Plush leather office chairs surround an ovoid glass table on the 16th floor. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows offer a panoramic view of the city streets below. Sitting around me are 30 highly accomplished students. As potential scholarship recipients, we’re supposed to ask questions of the five alums standing before us. I’m settling into my seat, when hands suddenly reach toward me. I shake their hands and crack a grin as awkward smalltalk ensues: “Hey, where do you go to school? It’s cold out today, eh? Nice building they got here.” You get the point. Don’t get me wrong: they were all nice people. But to me, for whatever reason, I felt an uncomfortable sensation that all our interactions felt superficial. 

At this point the alums had settled in and began taking questions, so I buried this sentiment somewhere in my gut and waited for someone to ask the first question. A hand immediately shot up across from me, and his question went something like this: “Given the interdisciplinary nature of the program, how did you leverage the synergies of the scholarship’s professional development to empower your value-add within your careers post-graduation?” While it took me a second to translate what he was asking into understandable English, the alums pounced on it like a starving cat on sardines. Alum 1: “Yeah, for sure! The community and prestige prepared me really well for finance at McKinsey…” Alum 2: “I’m actually gonna echo off that point right there…did my MBA at Stanford…” The rest of the meeting continued with pre-professional questions met with pre-professional answers. I discovered that most of the students, if not all, were only interested in business, finance, engineering, or medicine. 

Please do not construe my satirical (and perhaps slightly dramatized) retelling of this story as one of contempt against high-paying jobs or people who pursue lucrative careers. Most of these professions, like accounting and banking, are necessary for society, while others, like medicine and engineering, are not just necessary, but are noble and improve humanity. And most bankers, consultants, and engineers are of admirable character. Many of these people likely change the world—at least in small, immediate ways—through their respective professions. My concern was not so much with the students present at the reception, but with the lack of intellectual diversity resulting from the scholarship’s selection process. By exclusively looking for future businesspeople, engineers, doctors, and lawyers, the scholarship is implicitly telling students that they should pursue professions in those fields, rather than explore the arts and humanities for the sake of the arts and humanities. 

Worse, it seems that almost everything in our society prioritizes a life where Dostoevsky is exchanged with Calculus homework, Camus’s The Stranger is replaced with a YouTube summary, and Plato’s Republic is sacrificed for a 30-second Tik Tok. In our society, things must be fast, not slow; noises must be loud, not quiet; people must be hyper-specialized, not well-rounded.