Haven’t started a charitable foundation or saved millions of African orphans from AIDS by the fall of your junior year? Sorry, but according to this weekend’s Washington Post Magazine cover story, you are doomed to a lifetime of mediocrity and remorse.
“The Coveted” explores the career paths of what author Liza Mundy calls the “hypercredentialed” college graduates coming out of America’s top universities. The students profiled in the article all seem to have founded charitable organizations in impoverished Latin America or Africa and are generally hyper-excelling individuals who maintain 3.95 GPAs whilst saving the world, and one infers while reading, irritating the hell out of anyone they meet with their overdeveloped sense of self.
Case in point, when asked about what she enjoys to do in her leisure time, one supergrad answered, “Most recently I was monitoring elections in Kenya.” Yeah, I was too. On TV. For five minutes.
Besides the parade of irritating personalities that present themselves in this article, what is most frustrating is the fact that Mundy presents the idea that there are only a few acceptable career options for supergrads to pursue, namely, investment banking and the CIA. So after saving poor kids during their teens and early 20s, these kids are ready to pursue their charity on the corporate level by exploiting struggling Third World economies and propping up dictators? Their philanthropic devotion is touching.
Mundy also fails to address class. While other, equally talented students spend their summers working to pay for books or tuition, the supergrads are flying to exotic locales to help locals. Their work is admirable, but only wealth allows these twenty-somethings to pad their resumes by founding charities.
Readers on the Post’s website overwhelmingly agree with me that Mundy’s article is, and excuse the trade speak, “slanted bullshit”.
“Wow,” wrote one commentor, “this was just like reading an advertisement for corporate America.” Another glibly wrote that the supergrads will be “coke-snorting, drunk burn-outs” in a few years.
Charity and coke: what elite America does best.
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Jealous much?
But why not skip the charity and go straight to the coke?
Impossible is nothing!
I never heard that Aleksey Vayner did coke. Performance-enhancing drugs for tango and tennis, perhaps.
cool post man, i totally digged it.
Yeah, I opened that article being excited because I thought it would be about me. I went to a VA state school, graduated with honors, and landed a job within two weeks after graduation. I thought the article would be about something real - like how every single one of my friends and I are overwhelmed because we’ve been told our whole lives that we can do anything, so how do we choose?
But instead it was about Ivy Leagers - who I have worked with at internships, by the way, and have absolutely zero social skills (basically I think they’re mean) - not real students. Good for them I guess.
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