You can hear it: the click-clack of heels on Chapel Street while you’re still in a hoodie and sweats.
You smell it: cologne, mint, the dry-cleaner’s promise.
You see it: dots on the Find My map clustering at Omni, The Study, and The Blake. Everyone is “grabbing time” and “locking in” and “circling back,” and no one is sleeping.
It is finance recruiting season.
The routine is ridiculous and precise. You reread a LinkedIn bio, scribble three questions, and practice your sixty-second origin story: compelling, humble, slightly funny, never needy. You arrive seven minutes early and stand outside pretending you weren’t early. You shake hands. You ask about “the culture on the team” and “what success looks like in year one.” You listen, because there’s a lot to learn. You end by saying, “This was helpful.” It was. Then you step outside, type the thank-you note mechanically, and hustle to the next thing.
Somewhere between the fourth and the fortieth chat, the economist in me starts graphing. What is the utility function of all this? At first, the curve is positive and steep. Every meeting demystifies something: how groups differ, how people enter through side doors, how to pronounce “EBITDA” correctly and sound intelligent while doing it. You learn to steer a twenty-minute conversation. You learn where your voice cracks, and how not to let it.
Then the curve bends. Diminishing marginal returns set in. The futility. Calendars slip. Calls get bumped to “sometime next week.” Portal updates chirp rejection in the tone of an airline safety announcement. You find out a company’s application closed before you opened it. This is not a frictionless market with perfect information and rational actors. It’s luck and fit and timing and sometimes a typo.
So, why do I keep showing up?
Because there’s still utility, just not the kind you can plot neatly. I have come a long way from my first coffee chat, where I shrank inside a blazer and forgot the second half of my own question. Now I can hold a conversation that isn’t scripted beforehand, with someone who is leading a completely different life from mine. I can ask for advice without turning it into a test.
There are skills you don’t list on a resume because they look too human: keeping a room warm; knowing when to let silence sit; writing a thank-you that sounds like a person, not a template; leaving an interaction a little kinder than you found it. Those grow in the cracks between the chats. The more I practice, the more I learn how to present myself—and, more importantly, how to see myself. That might be the quietest utility of all.
There are also unexpected gifts. The friend you meet in a hotel lobby because both of you misread “a.m.” as “p.m.” The Vice President who says, “You don’t want to do this–at least not here–and that’s a good thing to know.” The analyst who talks about a book, not a deal, and you buy it on the walk home. The free hors d’oeuvres, yes, but also the free glimpses into other people’s Tuesdays. If recruiting is a parade of manufactured moments, there are still unscripted ones, and those are the ones that stick.
None of this is an argument for grinding yourself dull. The curve has a plateau, and beyond it the returns turn negative: you stop learning, your sentences calcify, you confuse willingness with value. That’s where you stop, or switch modes—fewer chats, deeper chats; fewer rooms, better rooms. Optimize less. Savor more. Tell the truth about what you want, even if the truth is “I don’t know yet.” It is shockingly efficient.
In class, we talk about constraints and Lagrange multipliers, about maximizing under conditions we can’t erase. Recruiting has its own set of constraints: time, energy, school, visa rules, luck. You move the sliders you can. You accept the ones you can’t. And you retain a small, protected part of yourself that is not up for an interview.
So, is it utility or futility? The answer sits inside the parentheses. The function is messy, piecewise, occasionally discontinuous. Some days it spikes; some days it trends flat; some days it descends. But the area under the curve includes more than offers and outcomes. It includes the people you met and kept, the courage to ask better questions, the ability to exit a conversation with grace. If that’s not utility, I don’t know what is.
For now, I have a chat at The Study, a friend at The Blake, a draft email in my Notes app, and a rule: if the room smells like mint and cologne, try to leave it warmer than you found it. The season will end. When it does, I want what remains to feel less like a leaderboard and more like a life.