Part 3

Monkey Business; Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle
By John Rolfe, Peter Troob

(Page 3 of 5)

A somewhat closer look at the heavily laminated pages should have yielded another clue as to the goals and mind-sets of our future business school classmates. The two job categories snaring the highest percentage of the graduating class, management consulting and investment banking, also happened to have some of the highest starting salaries. A coincidence? I think not. Troob and I were about to jump into a velvet-walled cage with some of the greediest bastards this side of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Unfortunately, at the time, we were both wrapped up in a Richie Rich fantasy of our own. We were about to start a frenzied two-year race with America's most prized business school graduates, blindly thrashing our way toward the almighty dollar.

At Wharton, the official start to this seminal marathon was the "Welcome to Wharton" seminar during orientation week. Whatever delusions I may have had prior to this cozy little gathering were quickly dispelled. Surrounded by 750 other hearty young business schoolers in a massive auditorium, all feelings of being part of something elite, something special, began to melt away. When the progression of second-year students took the podium and began describing, in lurid detail, exactly what awaited everyone on the job-search front, the essence was laid bare. We were there for a two-year mating dance with the recruiters. What the Wharton name would get us was a shot at the best of those recruiters. Given that opportunity, though, it would be up to us to distinguish ourselves from the sea of equally qualified candidates in the seats all around us. We'd have to be willing to climb over these people while wearing golf shoes with sharpened cleats to get where we wanted-no, needed-to be. F**k camaraderie.

What I didn't realize at the time was that not everybody in that auditorium was reaching these same wrenching realizations that day. Something between a sizable minority and a majority of my new classmates that day already knew exactly what game was being played. There were bastards there who knew what awaited them, and had voluntarily come back to subject themselves to the process, all for the sake of professional advancement and the accoutrements that accompanied it.

The phenomenon, mind you, was in no way peculiar to Wharton. In fact, 350 miles to the north, at that most venerable of all institutions-the Harvard Business School-a like scene was being played out. And among the 750 dandy young recruits there was one of those bastards who knew the game. A stocky little former investment banking analyst whom I'd later come to love as we wallowed together in our collective misery paying our dues as investment banking associates at DLJ. Peter Troob.

Later, after we got to know each other, Troob would confirm my suspicion that things at Wharton and Harvard were just about the same.

Yeah, I was going through the same mating dance at Harvard Business School. However, I had a big advantage: I'd worked in investment banking before going back to business school. I'd been an analyst at Kidder Peabody. I knew the pain, I knew the long nights and the late dinners eaten in the office six nights a week.

The thing was that I had sworn off investment banking. The sixteen-hour days, the people who had institutional authority to kick my ass, the extra ten pounds I had put on since college, and my nonexistent social life. The investment banking life as a junior guy sucked and I knew it. It paid me well for a twenty-two-year-old snot-nosed brat from Duke, helped me get into Harvard, and taught me how to break out a company's financials with my eyes closed, but as I sat in Harvard Business School I promised myself that I wouldn't go back. No way. I promised myself that I would find a more rewarding career, one that made me feel good about myself. One that cleansed my soul instead of soiling it.

So why was I willing to jump right back in? That's a good question. I remember sitting with one of my good friends, Danny, in the steam room at the beginning of the school year discussing that very question. We had both come from a two-year boot camp at Kidder Peabody and we were both at HBS. Danny asked the question first.

"Troobie, are you gonna go back to banking?"

"No f**** way, man. Are you kidding me? Kidder sucked and my life was hell. I'm gonna do something else."

"What?"

"I don't know, consulting or some s**t like that."

"Consulting? Making all those two-by-two charts and matrices and being shipped to some buttf**k place like Biloxi, Mississippi, to help consult some manufacturing company for two months? No thanks."

"Yeah, maybe you're right, Danny Boy. Not consulting. I'll try to get a job in a buyout fund."

Copyright © 2000 by John Rolfe and Peter Troob

About the Author

John Rolfe grew up in Virginia, the heart of Dixie. He survived on a daily diet of collard greens and ham hocks. He attended the first in a long line of parent-teacher conferences for disciplinary problems as a kindergartner after hocking a loogie onto another student in his gym class. John's parents deny all responsibility for his early, ornery demeanor.

Peter Troob grew up on the rough and tumble streets of Scarsdale New York. While in grade school he starred in James and the Giant Peach and then went on to be Sonny in the Scarsdale High School senior play, Grease. Only 5'8", Peter mistakenly fancied himself a career in the NBA until, during his senior year in high school, he tore his anterior cruciate ligament and decided to take up golf instead.