Where do you want to live after graduation, and why did you answer New York City? Now, I’m generalizing here, but you can’t deny the pull of the city, whether you grew up in the middle of nowhere and see it as a beacon of having made it big or in New Jersey and list it as your Metropolitan Area on your LinkedIn page. All I’m saying is that I’ve never heard someone say, “I got this great job, but, ugh, it’s in New York City.”
This New York centricity isn’t just a hunch — according to Duke Alumni, NYC is currently the second most populated region for Duke grads, second only to the Triangle. Growing up in rural Ohio, I dreamed of escaping to somewhere where there were, at the very least, more Democrats than cows — no offense to cows. When I wanted to be a fashion designer, New York held all the potential in the world. A writer: London and Paris; a software engineer: San Francisco. As I was rather disappointed or felt ambivalent by those latter three, I knew not to get my hopes up for NYC, which I’d often heard Ohioan describe pejoratively.
Much to the surprise of my Duke peers, I had never visited New York City until fall break of this year — it was a great fun fact that I don’t know think I can ever top. As much as I wanted to hate it — or love it, as it lacks much middle ground — I thought it was fine. Perhaps that is the most controversial way to feel about it. New York’s not the worst city I’ve ever been to, but it’s certainly not my favorite. It made me think about what subconscious urge drew me to make it a focus of my job search in the same league as places I’d visited and knew I liked.
The first such reason recursively goes back to the question at hand: I, like everyone, want to go to New York City because everyone else wants to go to New York City. It seems a sensical urge as a student in a place where many friendships are made out of convenience or circumstance and cease to exist when the winds change. You won’t be forced into testing the staying power of your friendships if you move to the same place and retain the same general sense of convenience. Beyond that, if you already know a handful of classmates in your new city post-grad, you won’t be forced to start from scratch, friendship-wise — in a much less forgiving environment than freshman year, no less.
I must qualify that I speak of this from the lens of someone who spends most of their time with peers going into tech, finance, business or perhaps something humanities-adjacent. I get the sense that for politics and policy students, DC may hold a broader appeal. For those attending graduate and professional programs, it’s wherever the heck they can get a good scholarship. All I can say is that for the nontrivially large subgroups of our student population who place importance on NYC, it’s a tangible pressure. It’s especially fascinating to see this shift in tech: the transition from glamorizing Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley. As young, privileged students, we often have the ability to choose to live in the places that continue to thrive and can leave those that aren’t. Fads come and go, for cities as all other things; New York is New York.
While there are certainly tangible benefits to living in the Big Apple writ large, the more nebulous idea of the image associated with it is even more enticing. It no longer matters what the city as a city is like, but instead, the importance exists because we are so infatuated with the desire that is New York. Frankly, we like the idea of saying we will be living in NYC because we know our peers will be pleased to join us or jealous that they can’t. The fantasy of the city gives us enough hope to gloss over any less desirable parts, whether that be the cost of living, a less-than-perfect first job or how crowded it is.
It initially seemed quite odd that the power of New York weighed so heavily in the minds of my peers. The root of the issue, I think, lies in our immense desire to have the very best of everything. It’s not only a desire, though; we genuinely believe we deserve it and act as such. Thus, it becomes simple and logical to choose the city that holds the most cultural capital in the country and see it as a need instead of a want.
Is it possible that so many Duke students genuinely want to go to NYC qua NYC? I’ll speak for myself; I don’t, really. It seems fine for a few years, but there are other places I’d rather live. I’m mostly worried that it will be hard to make friends post-college, especially in our world that is — irresponsibly — moving towards remote work as a norm, and NYC seems to be one of the few places that has bounced back from COVID socially and an easier-than-most place to be an independent woman. But I mean, when it comes down to it, it’s just a place. If you’re depressed in New York, you’re still depressed (but you’re in New York!).
I won’t minimize that a lot of people do genuinely want to go to New York for compelling reasons, but I’d contend that this is not everyone. Fewer than a third of Americans aged 18-29 expressed a wish to live in an urban area post-COVID, and for Americans at large, it’s fewer than 20%. No, perhaps the average Duke student is not the average American, but I imagine that there is a large percentage of us who are not super keen on living in a city. Frankly, I feel I’ll be left behind professionally and socially, if I do not move somewhere urban.
I would love to live in a politically purple small town with plenty of nature and a few good friends nearby. Unfortunately, in our time of geographically-based political separation, this is a pipe dream. The gap between liberal urbanites and conservative rural folk is only made worse by elite college students — the very archetypes Trump uses to garner the support of low-income whites — idealizing and choosing cities like NYC as the center of their own personal universes. When everyone around us seems to want the same things in the same places, it’s a lot harder to be sympathetic to people who have and want vastly different lifestyles.
New York City is an exceptional place in that — in its role as a melting pot — we forget how unrepresentative of the country at large it is. New York allows people like us to play at being the underdog while living out dreams and dealing with problems that are often minimal in nature. As future engineers, policymakers, doctors, anything, we must remember that while NYC is an epicenter of culture for our country, it is not the end all be all and should not be treated as such.
Heidi Smith is a Trinity senior. Her column runs on alternate Mondays.
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