Every fall at Brown, starry-eyed first-years hear the gospel of the open curriculum. Only at Brown can a student stitch together “Politics of the Ocean” with “Intro to Printmaking,” wander into a 6 p.m. philosophy seminar out of pure curiosity, and still graduate with a degree in biology. The open curriculum represents the very best of the Brown spirit of freedom, creativity, and openness; it’s what we brag about on tours and in conversations with friends at core-curriculum schools.
But by sophomore year, seminars give way to Goldman Sachs information sessions. Calendars start to fill up with coffee chats. The freedom to build our own schedules never wanes, but the choices inevitably arrange themselves around a single question: will this help with recruiting?
Firms on Wall Street hire their intern classes nearly 18 months in advance in an effort to snag top talent before competitors do. By sophomore fall, students are already expected to have leadership positions, polished resumes, technicals mastered, and an extensive network built from coffee chats. Miss that window, and students risk being shut out of the most lucrative jobs entirely. This urgency convinces students to drop classes they once dreamed of taking, skip extracurriculars, and ironically enough, put off the hobbies and passions that earned them admission to Brown. For many, this demanding process ultimately becomes the defining feature of their undergraduate years.
According to Brown’s Center for Career Exploration, 79 percent of employed graduates enter the for-profit sector, and over half land roles in just finance, consulting, and tech. At Brown, Computer Science concentrators alone accounted for about one-sixth of the undergraduate body in 2018. For all our talk of exploration, we are no less guilty of defaulting to the same, familiar career choices.
I’ve experienced the pressure to land a role in these lucrative industries firsthand. I transferred to Brown after my freshman year as a journalism student at Boston University, excited to jumpstart my dream career reporting on business stories, interviewing founders, and writing about the human side of companies. The open curriculum seemed like the perfect way to kindle that fire while I built a technical context to enhance my reporting and explore other subjects I hadn’t been able to under B.U.’s general education requirements. Instead, my dream of journalism became a dream deferred, supplanted by coffee chats and case prep.
“I’ve noticed in my personal experience that students are accepted, or even apply, to Brown because they want to save the world in their own ways,” said Professor Bill Allen, who has been teaching classes on nonprofits and social entrepreneurship at Brown for 20 years. “The open curriculum allows that. But once they arrive, they start to feel the pressure of career choices, and many gravitate toward finance as the ‘safe’ path.’”
The choice is certainly not irrational. Brown’s full cost of attendance now totals nearly $96,000 a year, and national data shows that STEM and business majors command the highest early-career pay. Consulting and finance offer a clear short-term safety net with structured, predictable recruiting cycles and unmatched “exit opportunities” from having a name-brand firm on your resume. In an uncertain job market, stability, even if short-term, is seductive. Bashing our peers for “selling out” is deeply rooted in Brown’s spirit, but such criticism borders on imprudent. It neglects the reality that a strong foundation of economic freedom builds capacity to effectuate change.
“Students need to set themselves up for a better future,” a junior recently confessed to me anonymously. “And so naturally, when you get a degree from a college like [Brown], you want to make sure that it’s worth it. [These jobs are] very high paying; they will set you up well for your career. So you sacrifice some of your passion to attain some higher level of security and comfort.”
The point is not that students shouldn’t explore careers in finance and consulting. The true danger lies in treating the job as an entire identity and deferring every other interest until some imagined future. Far too many students have an “all or nothing” mindset going into recruiting, losing their identities in the process.
“I remember going back to my roommates who all had secured offers [in finance] by now, and felt a huge sense of imposter syndrome,” a Brown student recruiting for a top private equity firm told me. “I began to cry in front of them, because it felt as though my world was literally collapsing, which is ironic given that I stepped foot on this campus just one year before that, not knowing a single name of any of these firms that I was applying to.”
We tell ourselves we’ll explore later, after the offer, after we’ve saved enough, after the pressure eases. But “later” rarely comes. I know far too many talented writers, debaters, musicians, at Brown who postponed those parts of themselves in the name of recruiting. Even the freshmen feel it; this fall, more than 200 underclassmen applied to Bruno Finance Society. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of these sharp, creative students would let the very things that make them interesting wither as I read through applications.
This mindset of postponement doesn’t end with recruiting. Once you start earning a certain salary, the lifestyle that comes with it makes it harder and harder to walk away. That’s what people mean by the golden handcuffs: you can always leave, but you almost never do.
Professor Allen put it more simply: “You can lead a purpose-driven life and still make a good living. But the money motivation can get to a point where you begin to make a lot of money, you’re comfortable, and then some, if not many, get to a point of saying, ‘Well, is this what I really want to do?’”
It doesn’t have to be this way. “Even if you still go into finance or banking, it’s a richer experience if you don’t crowd the other things out,” Professor Allen explained to me. “Brown allows you to do that. You can get a great concentration in economics and still explore widely. But too often, students build a bubble around themselves instead.”
Brown’s open curriculum is designed to encourage students’ curiosities beyond their major requirements. But in practice, it largely funnels underclassmen into the “holy trinity” of studies: Applied Mathematics, Economics, and Computer Science, often combined into a tongue-twisting double concentration that looks good on a resume. The paradox is that instead of choosing freedom, students impose rigidity and prioritize the courses they think recruiters want them to take over the ones they once promised themselves they’d try.
“I think if freshman year I hadn’t decided to take so many math and finance classes immediately, I wouldn’t have been pushed in that direction so quickly,” a Brown junior told me. “Because I chose classes based on what other people were doing, I ended up taking the same ones over and over again in the same field.”
As I flew back from JFK to T.F. Green after a grueling day of final round interviews, I reflected on my three-month-long recruiting process for just one internship. By now it was March of my sophomore year; I had already rearranged my entire life around recruiting. I had given up newspaper reporting, violin, creative writing, and the nonprofit I had worked on throughout high school and freshman year of college. By the time both my sophomore and junior summer internship offers were signed, I was staring back at a completely different version of myself in the mirror.
College is a time to explore, fail, and try again. Perhaps there is a balance that can be struck between stability and curiosity. Between recruiting for a job that pays well and not abandoning the things that make you who you are. You don’t need to wait until you’ve made partner or managing director to lead a purpose-driven life outside of work. Passions don’t have to be postponed, and they can coexist with careers, even demanding ones, if we refuse to set them aside. The real tragedy occurs when we treat recruiting as totalizing and let it swallow the very freedom that drew us to Brown in the first place.
Edited by Lucas Guan