Biographies Of Hegemony By Karen Ho

In the essay of “Biographies of Hegemony”, Karen Ho, an American Anthropologist describes the fact that undergraduate students get jobs on Wall Street to satisfy their own ambition of becoming successful investment bankers. Ho’s further research at Harvard business school made her wonder about the situation of the undergraduate “who once aspired to become, say writer or teacher, “realize” by the time they graduate that they always wanted to go to Wall Street” (170). This realization by most of the students made over the period, make them totally different from what they wanted to be in past. As students from Harvard and Princeton are recruited to work as an investment banker on Wall Street. According to Ho, the students are recruited by the
This make students mold themselves accordingly while studying at these institutions. Ho quotes the Harvard premed students as saying. “It is all a schmooze fest. You have to schmooze your recruiters. You have to master round of interviews followed by more schmoozing, and then once you get there, you have to “live the style” of a business person” (Ho 176). Which means to get the job at Wall Street you have to “schmooze” the recruiter, and then only you can live a perfect lifestyle. Which further leads to that you have to “schmooze” and you have to live like a “business people” to cater the recruiter. With “more schmoozing”, the student would lose their self-consciousness because they are doing the things that they do not want to do. As all human are different, and all have different personalities. But when they are made to change their thinking, or made to work differently from their own choice, they lose their own identity and develop into someone else, and start chasing goals set for them, by someone else. This make their original inner spirit distant from them. As the applicants for the job at Wall Street “have to” pretend to “live the lifestyle”, which implies the applicant originally live in their own reality, whereas
As we know that the institutes such as Harvard teaches their students to “Schmooze” to get a job at wall street. The recruiters at Wall street are also demanding for something similar. According to recruiters and people working at Wall Street, they play the role of “master of the universe”. So, Ho state that, “to play the role of “master of the universe” requires not only especially strong full dose of self-confidence and institutional legitimization, but also a particular set of beliefs regarding Wall Street’s role in the world and one’s own role on Wall Street” (168). This means that recruiters too support the teaching of the institutes, as they think they are the most important people in the country, and they control everything going on in the country. So, when students see themselves as the “master of the universe”, they start thinking that they are dominant over everyone else. This is one of the main reason why all investment bankers want to work at Wall Street. As the recruiters had set their bars so high that everyone wants to be a part of that community. But, the recruiters follow old stereotypical path set by other recruiters in the past, and thus they only give the chance to be the part of this community to only students of selected institutes, which