All Is Fair in Love and Jobs

From outside the job-seeking process for soon-to-be graduates, I like to imagine Harvard seniors as if they were participating in some dating ritual with jobs instead of people. However, the ritual seems to have gone amiss in setting students up for short-term jobs instead of long-term careers.

As the jobs dating ritual goes, each senior has his or her own taste in an ideal “date.” Everyone puts themselves out there by telling potential suitors about their past experiences and common interests with similar suitors to show that a relationship could work. And when seniors do get pursued, it is with food and gifts—just look at any tech recruiting event for uncanny dating parallels.

Right now, two of my senior roommates are going through the motions of this job dating process. One is a computer science concentrator who hopes to pivot into public service-oriented jobs; the other is on track to get a bioengineering degree and wants to break into scientific research. Yet both see that the bulk of job opportunities come from what I’ve come to think of as the Big Three: finance, tech, and consulting.

Generally speaking, I think finance, tech, and consulting are good places to learn while remaining flexible to move into a different career path. But it is no secret that Harvard has an interesting relationship with the Big Three: of the Harvard grads that would matriculate to a job in 2016, 53% would be entering a job in finance, tech, or consulting as their first, but only 15% of the same pool of grads thought they would remain in these industries after 10 years. Looking at just consulting, only 1% of Harvard grads think they will be in the industry in 10 years. Compare this to the 21% of seniors going into consulting after graduation and it would be hard to believe that seniors are making the long-term careers that they want by starting in industries they know they will abandon.

In other words, getting a job with the Big Three is akin to settling down with a partner who seems good for you now but might not be worthy of a lasting relationship.

Harvard’s primary matchmaking efforts seem relatively okay with letting this dynamic dominate. This year, 88 companies were tabled at the Campus Interview Program Fair; only 13 of these operated outside the businesses of finance, tech, or consulting. And finance and consulting are the only industries that have more than the standard single Office of Career Services-organized fair, not counting their dominance in the Campus Interview Program Fair.

This scenario mimics the quintessential chicken-and-egg problem in terms of figuring out why the Big Three dominate on campus; the Big Three are aggressive in recruiting and courting Harvard students, but students and Harvard are also receptive to their advances and benefits. With all those involved knowing what they’re getting themselves into, it might be hard to say anything might be amiss.

When it comes to jobs, maybe people should believe something along the lines of “all policy’s fair in love and war,” as one knows what they are getting themselves into when they love or wage war. But such a belief is grounded in the idea that that the consequential things in life merely come from decisions people make based on the desires that they have.

Contrasting this idea with the fact that many Harvard seniors are going into fields that they don’t see a future in leads me to believe something has gone amiss. The job dating ritual at Harvard has lost sight of what is at stake: finding jobs that allow us to immediately live the lives we want to lead into the future.

However, there are glimpses of what job seeking could look like at Harvard. For one, there can be a greater focus not just on the job opportunities that are offered to us, but on the expectations of the jobs we want.

I have been lucky enough to take a class with a professor who encouraged each of his students to think deeply about careers that they would like to pursue and how they want to live their lives after college. This kind of thinking is necessary in order to develop strong expectations so that we demand jobs directly related to our future careers after college ends. If we took our demands and expectations seriously, I think we would choose to go into first jobs that we see our futures in and not necessarily into jobs in the Big Three industries.

In addition to encouraging the development of such demands, Harvard could meet demand by providing a diverse set of jobs opportunities. Only two years ago did Harvard start making efforts to bring public-service oriented jobs to campus in an organized way. And I hope such an effort will lead to similar initiatives in more fields.

If we took expectations for our future working life more seriously, and if Harvard met those expectations, these glimpses could turn a rather unsatisfactory job-seeking ritual into one that immediately puts us on a path to lead the lives we want now rather in the future.

Dan A. Valenzuela, ’17-’18, is a philosophy concentrator living in Cabot House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.