What was it like for Mike Kaplanis? He of the olive skin and invisibly combed hair, but he too of the orthodox-Christian-priest father and the Greek-teaching mother. He who had always seen himself up there in the North, but he too who had stayed down South to have a little more fun and play football for Duke. What was it like for Mike Kaplanis, after he had turned his back on the pre-med track, after he had worked his ass off to graduate a year early, after one of his best friends pleaded with him not to sell his soul because everyone did it? What was it like for Mike Kaplanis when Morgan Stanley finally offered him a job as a first-year investment banking analyst?
"It was like the same process of getting into Duke all over again."
Well, of course it was. How can anyone not compare the life of a 17-year-old crusading the country on interviews and re-working their studies and begging for admittance into a high-paced institution of their liking to that of a 20-year-old doing, well, pretty much the same thing? But ask a couple over-achieving Duke students-some might say that's just plain-old achieving around here-why the hell they're headed to Wall Street next year to subject themselves to even more ungodly hours and more Excel spread sheets than Bill Gates ever imagined possible, and you'll get just as straightforward an answer. Go ahead, there's probably one standing right next to you.
For Kaplanis' sake, he'd never even really heard of this "I-banking" thing before. Back in Raleigh, all the "smart people" became doctors and lawyers. So his sophomore year, when the friends and girlfriends from the New Yorks and Chicagos with the rich daddies started letting him in on this industry that was so obvious to them, he figured "why not" and started picking up The Wall Street Journal. A stop by the Career Center helped him prep for the interviews he'designed up for, but even a football player who'd worked for a lawyer and a neurosurgeon sometimes doesn't know the difference between "fixed income" and "wealth management."
Even with New York recruiters throwing calculator-speed math problems at him, Kaplanis always struggled with one question: Why finance? But now, after he claims to have answered it 10,000 times, he thinks he's got it right. "It's kind of a pressure like sport," he says. "That competition-you've got to have that ambition, that drive to do well in this industry. I felt like I can carry those things from football and put 'em into a job. And that's something that's gonna be able to get me out of bed every day and be like-" He smacks his hands together like breaking from a huddle on 4th and goal. "Alright! I'm ready to go work an 18-hour day now."
Lauren Deysher is a perky blonde Tri Delt senior from just outside of Boston. She was not accepted to the Ivy League institutions of her choice. So eleven months ago, when she applied for a summer internship at Goldman Sachs-the Harvard, Princeton and Yale of Wall Street combined-she made damned well sure she got in. She was a freaked-out hurricane of cover letters and online resume drops, with 16 interviews in two weeks and what she considers an excellent answer for a would-be employer's query of how many quarters she would have to stack on top of each other to reach the top of the Empire State Building-which was just a subway ride away from where she would end up.
"It obviously is a great place, resume-wise, to start off a career," Deysher says of a rising senior's key 10-week stint in New York City. "It never hurts to be linked with a good firm and a place where you do get a lot of responsibility. And you do learn a lot. You're not just like a paper-pusher-although you do push a lot of papers."
Deysher's summer in Goldman's sales and trading division began with a week of training (more intense than Duke's freshman orientation, she says), followed by three three-week rotations at different sales desks. Despite the forgiving (compared to I-bankers) 6:30-to-6:00 work schedule, a cushy set-up at NYU's law school dorms and a $10,000 wad waiting for her at summer's end, she felt for the first time as not at the head of the class. Surrounded by UPenn business majors and finance-obsessed "dorky ones," even a Duke over-achiever can be outfoxed. "They were so happy and so intense," Deysher says. "And they were actually the ones that kind of ended up making the worst impression on the people there because they were just in your face."
Everything was in her face at Goldman. Twelve-hour omputer glare was the least of Deysher's problems during a summer she calls more stressful than any period during her time at Duke. The prospect of a job-a real-life, satisfying, braggable Wall Street suit job-was right there, finally for the taking in a climactic, two-week feeding frenzy when interns butter up to their favorite desk and try to shove out the competition for a contract. Toward the end, Deysher says, "even if you don't want to be in finance, you feel like you should want to be in finance, because everyone in your intern class is freaking out about whether or not they get a job.
"You live The Goldman Bubble, and you don't realize there's life outside of it, I guess, while you're there," she says back in Durham. "It's kind of like Duke. It's an area where everyone's extremely qualified, highly competent. There's a lot of firm pride, team pride-just like at Duke everyone loves the school, people at Goldman love the firm. You're dedicated to something. You're dedicated to doing well at Duke, you're dedicated to doing well at Goldman-or at any bank. At any bank it's like that."
Nearly a quarter of Dukies seem to agree. A whopping 24 percent of last year's seniors graduating with a full-time job played on the bank team, equalling those heading into consulting and health careers combined. The venerable Teach for America was still the school's top employer with 28 hires, but Goldman and Citigroup merged together to acquire even more than that. Goldman has hired nearly every rising senior from its internship program full-time the last two years, promising a salary of around $70,000 per year for its I-banking crop. Deutsche Bank's feverish alumni recruiting will reel in at least 10 more of its brethren for next summer.
So what gives? Do banks just recruit better than anyone else? Is the generation of alumni from Duke's rise to an elite college just recruiting harder than anyone out there? Are these just a bunch of rich kids getting richer and climbing toward daddy on the corporate ladder? Or is there a genuine love affair brewing here, a passion for passion?
Kwad Acheampong fell for Goldman Sachs at first sight. A South Bronx native who was a chess star at age six, a stud at Andover by high school and an intern at Goldman after his sophomore year, he's like the American Dream on steroids. Whenever Goldman's at Duke, Acheampong's there. Sure, it's the company that could pay him in one summer what his mother makes in a year, but who says the motivated can't be magnetized to their motivator?
"My motivation was-" Pulsating eyes deafen a handshake smile. "-thinking about my peers and my colleagues who I was competing with. And I was like, 'Yeah, you know, you may have had all these things, you may have been breeded to go for these jobs. But I wasn't.' But I wasn't gonna let that affect me. I was going to show that I was hungrier."
Returning to Duke for junior year, Acheampong, like so many of his fellow Wall Street ex-pats, felt "a burning desire to know a lot about the world." He bulked up on his course load and joined student government, dance groups, the Student Organization Finance Committee, the Investment Club, everything.
Still, sometimes the bank eats you. "I kind of focused my studies toward investment banking," says Vikas Agrawal, who will join Acheampong at Goldman full-time next year. "I heard they liked econ and math double majors, so I went that route. I figured it would help me out-and I was kinda interested."
Recruiters for the banks, meanwhile, insist that they value Duke's lack of any official pre-professionalism for finance, that it's merely a matter of time before Duke grads leapfrog Whartonites up North. "The well-rounded, kind of broad liberal-arts approach here really works well," says Phil Turbin '92, Merrill Lynch's managing director in investment banking, as nervous, name-tagged juniors scuttle out of a recent information session. "Not only does it not put students at a disadvantage, but I think they actually kind of are more energized and kind of really dig in and have an appetite for learning new stuff when they come in as analysts, which really propels them. So the fact that they may not have the hands-on experience from the get-go is overcome very quickly by drive."
Who knows? Maybe the Duke I-banker's drive is the same one that's somewhere inside each Duke student-wide-eyed and working harder than hard, even if they won't admit it.
"It's the culture," Acheampong says. "Look around you, look at the assets that people have here in the form of cars, what people wear and things of that nature. We are living in a society-probably perpetuated by the greek community, because you get all these people who are concentrated, homogenous, look like you, have the same things, come from the same backgrounds-and there's a need to take that to the next level.
"And how can you get there as quick as possible? Consulting? Yeah, but the bonuses aren't as big. The financial sector-it is the epicenter of capitalism. And at the same time, your parents spend like $185,000 for you to come to Duke, so there is also that pressure to be successful. And I don't think Duke has the type of atmosphere that breeds you to go into a career like a non-profit-especially in this 'work-hard, play- hard,' you want to do things fast. That goes with making money fast too."
Thus begins the obsession for the Duke doers, they of the opportunistic inclination to chase an American Dream inflating at their fingertips, whether they're ready for it or not. "At Duke you have kids that are very success-oriented," Deysher says. "They want to do the best that they can possibly do, and so the best, I guess, as it's come to be represented on campus is, in a lot of people's minds, is getting somewhere into investment banking or consulting."
Kaplanis, to be sure, is getting right into the thick of it and getting in earlier than most. He's legitimately worried that any of his former aw-shucks ambivalence will be lost on the children of this banker-to-be, that they'll end up being "a bunch of spoiled kids, Laguna Beach-style, on their cell phones all the time, maybe not seeing that working hard is important." Good ol' boy he may be, but Mike Kaplanis can still see his future, as clear as a football in mid-air or a spreadsheet right int front of him, exactly as he planned it. That's what it was like when he got to Duke, and that's right where it'll be when he leaves.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.