Why the Ivy League is a Blessing and a Curse

Happy Sunday, and thanks for opening this week’s story from #TheLifeofJLOWE!

If you’ve been here long enough, you’d know that a lot of my writing talks about perspectives, and how your outlook on life can impact how you live. If you’re new here, take a moment to read about timelines or how to define success for yourself.

My Ivy League Experience

As you may know, last year I graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Economics. If you know me though, I didn’t take Economics in high school, and in fact, some would say I was on track to become a STEM major in college based on my academic history. 👨🏻‍🔬

At Cornell, I enrolled in the College of Arts & Sciences, so I had the opportunity to pursue a liberal arts education, with broad exposure to a variety of academic disciplines. I took classes in fields like philosophy, history, anthropology, and astronomy in addition to things like biology and economics. My education was academically diverse and I found real value in a liberal arts education.

But as you can see by the title, the Ivy League and other elite Universities across America can be both a blessing and a curse.

What is an “Excellent Sheep”? 🐑

I recently finished a book called “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life” which I got from my best friend and recommend to anyone who finds themselves at a top-ranked University in the US. 

It outlines this idea of elite Universities creating students funnelled into America’s leadership class, by educating them for corporate jobs and almost stripping them of the things that they were passionate about before starting college. Top students from these Universities often end up in consulting, finance, law or medicine, because that’s the next ‘metric of success’ that’s defined for them by society. 

This is a big reason why I’ve begun a journey to learn how to define success for myself. I feel like I may have fallen victim to studying a popular “career-oriented” major and then matriculating into finance post-graduation. 

I’m so grateful for everything that I’m learning in my current role in wealth management because I’m learning how to build wealth and be financially healthy, but the career path that I’m on today feels like it came out of a desire to fit in with other Economics majors at Cornell, rather than from my own personal definition of success. 

I may just be an Excellent Sheep. 🤷🏻‍♂️🐑

Experiences, not mistakes:
How perspective can help you to count your blessings

The blessing about this though is that I graduated last year, and I’m not even a year out of college yet. I barely have work experience so I have the leeway to make mistakes with my career path. And oftentimes we have to make “mistakes” for ourselves to be able to learn from them, instead of just hearing lessons as advice from other people.