Havard i-banking? What?

sakky
Sun, 25 Dec 2005 20:03:37 +0000

And yet half of the class at Harvard are econ majors.



I don’t know about that. Sure, there are a lot of Harvard econ majors, but half of the class? How many undergrad majors/concentrations does Harvard offer, something like 40 or so? Yet half of the class is going to choose just one of those concentrations? I think that’s a stretch.



I mean, it’s so broad and NOT closely tied to finance/personal investment.



Well, it’s the same reason why Ibanks hire plenty of MIT and Stanford engineers, and the same reason why they hire lots of HYPS liberal arts majors in general.

Look, the fact is, banks are hiring you for your ability to think, not on the specific courses that you’ve done. I think we have a simple misunderstanding of what the true purpose of education is all about. The truth is, most of the specific subjects that you take in high school and in college you will never use ever again in your life. For example, how many people really hold jobs where they deconstruct Shakespeare or write papers on the War of 1812? Almost nobody. But does that mean that that was all just a waste of time? Not at all. These classes teach you how to think and learn and that’s the REAL purpose of education. Most of the specific topics that you learned in school will turn out to be useless in the sense that you will never use them ever again in your life. But what you will use is the mental dexterity and logical reasoning that you those subjects develop.

Consider this analogy. If you want to perform better at sports, you might join a gym to lift weights. But why? Doing a bunch of bench presses and squats is not ‘useful’ in the sense that that’s not what you’re going to be doing when you play your sport. But what will be useful is the muscular strength and stamina that you develop by lifting weights. The goal is not really to learn how to bench press a lot of weight, the real goal is to develop your muscles, and lifting weights is the way that you do it.

This is why a lot of companies will actually pass over a person who has the specific skills that the company needs in favor of somebody who has greater potential. Skills are easily taught. What is not easily taught are the underlying raw talent and the attitudes. As a case in point, NFL teams would rather draft a guy who has limited football experience but has tremendous size and athletic ability (i.e. the ‘physical specimen’) than draft a guy who has played football his whole life but is small and slow.