Ethersnap

For many kids, college represents an end goal. Once you get into a good college, you’ve made it, and everyone stops worrying about you. You’re encouraged to take classes in subjects like English literature and history and political science, all of which are fine and interesting, but none of which leave you with marketable skills. After a few years of study, you suddenly find it’s late in your junior year, or early in your senior year, and you have no skills pointing to the obvious next step.

What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, incredible work ethics and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.

On this night, though, the financiers turned it into a playful paean to their industry. (“I believe that the Lord God created Wall Street. I believe he got his only son a job at Goldman Sachs.”)

Off-key and raucous, the financiers raised their voices once more.

“I work on Wall Street. And Wall Street just believes.”