Why I chose the money-driven, emotionless ego of NYU

You rarely hear about the not-so-Stern side of Stern

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In our last class, Professor Norén asked us to share our individual dreams.

The second she said the word ‘dreams,’ my classmates and I looked at each other as if we had just heard the most cliché question ever. Obviously, none of us raised our hands. So, she patiently waited for ten minutes, and despite the awkward, but more so disappointing silence, not one hand went up.

I wish I would have raised mine.

Ever since we could sit on a dinner table, my siblings and I would overhear our parents discuss abstract topics such as public education, government reforms, poverty and economic growth. At a young age, we barely understood the meaning of those conversations, but we began to observe their arguments and our father’s worries in the streets of our country, the Dominican Republic. 

The Economist vs. Where Do Monsters Live?

While my siblings and I fought over the level of the air conditioning in the car, young children, like us, but unlike us, sweat away their tears as they knocked on our windows and begged for food. I distinctly remember observing this disparity when a homeless child rested on the sidewalk, wearing one of our school uniforms for protection.

We knew that while the uniform could open many enlightening opportunities for us, it was just another shirt and unaffordable door for him.

We just couldn’t understand why.

So, I developed an urge to make sense of those seemingly confusing conversations by joining the dialogue. Any chance our school gave us, I attempted to write about poverty and human development and, although I probably did not fully comprehend the severity of these issues, I tried to bring attention to the problems most of us, at that age of fourteen, forgot we cared about.

Attempting to address the Dominican education crisis through art

I continued to express my ‘knowledge’ on this topic with confidence while carrying those conversations to high school in forms of research papers, art projects and presentations. My confidence remained, until a teacher asked “So, what should we do about it?”

And I blanked out.

Initially, I felt embarrassed I didn’t have an answer to his question, not because I had not researched solutions, but because if one truly existed and, more importantly, worked, then how was this homeless child still begging for food on the streets, and why had I been writing about the same issue for the past five years?

I replied with the generic ‘the government should do this’ answer, which I strongly advocated for (I was quite naïve back then and did not understand how corrupt politics works).

Years later, unsatisfied with this solution, I began to look for answers on research papers and textbooks. I took classes to understand the trends and patterns among developing countries. But still, no text offered a concrete and innovative solution to alleviate poverty. And, maybe the fact that I was addressing such a large scale issue, like ‘poverty,’ as if it was one simple entity, did not help.

Anyways, I felt more lost than before.

La Lomita, DR with Rustic Pathways (photo by Caitlin McManus)

Naturally, in the midst of all the confusion, and assuming that if I wanted to change the system, I had to be a part of it, I considered Economics as an undergraduate degree. After all, people who dedicate themselves to the study of how countries work are the most prepared to find answers and solutions to why poor countries are poor, right?

My parents never said anything, but I had an understanding that this ‘I will solve the poverty crisis’ mentality seemed more of a philanthropic and idealistic career, and not exactly what a young Dominican woman with the opportunity to spend the next years in the United States, should waste her degree on.

So, like the rest of my siblings, I applied to business schools – they could open doors that might not necessarily unlock themselves with other degrees. And, although those conversations about issues in the Dominican Republic would be set aside for a while, perhaps it would not hurt to join a different and larger dialogue in a university that feeds on artistry and ambition, like NYU.

I decided to enroll, and during my first semester everything was better than I expected – the people, the classes, the city, the excitement.

Yet, after several months of drawing indifference curves and computing indefinite integrals, I started to miss having conversations that mattered. I questioned whether I could ever instigate social change with a business degree, or whether the business world would even care about these kinds of issues.

And I was not the only one who felt lost. Some of my friends and classmates complained because they, too, had other ambitions, ones that would not necessarily be fulfilled by learning how to derive standard deviations and utility functions.

Adding to the concerns and my impatience, Spring Semester arrived and many of us dreaded Stern’s core class: Business and Its Publics. Not only had we not heard much about it, but what we had heard involved a lot of reading, research, discussing and writing (words we, business students, tend to dislike).

As the weeks passed, and as much as we feared those hour-long discussions with Professor Foudy, it was clear this was the first class that finally cared about having those conversations.

Flood in La Barquita de Los Minas, RD (photo by Carmen Suárez)

Our professors challenged us to address social issues from a business perspective because, although textbooks do not always have answers, markets often do. We were encouraged to create and to do so with intention and purpose because impact is as important as profitand profits can depend on the vision and scale of that impact.

This was an answer I had never heard of before.

Suddenly, all the worries about having made the wrong decision were at ease. And all those preconceived notions about business being just another cut-throat, survival of the fittest world began to dissipate the moment we learned how the same industry led by ‘selfish’ bankers perceives that the ‘doing well by doing good’ business model can, and ultimately will, become the most valuable and respected measure of success.

Children in the community La Lomita, DR (photo by Caitlin McManus)

To be honest, I was nervous that I would not fit in or like studying in a school like Stern, which is often characterized as the emotionless and money-driven ego of NYU, because I cared too much, and perhaps the business mindset would absorb the importance of those dinner conversations and transform the values they were grounded on into dollar signs and Excel sheets. 

If anything, this school has reinforced them by helping me find a different voice within the same dialogue, as businesswoman and not just a concerned Dominican citizen.

I hope this story brings attention to the side of Stern we rarely hear about. Many of us who pursue business don’t do it because we don’t care, but because we do. And we are lucky to be a part of a school that doesn’t just lead the conversation about the future of business, but also urges its students to rediscover lost interests, and find ways to immerse themselves in dialogues that matter.

This is what I would have said, had I raised my hand.