When I worked for a big investment bank in New York City, I used to get passed on opportunities simply because I wasn’t an alumni of an Ivy League School. Those schools had a huge presence in the firm I worked for and their alumni would favor the younger workers from their schools. It bugged me like crazy at the time. I knew I was a better worker than most of the Ivy Leaguers, but I had no control over the decisions being made.
In my annual review I brought this up to a managing director I respected (in a professional manner of course). He said to me, “If we had the time to truly review all of the analysts work I’m sure this type of stuff would never happen.” Oh wonderful, I thought. Someone is finally going to sympathize with me. “But”, he followed up, and there always seemed to be a “but” in that industry, “We will never have the time or money to properly do so, so instead of bitching to me, why don’t you work out a way to sell yourself? Until you do that, you will always just be a kid who didn’t go to Harvard.”
Luckily at that point I was already numb to the harsh feedback that came with finance. Being a young white male I rarely get the bad end of categorization, so I don’t have too much experience. But the business world did teach me a harsh lesson. People in positions of power will always operate with fixed resources, especially time, and as long as they do, they will make decisions by categorization. To them, the average Ivy grad is a better banker than one from a non-Ivy school. To some particularly awful ones, a white banker is better than a black banker. Complaining didn’t help me alter that. I just had to work that much harder to change the managing minds.
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