Common $ense
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| Everyday I’m hustlin’ |
Tuesday in my Management 100 lecture, we engaged the students in an intellectual discourse on the ethics of business. When asked if he would inflate performance numbers to get a contract, a freshman replied, “Hell yea I’d inflate the numbers. We gotta get that paper any way we can.” (Actual quote)
Ladies, take note. This kid is going places.
As much as Penn students look down on the urban working class of Philadelphia or New York from our lofty Ivory Tower, we have to admit, everyone at Penn has their hustle . We just replace the bootleg DVDs with something more glamorous. Let me highlight a few for our readers out there.
Fraternity Hustle: Does anyone else but me see anything odd about the way they are advertising for philanthropy events out on Locust Walk this week? Tell me, what else can you call a bunch of guys just hanging out on a couch while their sorority girls collect the money?
MBA Hustle: You won’t see them wandering aimlessly around campus. These guys are about their business. With their designer coffee mugs and their tote bags with the name of their old employers emblazoned on the front, they’re not here to play games. You think undergrads are motivated? There is no greater motivator than a wife and two kids.
Sorority Hustle: Don’t believe the stereotypes, these girls are no dummies. Anyone care to guess how they keep their chapter GPAs so much higher than the campus average? I’ll let you speculate on that…
Pre-Med Hustle: These students are slick. They get the money and the glory. Do you know what the median salary for surgeons is? Your friend in organic chemistry does. Tell me what other profession can you make well over a quarter million and still let you people you are “giving back to society” with a straight face.
Unless you are doing surgery in a little hut…in a third world country…for free, I don’t think you are giving back to anybody.
Feel free to comment on any other Ivy League hustlers you see out there.
Common $ense appears every Tuesday and Thursday.
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October 4th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
As an aspiring medical student, I wanted to share. Other more lucrative careers are already sucking talent away from the field of medicine. Some argue that doctors (especially primary care physicians) should earn more than they do now. I had better make enough money after my 4 years of medical school, 5 years of residency and perhaps a fellowship to pay off all of the loans I have taken out to do so. Maybe the real problem here is the inflated cost of a medical education?
October 5th, 2007 at 8:36 am
The field of medicine was first and foremost a business. If you examine its history, you will learn that the complex medical lexicon was designed so patients would have less information. People profit from information gaps. Now, with WebMD and other informational tools that help erode this gap, it makes some sense that doctors are losing some of their edge.
The biggest anticompetitive process is the med school application process. The reason it’s so competitive is because doctors realized that did not want too much competition. This is a well-established fact.
In reality, computerized care systems and advanced biotechnologies are allowing nurse practitioners to take on more and more responsibility. Medicine simply isn’t as hard to implement anymore. And that’s a good thing. It’s better to have some automated systems in place instead of trusting one doctor to always be on top of her game.
Long story short, a medical degree is less valuable than it used to be.
October 5th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
I don’t want to hear you MDs bitch about salaries. What about us biomedical graduate students, who spend equal, if not more (~5.5 years of grad school and 5-7 years of postdoctoral training), time training for our careers. Yet, we can expect to start out as assistant professors making a paltry $45,000.year.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Aside from medicine…
Yuekee has jacked up prices across the board by 50 cents, breaking the wallets of fob students everywhere. if that’s not a hustle, i don’t know what is.
December 3rd, 2007 at 4:43 pm
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