Biographies Of Smartness

Institutions such as Princeton and Harvard often have an effect on a student’s individual interest when it comes to Wall Street. In “Biographies of Hegemony” by Karen Ho, she expresses how these type of institutions are always after the students, through a means of interviews, observation, social events, presentations, and even conferences. When in these type of “ivy leagues,” Ho writes how everywhere a student goes he will end up surrounded by someone marketing Wall Street and they know that it will not be hard recruit and convince students that it is the path that they want to go down. The reason that this happens at these institutions is because at Wall Street, they only look for a specific category of people, that look a certain way, usually
Even so, when looking for these individuals, they would know who it is because they are a different set of people that stand out by physical appearance, such as skin color and style, and are in the “culture of smartness.” Ho writes, “In other words, smartness must be represented and reinforced by a specific appearance and bodily technique that dominantly signals that impressiveness; not surprisingly, such characteristics as being impeccably and smartly dressed, dashing appearance, mental and physical quickness, aggressiveness, and vigor reference the default upperclassness, maleness, whiteness, and heteronormativity of ideal investment bankers.” So besides being just the ordinary genius in these elite universities, obviously Wall Street is not going to accept every single one of them. They start out by heading to these universities knowing this is where the best and smartest people of the world are, and from there they would look for a specific appearance that would fit Wall Street, which is usually a white male. When on Wall Street, Karen Ho explains how “smartness” doesn’t just mean someone with a lot of knowledge, but much more than that. Ho writes in her essay, “on Wall Street, “smartness” means much more than individual intelligence; it conveys a
She explains and analyzes, through her experiences and time with Wall Street, the recruitment that Wall Street has and the strict guidelines for accepting an individual. Wall Street promoters would set out to just Ivy League universities and would find and convince people there. By doing this, it causes a lot of individuals to switch into a business or finance major, so they could go into investment banking. When looking for a job on Wall Street there is a lot that needs to be considered. Ivy League universities may be targeted by a whole by Wall Street, and even though these people are the utmost people of the world, they still might not be the specific targets that Wall Street is looking for. Wall Street is always promoting and talking about themselves and are all over campus convincing individuals. When Ho says what she says in the text, about the recruitment, the promoting, the qualities to join Wall Street, she knows what she is talking about because she is someone that worked with Wall Street and had an inside view of what was going on. The description describing Ho states, “For one thing, the time she spent working on Wall Street gives her an insider’s eye, but she is also an anthropologist who believes the Street has created a distinctive outlook that threatens to remake the whole society in its narrowing image.” We could see