First of all, I would like to extend my congratulations to each member of the Class of 2001 for his or her acceptance to Dartmouth. You have arrived at a great institution, and as long as you wisely manage your life here, countless opportunities will be thrown at you upon your graduation.
However, I must caution that, even at Dartmouth, one could somehow fail to realize his or her potential. Such a tragedy is almost always the result of the student's blindly endorsing the administration's message that liberal arts must lie at the heart of a college education. The administrators will pontificate that a Dartmouth student must not only acquire knowledge but strive as an ethical being to educate his or her soul.
Class of 2001, don't listen to them! In particular, ignore President Freedman's vision of the Dartmouth student as a "creative loner."
Why so? Because academia, almost without exception, gets left behind in a time of tremendous change like now. Its morality has failed to cope with the ramifications of information technology, a technological breakthrough whose impact may surpass even that of railroads.
And facilitated by the universal triumph of liberal democracy that has marked the end of history, humans have entered an epoch when money has become the primacy of their existence. In other words, Gates and McCaw will be remembered, while Clinton and Gingrich will be forgotten. The administration's philosophy of education will utterly fail you in this new world order.
With this in mind, I have created a list of injunctions appropriate for those who will head into the real world on the first year of the twenty-first century. Your future promises to be exciting only if you choose the right path, and I sincerely hope you will heed at least some of my advice to make your $30,000 per year at Dartmouth a worthwhile expense.
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Study math -- the master science -- for it is this discipline that creates the foundation of Wall Street. There was a time when investment bankers -- whose strength lies not so much in intelligence but in schmoozing -- controlled America's financial glory. Unfortunately, with the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act, their once niche market is quickly eroding as competition from commercial banks intensifies. The areas that will continue to generate extranormal profits are mathematically rigorous derivatives and mutual funds. Accompanying math skills should be a knowledge of C++, which can further boost your purchasing power.
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Read The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. To discover the next paradigm, one must have a profound awareness of world events, and I cannot think of another magazine whose coverage of international affairs is superior to that of The Economist. Many professors recommend The New York Times for a similar purpose, but don't listen to them. Its international coverage is so shallow I hardly find any insightful news. What disturbs me, in addition, is that its liberal/pluralist philosophy distorts an accurate portrait of Asia, the continent where the major conflicts in the next century will transpire. Your ability to make money heavily depends on your understanding of the world's political conditions.
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Do not take social sciences -- economics included. They are supposed to serve the bridge between academia and reality, but unfortunately they do so only in theory. Political science, with the exception of its political theory and some comparative politics branches, is so theoretically deficient that you would be better off just reading history books. However, that doesn't mean you should take history, a discipline so theoretically rich that no one has a clue about the past, because each historian has his or her own methodology, all of which combined necessarily lead to disparate interpretations. Economics will teach you only the general principles and hardly any useful tools in depth like option-pricing, which John Hull's celebrated books can teach amply. I will not even bother to comment on (Marxist) sociology, (ethnocentric) anthropology, and (Freudian) psychology.
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Inertia is the greatest danger. Many of you are currently pre-law or pre-med, mostly because law and medicine have traditionally led to prestigious careers. Soon, you will confront the not-so-pretty reality that most doctors and lawyers do not make the amount of money to justify how much they spent for additional years in school. Once you arrive at this junction in your life, be honest to yourself and let go of your childhood dreams. Too often I see, for example, pathetic divorced lawyers stuck in law firms only to pay off their debts from school. Had they headed to Wall Street many years ago, they could have made their $300,000 in a few years, perhaps, at Bloomberg. Think about that.
