From Wall Street to Shakespeare
By Ayanna Thompson
In the early 1990s, I fought hard to get a job as an investment banker in the oil-and-gas group at Lehman Brothers. I wanted a job that promised financial success—and Wall Street was on fire. Mergers, acquisitions and IPOs were depicted as world-shaping and sexy, and all the big investment banks made a point of recruiting the so-called best and brightest from Ivy League schools. When they came recruiting at Columbia, that was it for me. I thought I had found a career that aligned perfectly with my goals. Suffice to say, I had a lot to learn.
You see, I grew up working-class poor just outside of Washington, DC. I always had food, shelter and clothing, but food was only purchased every other week when my mother got paid, and the clothing wasn’t new until my older cousin stopped growing when I was 11 years old. My one overriding goal was to never worry about money as an adult. Success was simple: the ability to eat in restaurants and to buy and wear new clothing regularly.
Since my mother was an educator, there was no question that I would go to college. The question was merely what I would study. The only certainty I had throughout high school was that I would definitely not major in English literature—English majors ended up as poor public-school teachers like my mother. I only applied to Columbia University because my high school calculus teacher challenged me to pick one stretch school. When I was accepted, I confidently told people I was going to major in business administration. I don’t know where I picked up on that phrase, but I think it sounded serious, business oriented, and potentially lucrative. I didn’t seriously consider my options until one knowing adult told me that majoring in business administration wasn’t even possible in this liberal arts school.
“I majored in English literature, but my ultimate goal remained steady—obtain a job that promised financial success
Then I got to Columbia, where I was obliged to take two years of core curriculum courses, including a heavy dose of literature. To my surprise: I really loved them. I attribute this to an amazing array of professors who turned every course, whether it was about medieval literature, Shakespeare, African-American literature or post-colonial literature, into referenda and debates about the current state of the world. Everything felt urgent, meaningful, impactful. I was taught that the way you interpret any literature, no matter the subject matter, can have real-time and real-life consequences today. I was hooked, and I learned how to read, think and write analytically.
So I majored in English literature after all. But then Lehman Brothers came calling, and my ultimate goal remained steady—obtain a job that promised financial success. I had to fight to get hired by Lehman. First, there was the fact that I was an English major, and bankers tended to be picked from non-humanistic fields. Second, there was the fact that I am a black woman. There were very few women in investment banking in the early 1990s; there were virtually no women in any of the oil- and-gas divisions at any of the investment banks; and Lehman had never hired a black woman as an analyst before. I had a lot of convincing to do to get hired, but I was a zealot.
During the interview, when the interviewers were visibly discounting me, I stopped in mid-answer. “Don’t write me off like that,” I said firmly. “I know I’m an English major, but I am not a piece of fluff. I’m smart and I can do this job. I want this job.” Apparently, that show of backbone did the trick. When I got the job, my entire family celebrated. I had made it, and made it good. In fact, I had to buy new clothes for the job, and I could afford it!
I found that I was good at the job. Math has always been easy for me, and I could distill complicated financial information into compelling snapshots of success or failure, profit or loss, potential clients or hard passes. I worked hard, and I worked long hours. I worked so many hours that I could get a free dinner from a restaurant and a black chauffeured car home, all paid by the company. This was living. I made more money in a few months than my mother made in an entire year working as a teacher in the Baltimore city school district. New clothes, restaurant meals every night and a chauffeured car home. I was the portrait of success.
But I wasn’t happy. I missed talking to smart people about books. I missed participating in the raging debates about the culture wars. I missed feeling like I could impact the future of the world by being a part of what was happening in its intellectual hubs. In short, I missed the academy. At first, I attempted to ameliorate the problem by reading novels surreptitiously at my desk. Nothing motivated me more to finish a spreadsheet quickly than the promise of a good novel. When novels became my self-imposed reward, I found myself finishing well before 7 p.m., despite the company’s reward policy of free dinners and car services.
As you can imagine, this wasn’t really sustainable. I got caught several times reading at my desk and was chastised for not being a dedicated team member. And I began to quietly question the culture of the job. While I had grown accustomed to the chauvinism (we actually closed deals in strip clubs) and the racist micro-aggressions (“you must be good at basketball, right?”), I couldn’t get used to the anti-intellectualism. Now I don’t think this is true of all investment bankers, but my colleagues in this division didn’t seem to care what was happening in the world (the World Trade Center would, in fact, be bombed for the first time a few months later). And I when I attempted to engage my colleagues in dialogues about the geopolitical and financial legacies of colonialism—the ramifications of which are huge for the production, distribution and sale of oil and gas, our bread and butter—I was called a nerd, a Steve Erkel in a skirt. And since I couldn’t play basketball either, I was practically useless. This was all said as a “joke,” of course.
“I missed talking to smart people about books…I missed the academy.”
Then one day something clicked, like a camera image suddenly coming into sharp focus. I had an epiphany about freedom. I had always thought that financial stability and abundance represented freedom, both freedom from financial concern and freedom to pursue whatever I wanted to do in the world. But the epiphany revealed to me a different kind of freedom—an intellectual freedom that allows one to engage robustly with current and future thought leaders. That freedom does not require money; rather, it requires access. I had to pursue that access, and there was only one way to do that.
I called my mother from my desk at work late that night. “Are you sitting down?” I asked her. “I have something important to tell you.” She sounded very anxious and assured me that she was sitting. Then I told her that I was going to quit my job and go to graduate school in English literature. She started to cry audibly over the phone.
“I have never been more proud of you in my life,” she said through sobs. “I always knew you would come to understand that there is more to life than money.” I have never been more relieved and moved by my mother’s wisdom, acceptance, and patience. She knew me better than I knew myself, and she allowed me to find my way in my own time.
I still carry that giddy feeling I had then about the value of intellectual freedom. I wake up each day excited by my research and teaching adventures. I also think I have been less fearful of taking big academic risks than some of my colleagues because I know I can do other things to earn a paycheck. I actively and joyfully choose this career because it is my calling and my passion.
Ayanna Thompson is a professor of English, a Shakespeare scholar and director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University.