Things aren't lookin' too hot

It looks like the financial world has been sucked into a vacuum of disaster.

One of our very own Penn alums turned up on the front page of the New York Times business section, her desk at Lehman Brothers packed into a sorry-looking box. During these troubling times, one question we seniors must ask is whether our bright futures are on the line.

While our class may have lucked out in high school by just missing the new SAT on steroids, it now seems like our good timing may have come to an end.

Looking for a job in recessionary times is no walk in the park. And though many of us may be bummed about what we expect to be lower-than-average hiring rates, I truly feel this sorry state of affairs may be nothing but a blessing in disguise: a time to look inside, rather than on PennLink, and truly evaluate what we want out of life.

I’m not about to go on an OCR diatribe, because we should be nothing but thankful for the vast opportunities our school is so helpful in presenting to us. But I will say that OCR is a world unto itself that can suck in even the most unsuspecting characters. Even I, a Communications major and Photography minor, had a brief stint of converting my resume into pdf files and conjuring up reasons why my internship at Hermes prepared me for the rigor of debt financing for leveraged buyouts. (I still don’t know what that means.)

I genuinely believe that Wall Street’s downward spiral may give those students who normally would have been suck(er)ed into the financial sphere a chance to consider options that never would have occurred to them.

I can imagine that grad school, fellowships and traveling all suddenly showed up on the radar of many students who never would have explored the possibilities beyond finance. And I’d like to think that some students will take this alternative route and look back in a few years, thankful that these troubling economic times forced them to veer off their predestined path.

So even though Kelly Cleary’s emails seem alarmingly chipper for such trying times, perhaps we can attribute her optimism to the idea that our bright futures are not on the line, but may actually be “in line” with what we truly want.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 11:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.