On the Campus: November 19, 1997


MIDTERMS ARE MURDER
A week of overload--papers, tests, and classes--makes Princeton a nightmare

BY MANDY TERC '99

I awoke suddenly on the Sunday before midterms week, sitting upright in my bed and sweating, despite the ice-cold temperature of my room. My heart was beating rapidly, and I took a long breath of air to steady my breathing. With the nightmare of minutes before still feeling like reality, I slowly managed to regain a grip on reality.

This hadn't been a typical dream--I hadn't been falling, nor had I been running from some three-headed monster. Instead, I had been wandering around Firestone Library, supposedly on that very Sunday, looking for a place to work on my religion paper. But I had overslept and arrived too late to find an open carrel. I slowly made my way from the C-floor atrium to the B-floor loft to the A-floor reserve room with the same results: every inch of working space was taken. As I searched I realized that other students were laughing at me. Then they started openly mocking me. One particularly vicious kid even threw paper at me while taunting me for my tardiness.

Then there I was, awake at nine on a Sunday morning and still slightly terrified. And even though I told myself the whole thing was ludicrous, the images of that evil kid were vivid enough to send me running up to Firestone before 11 AM. Of course I found the entire library virtually empty and had no trouble securing a carrel for the day. That dream, inspired by midterm stress, may have been a bit extreme, but most students would echo the same feelings of overwhelming work and dwindling time during midterms week. My friends' to-do lists read more like an agenda for the next decade: complete the regular problem sets, do all the class reading assignments, don't slack on activities, go to swimming practice, and then, oh yeah, throw in four tests or papers.

Final-exam period begins to look like a week at Club Med next to midterms. For finals, we've got a week and a half of reading period followed by a week and half of exams, and all regular work has been put on hold so we can concentrate on the task at hand. But in mid-October we usually don't have time to identify the task at hand, let alone focus on it. We waffle between studying and writing papers, between finishing problem sets and completing lengthy reading assignments.

The week before midterms, a group of us began to map out what lay ahead one night at dinner. My roommate--I'll call her Sally--sketched out a week that made my Firestone nightmare sound blissfully relaxing. An engineering major, she had three midterms, two problem sets, and a take-home exam all within five days, plus 16 hours of classes that she must still attend.

When Sally asked one of her professors to reschedule a take-home midterm because most of the students in his class had another exam later that day, his response was less than sympathetic. "It always comes up," he said, "that someone else's class is more important than mine." At that point she gave up any attempt to make her week more manageable. To prepare for the deluge ahead, Sally relocated and changed her diet, moving into the E-quad and consuming caffeine-saturated soda like so much water.

When our other roommate mentioned sleep (out of concern for Sally's health), Sally let out a small, sardonic chuckle and looked at us as if she couldn't believe we were thinking about sleeping.

Sally wasn't alone. This semester, as usual, the USG paid the library to keep the Reserve Room open 24 hours a day. That kind of demand for constant studying shows either that students have more to do than they can reasonably fit into five short days, or that there are more procrastinators on this campus than I thought. For Sally--and for myself--it was the former. Yet for those five days, students work until they drop, comforted only by the promise of a week's vacation to recover.

By the time you read this, midterms have long been over. After our week-long break from the tests, papers, and daily work that overwhelmed us, we're now back to our regularly scheduled lives: busy and active, but not overtaxed. Sally has moved back to our room--if she remembered where it was--and (I hope) reduced her caffeine consumption. As for me, I'm once again sleeping in on Sunday mornings, unbothered by visions of Firestone. At least until next semester.


Stop the recruiting, I want to opt out
A $120,000 education should buy flexibility

BY WES TOOKE '98

This article could open dramatically. I could write, "Princeton seniors are leaping like lemmings into the sea of finance." It could begin ironically, sarcastically, or cleverly. It could use witty metaphors and cute turns of phrase. But the world doesn't need another angst-ridden article by a senior contemplating his uncertain job prospects. Instead, this tale has a simple plot-the struggle of my friends and I to find our future.

Our story opens in McCosh 10 on a Wednesday night, where the African-American studies department has invited director Leon Gast to introduce his spectacular movie about the 1974 Ali-Foreman fight, When We Were Kings. Near the end of the film one of the narrators remembers some advice Ali once gave to a class of graduating seniors at Harvard. "You've been given great opportunities," he remembers Ali saying. "Now go out and change the world." Clichˇd perhaps, but still perfect advice for those of us approaching graduation.

Yet few of my classmates heard Ali's words that evening. It was a corporate recruiting night at the Nassau Inn, and most of my friends had wandered off to ask earnest questions of the investment-bank gods. It's not like the Ali night was a student's only shot at Wall Street-the campus has been absolutely lousy with recruiters all fall. If they put a bounty on recent Princeton alumni in suits, I'd have a dozen Armani pelts by dawn.

The recruiters are here because Princeton has proved itself to be an investment banking and consulting factory over the past few years. Practically any major company that comes to the Nassau Inn is guaranteed an audience of more than 100 students. You just have to read one of their ads to figure out why these firms are so popular. All the blurbs read the same, "Interested in money? Our top-ranked, fast-growing consulting firm is looking for energetic, creative minds to work in a fun, stimulating environment."

Their pitch is brilliant. These firms are catching us at the height of our insecurities, when we have no idea what we're supposed to do with the next 60 years of our lives. Most of us have just reached the point where we're comfortable in college, and now we're staring into the great emptiness. The consulting firms step into the void and say, "Hey, we'll keep you entertained, pay you a lot of money, and let you hang out with people your own age." In fact, what these firms are promising isn't a job at all; it's College II.

Perhaps the advertisements would sound ridiculous if we seniors felt like we had more options. But we don't. Some of my friends have large college loans to pay off, and most are unprepared to deal with the uncertainty of not having a set job next year. There is also a powerful temptation to follow the herd. It seems that everybody is going either to grad school or to a high-paying job, and nobody at a school as ultra-competitive as Princeton wants to be left behind.

Yet in our rush to find jobs, we have forgotten two things. First, the $120,000 we've spent on Princeton has bought us flexibility. Those consulting firms will be just as eager to hire us in two years as they are now. There's no reason to take a job about which you're indifferent when there are so many other options. The Princeton-in-Asia program, for example, has sent Princeton graduates to exotic places to do interesting things for more than a century.

Second, when we agreed to come to Princeton we accepted a responsibility. We Princeton seniors are the luckiest people in the world. For four years we have been educated on a campus with incredible resources by the best professors money can buy. We owe society for those opportunities. Maybe we can repay that debt on Wall Street, but maybe we can't. The world probably would not have been better served if Wendy Kopp '89 had become an investment banker rather than the founder of Teach for America.

The point is that there are people who were born to be consultants, came to Princeton to get consulting jobs, and are now about to become consultants. More power to them. But some of my friends are about to become consultants by default, and that's a tragedy. Twenty-one is too young to give up your ambition of writing the great American novel or becoming a jazz musician. Sure, you might chase your dream after five years of consulting, but those odds start dropping once children and a mortgage start weighing on your mind.

So, next year I'm taking Ali's advice and heading for points west. That is, unless I get an offer I can't refuse.

Send any offers to Wes Tooke--who looks forward to being a starving writer while his friends enjoy champagne wishes and caviar dreams on Wall Street--at cwtooke@princeton.edu.


paw@princeton.edu