For fourteen years, my mornings started at 7:00 on the basketball court of my school. Everyone stood in queues under the 104-degree Delhi sun, segregated by grade and gender and ordered by height. We had to don a dull gray pleated skirt that went below the knee, a button-down shirt with a striped tie, and no make-up or jewelry. It was a ritual of conformity. Our hair had to be in a braid, and braids had to be tied with navy blue hair ties. Cotton ones.
At the beat of a drum, student council prefects scanned the queues with a discerning eye for below-standard uniforms. I once had a fractionally long fingernail and was pulled out of the queue to run five laps around the field. My peers watched my cheeks flush from both embarrassment and exertion. The drumbeats reverberated as we then dispersed in perfect synchrony to the classrooms.
My grandfather tells me his earliest memory of school is fleeing from it. He was six years old, the fifth of his nine siblings. His early schooling took place in the by-lanes of a bazaar in Paharganj. It was English class, and the schoolmaster asked him about the difference between “gate” and “gait.” He was supposed to know, but he fumbled as his master stood there holding a three-foot wooden rod. Conformity was not only an unquestioned ritual, but it was also imposed in physical form. “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” they used to say. 70 years later, as I was getting ready for school, he asked me the difference between “gate” and “gait” and showed me the scar on the mount of his left palm.
I grew up in a middle-class household for which education was a symbol of pride and etched into each block of its concrete. My grandfather rebelled against our family of confectioners to earn a Ph.D. and spearhead India’s green revolution in the ’60s. My maternal lineage consisted of public school teachers, and my parents together founded an education consultancy to help students prepare for their careers. The deep roots and widespread branches of education in my family meant that the purpose of education was predetermined or at least never questioned. The degree had to be an end in itself.
For years, I was top of my class. By middle school, I knew all the multiplication tables up to 35 and memorized my geography textbook. All 57 pages of it. During school breaks, I took coaching classes in physics or solved math problems with my dad from a textbook two grades above mine. This was education, and boy, was I great at it.
I could compute complex derivatives before tenth grade, but if you asked me why calculus was used or what it meant, I couldn’t say. I could speak well, but not for myself. I could write a star-studded essay about global warming, but was I a conscientious citizen? School imbued in me an impressive knowledge base and my home a solid moral compass, but I never gave a second thought to how, why, or what I was learning. I could meet goals, but not set them, answer questions, but not ask thoughtful ones. How much of this was a pursuit of education rather than a performance of it?
***
In my early college years, I approached this dilemma in practical terms, fixating more on what to do than how to be. Freshman year, I was drawn to everything and changed my major three times in the first month simply because I could. Yet, even in a liberal arts environment, I continued to seek ways to fall in line, to conform. By sophomore year, I was the archetypal wise fool (sophos + moros) and spent as much time pseudo-philosophizing Hegel in dining halls as I did attending corporate info sessions, re-re-editing my resume, and compulsively checking my LinkedIn. Before I had even reached the halfway point of college, I landed the coveted management consulting internship. When junior year arrived, I spent my time suspended in anticipation for this role and realized that I was losing track of who I was beyond what recruiters had wanted to see. Recently, on a sleepless long-haul flight home for winter break, I read William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep. In his words, much of my first two years were spent “trying to create a self—or at least the illusion of self—that was capable of being packaged.” Now, freshly returned from my internship as a senior with a full-time return offer in hand, I stand as exactly that: a package, neatly wrapped in resume-worthy achievements but feeling unsettled, open, empty.
According to a Career Advancement survey I recently came across in the Maroon, 47.4 percent of the 2024 graduates who entered the workforce pursued consulting or financial services jobs. In 2011 at Yale, this number was 25 percent, which then-senior Marina Keegan wrote about with dismay and shock in her oft-cited article, “Even Artichokes Have Doubts.” In her article, Keegan quotes Professor Charles Hill, who says that firms “consider you a crop. They harvest you, put you in their grinder, pay you well and off-load you.” When we graduate in June, about every third person next to us will be something like a consultant or investment banker. I, too, will be among them, and yet, for all the lip service we pay to the life of the mind, I find it unsettling how many of us are so willing to walk into this grinder.
On the last day of my consulting internship, a mentor who was a few years older and incidentally a UChicago alum, casually remarked how there’s no other job that will pay you “this much” to “just take notes on calls your first year.” The comment may have been off-handed, but its effect lingered. The time and risk tradeoffs we learned about in ECON 100 came alive for me. It seemed like I was supposed to feel proud or happy, but how I truly felt was more uncomfortable and more unsure.
Arnav Agarwal, a computer science and economics major heading into management consulting in Chicago, recently spoke to me about how his pre-professional endeavors were, to a great degree, separate from his academic pursuits. He said that he is “the kind of person who enjoys learning for the sake of learning, not necessarily to derive professional utility.” On the one hand, I admire his acknowledgment of a real love for learning. But on the other hand, I struggle to understand why so many of us continue to spend so much of our time in school trying to package ourselves for a job, rather than immersing ourselves fully in the intellectual growth we say we want.
Those going into consulting or similar roles are often labeled as “insecure overachievers,” and I can’t help but think about the many ways in which that rings true for me. A senior in Keegan’s article described his internship experience at an investment bank as “a combination of the least fulfilling, least interesting, and least educational experiences” of his life. Journalist Ezra Klein acknowledges that these companies have figured out how colleges are producing so many of us with “ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic, and no idea what to do next.” Maybe it’s just me, but like the disillusioned senior in Keegan’s article, I haven’t encountered many people who seem excited about their jobs for their own sake. Whenever I hear the all-too-familiar claim that consulting offers “transferable skills,” I ask why we are going after these skills whose highest purpose is their potential for transfer. I have been taught, throughout my time here, to always read closely, engage boldly, and learn deeply. Why do I only now understand what was at stake when I scanned (OK, honestly, skipped) my sosc readings to edit version 18 of my resume? I was asked in my job interview to talk about a time I had failed, and I had a carefully crafted story ready to spew. But what about the ongoing, quieter, deeper sense that I may be failing myself?
A student in Deresiewicz’s book calls it “hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.” In an article in the Maroon, alum Jessica Zhong refers to students like myself as “sellouts.” I find this label unsettling because it oversimplifies a far more complicated reality. We all have our reasons: cultural expectations, financial stability, the desire to secure a better future than our parents had. For me, selling out is less a judgment of certain decisions and more a lack of consciousness toward what one is buying into. And the real question arises in how we can reconcile, not separate, our professional ambitions with the ideals we claim to want out of our education.
David Brooks said in his 2017 Class Day address that he was “deeper” when he left Chicago than when he arrived. He said that he graduated from the College with “a sense of his soul and its yearnings.” If we are serious about what our souls yearn for though, I think we owe ourselves at least one moment of reflective pause. After all, this ability to pause and deeply reflect may end up being the one transferable skill truly worth having.
Each passing day, I become more conscious of the clock ticking down to graduation, and I want to stop kidding myself. But I know I won’t. I will convince myself that I am buying some time and find a way to live with the ever-pricking consciousness that it is, in fact, my time that’s being bought from me.
Deresiewicz says it best: “So much promise, to no great purpose.”
***
My journey at UChicago began with the Aims of Education address during orientation week, where Professor Agnes Callard told us, “If you want to throw a ball a great distance, you have to follow through with the motion even after you’re out of contact with the ball. The time when the ball won’t be in your hand plays an important role in how you throw it, and that is part of what determines how far it eventually goes.” This metaphor has stuck with me, and I would like to believe that the full arc of learning can unfurl long after we leave campus.
But I am afraid because soon, passionate, timeless intellectual transactions in Cobb Hall will turn into real, commodified transactions of my time for money for rent. I am afraid that once we graduate, the ball might bounce out of our hands and into the fluorescent-lit corner of a corporate bullpen, only to stay there. Stuck.
Maybe I am more afraid because the ball isn’t quite out of my hand yet, and senior year feels like the final chance to learn for learning’s sake. Deresiewicz writes, “College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.” Unlike many of my peers from high school, I had the privilege and opportunity to defer practicality for a time, to revel in this liminal space between the peace of home and the pace of professional life.
In the fall quarter, one of my classes concluded with Om Prakash Valmiki’s autobiographical work, Joothan. On the last day, our professor talked to us about the exhortative, normative force of education, the ways in which it can transform you. The value of education had always been inscribed in my life intellectually, but, that day, I experienced it emotionally. As I walked out of the classroom, Valmiki’s story echoed in my grandfather’s struggles, in the arc of our family’s transformation, and in my own privileged distance from it.
Callard’s metaphor of the ball, for me, had been far deeper philosophically than I was ready to receive at that moment. In his 2017 speech, David Brooks said, “Professors pour more into their classes than the students are able to receive at that moment. The seeds they plant burst out a lot later.” Three years ago, I had walked into my first humanities Core class with naive wonder but an admittedly closed mind, a loud mouth, and an inflated sense of self-worth about having “made it.” As a senior in this class I was only taking for fun, I walked out with fewer answers and more questions, existential discomfort and humility, and a voice that so often fumbled and hesitated.
Maybe I really am just a sheep on the hedonic path to corporate life, indistinct from the many I march with. But the truth is, I have become so excellent at being shepherded around, I no longer know how to move without it. With no quarters to structure me or grades to fuel me, how do I propel my ball? Towards what do I channel my learning? From whom do I seek validation? Perhaps it’s not the life of the mind I fear losing, but who I will be once its prescriptions fall away.
For when we graduate, art will be “for seeing evil,” no longer a Core class that coddles you with painting supplies and color theory manuals. Philosophy will be to live by, not only to write about. We will transact our labor in the economy, no longer run regressions on mock data. We will participate actively in shaping history, not memorize it for civ tests. We will practice our scientism, embody our humanity, keep to our business, and try to live the life of the mind outside its most fertile grounds. I would be lying if I said I feel prepared for it.
My grandfather often quotes to me the parable of the frog in the well who is convinced its confines are the entire world until the monsoon rains force it to confront the vastness beyond. He gave me my name, and as he turns ninety this year, I often reflect with him on how education came to him as the monsoon rains that pulled our family away from selling sweets in rural Panipat into a legacy of economic and intellectual possibility that enables my elite American education today.
In my family lore, the degree was an end in itself. As this end is fast approaching, I can’t help but wonder, what now? My brother calls it naiveté, but I hope that we can follow the arc wherever we go. I hope we perform our jobs, like we do our education, for their own sake. Not to build a cache of transferable skills, not impatient to climb the ladder, not afraid to take risks. I hope that occasionally, we even allow ourselves time to apply some humanities in the otherwise ruthless business world and listen earnestly to the drumbeats that I know will continue to reverberate within us.
I know that no additional class I audit or extra office hour I attend will fill the void of my restless sense of purpose. I have been told that purpose, like faith, reveals itself only when questioned. So, I keep looking to others for answers that I know are ultimately mine to unravel. If I like to believe that faith is cultivated through ritual practice, perhaps purpose, too, will emerge from the very rituals of conformity I otherwise find suspect.
As my anxiety remains and grows, unresolved, I find consolation in knowing that I graduate with a heart and mind alive to everything in store for me. For once the ball leaves our hands, untethered, perhaps that is when it will finally gain the momentum to fling far and reach great distances, toward possibilities that have now only begun to germinate.
Anushka Bansal is a fourth-year in the College.
