Somewhere between my fourth and fifth coconut-fried shrimp, I realized I was in over my head. As I stood at the Biltmore on Tuesday night, listening to a presentation on an investment bank in Manhattan and eating seafood appetizers like it was my job, I started to understand how real and how scary this "job thing" is.
On the surface, it doesn't look so bad. After all, we're already being wined and dined by recruiters from big firms, and it's only our third year. With today's economy in a bigger slump than Winona Rider's career, even the prospect of a job is a good thing.
So, here I am, already sending a dozen resumes over e-mail everyday, writing cover letters and thank you notes to anyone I've talked to for five minutes.
Call me naive but when Career Services said the internship fair would be in February, I thought the internship hysteria would begin then too.
I figured I had a few more months to get my resume in good shape and research any companies I might want to work for next summer, but then reality slapped me into a black suit and stuck me at the Biltmore on Tuesday night.
For the next two hours, I would talk to analysts about derivatives, equities and futures, hoping they would derive a little equity in my future at their company.
They talked about life on Wall Street and on the trading floor while I noticed that their jewelry could probably pay my tuition for the next two years and then some. I wondered if I could ever be so articulate and knowledgeable, if I could do a pinstripe suit such justice.
I also wondered if I would be able to trade stocks, console a client and outsmart the market, while at the same time converting Yen to U.S. dollars in my head.
Maybe for fun, I could do all of this while standing on my head. But, then again, that's hard to do in a pinstripe suit.
The reason internships become more important than they should be is that they often translate into jobs at the end of the summer.
So not only do we have to chose an internship with care because it represents three months of our life, but we have to acknowledge that our (only) job offer may come from that very same company.
The question then becomes not only, "Can I see myself here in July," but "Can I see myself here at age 35?" I pondered these deep thoughts while I crunched on my next shrimp and considered whether to move on to the chicken tenders at the next table.
I watched my classmates swarm around the room, collecting business cards and fliers from different associates. It was the third-year equivalent of trick-or-treating: going from person to person, hoping for a treat.
Some students clearly had the advantage of personal connections and were rattling off more names than a phone book. Sometimes we say these kids are "hooked up." And suddenly, I felt very off the hook.
My finance teacher told our class that some people are just born ready for the business world. He says they were diapered in the Wall Street Journal.
My dad was a doctor, not a stock broker, so I was diapered in scrubs not the Journal. While there's no one I would trust more with my life or a bad paper cut, he can't help me much for name dropping at Wall Street.
Can you imagine me going up to an analyst at Morgan Stanley and saying, "Have you heard of Dr. Warner? Helluva plastic surgeon, that man."
Yeah, that won't get me anywhere.
So for some of us, it's up to the impressions we make rather than the names we drop.
Although such a meritocracy is a good thing in and of itself, it doesn't mean that it's not a little intimidating to watch other people play the name game.
Especially when the game involves the name of every CEO, CFO, CIO and VP in company history.
Sometimes I even catch snippets of how the student summered with these execs and played a few rounds of golf with them from time to time.
That brings me to another point: summer is a noun. It describes the season between spring and fall when college students flock to DC and New York to play professionals.
You wouldn't believe how many people insist on using it as a verb to indicate the act of spending the season at a very posh locale.
Okay, if you're a Rockefeller or a Kennedy, I'll grant you the privilege of using summer as a verb. If your last name doesn't match one of those mentioned above, you can use summer as a noun like the rest of us common folks.
The summer-as-a-verb phenomenon also rears its ugly head in other ways. Some former interns refer to their internship experience as "summering."
During one presentation I attended last week, one young analyst attributed her success in the job search to the fact that she had summered at the bank.
Clearly, it's time for an amendment to our summer-as-a-verb rule: Not only do you have to be a Rockefeller or Kennedy, but you must have summered at a place that's worthy of the verb. You can summer on the Vineyard, you can summer in the south of France. You cannot, however, "summer" in downtown New York. It just doesn't work that way.
At this point, I'm a long way from Wall Street. I still have two semesters and a long interview process before there's even the possibility of a job.
For now, all I know is that I refuse to summer anywhere that doesn't have coconut-fried shrimp.
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