Tara rather quickly found a company she liked for after graduation, and wanted to accept their offer even though it was the first she had recieved. It really bothered me that she wanted to work at a consulting company, because I had felt up until that time that she wasn't someone who was going to do what everyone else was doing (all of her friends from Harvard were also going into consulting). It was also in Chicago (I really wanted us to live in NY, or at least San Francisco or Boston). I wrote this letter to her after we had some very serious and difficult conversations. I saw this as a complete shock; clearly we weren't as mentally in sync as I had thought. I remember feeling intensely depressed for at least three weeks during this time.

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My dear Tara,

I do think I mistook your opinions on finance and consulting. I appreciate your clarification and that makes me feel better because I see now that your opinion hasn't changed just because you have an offer.

I suppose what I'm struggling with now has to do with my outlook on the goals and daily work of consulting and finance and how they differ, which could be flawed. It seems to me like the goals of finance are bad, as they are to make people more money. However, the questions they ask and the daily work involved are interesting, as they involve difficult modeling problems. In typical management consulting, I see it as the goals are bad, as they often have to do with making companies more money (catching credit card fraud faster to save the credit card companies money, optimizing loans to reduce losses on people who can't pay them back, etc.) and the daily work isn't interesting because it involves PowerPoints. TGG seems to differ as the daily work can involve machine learning and technical challenges, but to me, I haven't been able to see how the goals are different.

Perhaps my outlook on the goals of consulting (specifically TGG) is wrong or my outlook differs from yours (in which case, in all honesty, I consider my outlook wrong because you're smarter than me). If so, I'd really like to know how, so that I can feel better.

With love for you,
Joe