I recently graduated from a top university with a great business school. I majored in business and my school might as well have been a feeder school for Wall Street. This always made me a little uncomfortable, but it was not until our economy crashed that I began to see why...
While I was watching Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism, I was struck over and over again by all that he analyzed and how it played into my life. When he asked two prominent persons in finance, what the hell is a derivative? I remembered how I never really got what a derivative was in my finance class, nor why it mattered. And the two men could not answer his question, stuttering through an answer that they knew was not an explanation at all.
I ended up majoring in marketing because it concentrates on the customer. Makes me wish Wall Street had thought about them instead of profits, shareholders, and top executives.
Michael Moore's movie showed how the financial practices in the U.S. have destroyed too many people's lives.
I saw adults and children crying because they were losing their home, or because a corporation had profited off of a loved one's death. I saw devastated cities and politicians who were unresponsive toward the plights of their constituents but handing out bag-fulls of money to the very companies that helped cause this crisis. And I saw companies with empowered employees, because those employees control the means of production and share in the profits.
In those stories, I saw the work that I and my generation have to do. And while I watched those scenes on the movie screen, I pictured scenes from my own life, too, as if all the scenes were somehow fitting together like a puzzle.
Most of the business students at my university majored in finance and I saw too many of my friends attend event after event for Lehman or Goldman or Bear Sterns. Some accepted jobs with these companies only to lose them a year later during the recession. For four years they cultivated relationships with these recruiters only to come home one day with a Wall Street Journal in their hands, front page story: Merrill Lynch crashes and burns...would that the housing bubble be our only problem...
It suddenly looked like all those English and Philosophy and Finance and whatever majors I knew of who were aiming so high for Wall Street suddenly had no place to go. I remember sitting in my living room this past year, my senior year, with my roommates watching the Dow drop hundreds of points at a time. We were in shock because it was so crazy. It was like a TV show, like watching a roller coaster drop and never stop falling. And with it we watched our friend's job opportunities and our own, disappear.
I majored in marketing because it allowed me to work closely with what matters most to me: people. I wanted to work for a company that deeply valued its customers, acted ethically and sought to provide a great product that consumers would want. By the time I graduated, I wasn't even sure I wanted to remain in business, thinking that maybe I should work at a non-profit, in the public sector, or go to law school, instead.
I still don't know what I will do career-wise, but I DO know that my parent's generation and those who came before them have left me a mess to clean up and some very old problems to solve. Health care, the recession, a bad education system, discrimination in our criminal justice system, two wars, not socialism but corporatism...the list goes on. Like my fellow citizens, I am knee-deep in this mess we call a crisis, but I will do everything in my power to help us get out of it.