With teaching job prospects for anthropology Ph.D.'s pretty dismal, we've been forced to search farther afield, away from the familiar halls of academe.
So last spring the grad students in my department organized a self-help "survival seminar" on the topic of career choice, inviting a well-connected alumna to come in with suggestions and success stories of alternative employment options. It sounded mildly interesting, so I decided to check it out.
She told us we could write children's stories, be C.I.A. agents, design computer software, carry out social-impact research, do pretty much anything. But what she said next made me sit up straight: We could even check out lucrative opportunities in management consulting since firms were now dipping into the overflowing Ph.D. pool. (See an article from The Chronicle on management consulting, November 12, 1999.) I was inspired.
We just needed to work on clearly and successfully communicating our skills to potential employers, she emphasized.
I had no doubt that my anthropological training was a perfect segue into an extremely lucrative job as a management consultant. We can think on our feet, find themes and patterns in complex situations, collect and analyze diverse data, and communicate information in audience-sensitive ways. But to sell myself in the business world, I knew I would need to learn the field a bit, absorb the language, talk the talk, and walk the walk.
That's how I ended up a few weeks later at an on-campus management-consulting recruitment meeting. I approached it as an ethnographer, entering and analyzing an odd foreign culture ("community of practice") of power suits, bottom lines, "actionable solutions," and other "talking points" alien to the life of an idealistic academic (non-applied) anthropologist wearing ragged jeans.
The recruiting consultants were all dressed in non-intimidating "business casual" clothes, but I checked out their shoes: not a scuff or a two-digit price tag among them. And the food was heavenly -- a rich collection of expensive fruits and gourmet entrees. But it's pretty easy to seduce people living at or below the poverty line with free drinks, buffet spread, and promises of six-figure starting salaries. As a liberal-arts graduate deeply in student-loan debt, I suddenly had to sit down. Oh yes, who wouldn't fantasize about this life?
It seemed oddly like joining a cult: enthusiastic insiders with glazed eyes extolling the virtues of membership without specifying what consultants actually DO. "We just come up with simplified 'facts' based on always incomplete data sets," they said. "Sometimes you can leave the office as early as 8 p.m.," one consultant chirped enthusiastically. Under heavy questioning, they admitted to 12-hour-plus days and weekends as hired guns paid to come up with better "best guess" solutions than anyone else could. "But I still find the time to write poetry on the planes," one man reassured us.
For them, consulting was a game of profit -- making even more money for the top companies that could afford their price tag. It was a game of following the best business rules, or forging new creative (yet still acceptably conservative) pathways. It was a game of making proper impressions and conveying authority. It wasn't the kind of work energy I was used to.
But the problem-solving sample cases were kind of fun. And the salary figure slowly seeped its way into my brain. I drank another glass of wine, nibbled on another piece of tiramisu. I applied. One thing led to another, and they flew me in to interview.
The meeting was oddly hostile, as though the interviewer had already decided I was some sort of liberal-arts flake. "You had FUN researching the circus??" he demanded, then proceeded to test my quantitative abilities for figuring market-share predictions in billions of population. I did the math, we talked about production and revenues and liabilities for a bit, then he moved on.
"Tell me about an incident in a teamwork situation where there was considerable conflict and you demonstrated leadership," he said.
Cultural anthropologists do not often work in teams, and this might have momentarily stumped me. But I knew the question was coming because I had just debriefed a woman coming out of the prior round of interviewing. So I was prepared.
"Well," I said smoothly, "last year in the teaching program I worked in, there was a threat made by one of the students to one of the other instructors, and there was a great deal of concern about safe work environments and how these types of things should be handled by the administration, particularly in the wake of the events in Littleton...."
He interrupted me. "Well, I'm sure it wasn't serious," he said abruptly.
That was odd, I thought, but maybe he just wanted me to make it brief. "Well, it was essentially a rape threat," I began again.
He interrupted me instantly, while echoes of the word "rape" still hung in the air. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said, and immediately changed the subject with a new question on what I would specifically like to do in the company.
Then I watched helplessly while he effectively twisted my willingness to travel anywhere and my earnest desire to contribute to diverse problem-solving situations into a tacit admission that I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do.
I never got to finish narrating the teamwork incident. I never got to explain how I might have demonstrated any leadership skills. I never got the chance to wrap it all up with a comfortably happy ending. I did not get the job.
To be fair, I did muff the numbers in the market-share problem. But I also suspect that good job-market advice on fitting into the culture might include this rule: "Never mention rape in a business job interview."
The consulting company claims they want people who "think outside the box," but they seem to want them to be inside the box while they're doing it. Anthropology has taught me to attend to fuzzy edges, and I suspect that I could never be quite square enough.
Since then, a sympathetic colleague sent me an advertisement for ground crew staff for a hot-air balloon touring company. They sought friendly, multilingual applicants willing to travel all over Europe. "It's perfect for you," she laughed, "it's just like the circus." Alas, the job required a European Union work permit.
