Math, biology, physics, chemistry, Arabic, English, French, history, geography and “nationalism.” Those were all the subjects I took at school back in Syria, where I lived for 19 years, leading up to my coming to Northwestern.
I was trained to think with proofs in math and the sciences, to reason toward an answer on my own terms. The humanities were a different story. They were based on a blend of rote memorization and the subtle indoctrination of the Assad regime. Back then, I had no language for the world. I didn’t ask what was wrong with it; I was programmed to take it for what it was. I certainly never imagined I could learn how to, in one way or another, change it.
Most of all, I didn’t think about economics. In a country with little creative space for students to learn outside of school, it didn’t help that Syria’s economy was failing miserably. With the exchange rate at 1 USD to 15,000 Syrian Pounds, I turned my back on it because studying the mechanics of a system that was actively dismantling my home felt like a cruel irony. It felt like economics was too broken to study, so I arrived at Northwestern having never considered the major for a second.
Somehow, by the spring of my freshman year, I started thinking about majoring in the unthinkable. But I reached a firm conclusion quite quickly: at Northwestern, you major in economics to get into consulting. Sometimes it’s to get into business, other times it’s investment banking or finance. Pre-professional clubs seem to be the only accepted currencies for those hoping to afford their dreams after graduation.
I am not immune to peer pressure, nor the quiet pull of a crowd, so I convinced myself that I was majoring in economics to become a consultant, too. I thought pre-professional clubs were the perfect place to finally gain the experience I never had the chance to touch back home. I thought that surely student organizations built for students would help a student like me.
It took me a few internet searches to find out that these pre-professional student clubs are as selective as Northwestern. You have to go through rounds and rounds of essays and case interviews to get into a student club meant to mentor you. I was sitting with my friend, Weinberg second-year Claire Ruan, in Shepard Hall’s basement when she told me, “It feels like you’re applying for jobs, especially with the way they make you grind through interviews, cases, technical questions and the way you have to dress up for them too.”
I really wanted to maintain my momentum, accept and indulge in the life of a “proper” Northwestern economics major. But, I couldn’t wrap my head around how strange it feels to be told you aren’t “analytical” enough by a nineteen-year-old in a suit because you didn’t use the right framework for a hypothetical business. It is a strange cycle; reaching out to learn the variables of finance or consulting from peers, only to be rejected by those same peers for not already knowing them.
The obsession with these clubs isn’t a fluke; it’s a symptom of Northwestern’s academic architecture. As former Medill Professor Jonathan Copulsky pointed out to me, Northwestern’s lack of an undergraduate business school creates a void that students feel they must fill themselves. Without a formal business stamp on our transcripts, we look for other ways to show recruiters our aptitude and ability. We have outsourced our professional development to student-run organizations, turning extracurriculars into a shadow-curriculum.
This leads to an emphasis on what economist Michael Spence called “signaling,” where people pursue credentials even when the learning itself isn’t the main goal. We aren’t joining these clubs because we are dying to analyze a mid-market manufacturing firm; we are joining them because we think the name on our resume serves as an “I am vetted” seal.
Those within the system acknowledge the pressure. Weinberg second-year Vanessa Zhang, a member of Lambda Strategy, said that while these clubs make breaking into the field “a lot easier,” they aren’t the only path. Yet, when you are a nineteen-year-old looking at what David Wu, director at Institute for Student Business Education (ISBE) Analytics, describes as the “direct avenue” to tech and finance, the “easier” path feels like the only option. Wu suggests that the “real kicker” is the network and the industry sense these clubs provide. “In a world where everyone was extroverted and went out of their way to talk to other people, there wouldn’t be such a large differential between what these clubs give you and what they don’t,” said Wu.
But, to me, that’s the catch. These clubs don’t just teach finance, they reward a very specific type of American corporate extroversion—a social polish that is often second nature to those raised in the suburbs of Chicago or New York, but feels like a foreign language to those of us who arrived here from places like Tartus. We are told it’s “not the end of the world” if we don’t get in, but it certainly feels like the end of a certain kind of dream.
Luckily for me, I was able to understand that this is not my dream. When I took my first class, ECON 202, Introduction to Microeconomics, I liked it because it exposed me to the very beginning of the thread tied to how corruption can be crafted so easily in the economy. That class pushed me to major in economics because I was able to immediately tie the major to my lived experiences in Syria. One class after another, I started to clearly see economics as a language for the crises I had lived through, so I struggled to connect with a pre-professional scene that treated the field as a one-way ticket to the corporate world. I felt like I had no place in these clubs where students are playing “business” while people back home are living through the consequences of an actual economic crisis.
When I was talking to Professor Copulsky, he asked me what I was interested in pursuing through economics. He did not assume it was a given, and I appreciated that. I told him about my interest in development economics research and policy, about how in my town, Mashta al-Helou, of 0.007 square miles, there was one school and a clinic, while 40 miles away, the city of Tartus had multiple hospitals and well-funded schools. He thought for a few seconds and said, “that sounds like the World Bank” — that my mission, the questions I was already living, were the same ones that institution was built to answer. Hearing that felt like giving my lived experience a name. He made me realize that my questions about why a child in Tartus had a hospital while a child in my village didn’t were the exact questions that drive international development. I saw a path where my history wasn’t a hurdle in the face of my goals, but the very foundation of my impact towards them.
It is a special kind of top-school-bred insanity that I had to convince myself it wasn’t my “fault” for not knowing the nuances of consulting. I arrived here from fourteen years of war in Tartus, yet in Evanston, I found myself questioning my own intellectual worth because I lacked the inherently American business polish that my friends seemed to wear like a second skin. It shouldn’t feel like a radical act of relief to simply be asked what I am interested in rather than “what clubs are you in?”
I remember sitting in a finance club information session, when a facilitator asked me how I do my “elevator pitch.” The words were moving toward me, but they certainly weren’t landing; the question wasn’t applicable to my world, my concerns, my reasons for being here. I want to know why the chocolate bar I grew up buying for 100 SYP quietly became 1,000 SYP, not all at once, but steadily. Why my mother surrendered two hours of her day to a gas queue just to fill a tank she had to save up for. Why my grandfather walked past the store downstairs and took the long road to a town three towns away for discounted bread and rice. Why I sat for my Syrian baccalaureate with my cousin’s used books and notebooks, pages already filled and erased, and why I passed them on to the next 12th grader in the family. Why I needed a VPN just to open a university website when I was trying to apply to college. Why we had to sell our car the year its parts stopped being imported. Why my family couldn’t “just leave.”
These are not examples of theories I would read in development economics textbooks; these are my past 19 years of life. They are what happens to an economy when the world cuts off its banking sector, when the external pause of financial activity collapses everything within. These are the questions I arrived with. Yet in these rooms, the script runs the same: elevator pitches, LinkedIn optimization, the careful performance of ambition in a language I was never taught.
It shouldn’t feel like a radical act of relief to simply be asked what I am interested in rather than what clubs I’m in. But Northwestern’s pre-professional culture has a way of making you feel like a stranger to your own ambitions. The clubs that promise to open the door have a way of making me feel like someone like me was never meant to knock.
