classroom.
A randomized evaluation of Teach for America was just completed by Mathematica Policy Research. You can download the final report here. The study is well constructed. Students were randomly assigned to be taught be either a Teacher fro America participant or by someone in the school’s regular teaching pool. The random assignment ensures that, on average, the TFA participant has the same quality of student as the “control” teacher. Student performance was measure by performance on stanardized tests.
In math courses, a two point difference between the TFA and “control” teachers was detected. The result is statistically significant, but substantively might be construed as minor (the scores are based on Normal Curve Equivalents with a median of 50 and standard deviation of 21, so moving from 28 to 30 is not a huge success).
In reading courses, there was no difference between students assigned to TFA participants or regular teachers.
I think a couple of conclusions can be safely drawn:
1) Teach for America doesn’t harm students. The liberal arts graduates typically took no education courses in college, but they don’t do worse than the typical teacher in a low-income school.
2) Teach for America may aim to address inequity in public education, but the gains are extremely modest. The quality of the “control” teachers was extremely low in the sample — many were not even certified teachers. Despite a low baseline for comparison, the Teach for America participants did not perform exceptionally well. TFA participants may be hard working, enthusiastic, smart, and idealistic, but they aren’t miracle workers. The bottom-line is that students still underperform in both math and reading. (Note: An interesting point of comparison would have been to compare the performance of experienced and “good” teachers from more affluent schools in the same low-income schools.)
