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This Issue 02/28/2002

Also in this issue

• Music: Ready, set...Ally!
• Feature: Masters of their universes

This is how Sherman McCoy describes himself in Tom Wolfe's 1980s novel Bonfire of the Vanities. Sherman McCoy: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant with the aristocratic chin; the owner of a $48,000 Mercedes roadster and a Park Avenue co-op; the St. Paul's and Yale man with both the high-society wife and the frisky, Southern mistress; and the cheap, rotten liar of a bond trader with a salary that could run a small country. And he, like the characters on the Fox network's short-lived sitcom The Street or Charlie Sheen in the movie Wall Street or Giovanni Ribisi in Boiler Room, makes tons of money in minimal time by making a few calls and by being an egotistical, heartless hardass. This is the image that approximately 46 percent of Wharton undergrads, 20.9 percent of Engineering undergrads and 18 percent of College undergrads will inherit next year when they enter the financial services industry. This industry -- the most highly sought-after by the class of 2002 -- expects them to work weekends and come into the office on call, to be able to sleep on a significant loss from a trade and be able to bounce back the next morning, to do what the guy who sits next to them does, except faster and better. And, ultimately, Wall Street will judge their performance not by how hard they work or how much they care, but solely by how much money they can make for the firm.

But these, the driven young of America's future financial elite, are not quite the soulless Sherman McCoys that people imagine them to be.

*

8:00 p.m., Saturday night, at his off-campus house on Spruce Street, Matt, a Wharton senior, is lying on his couch, legs stretched out on his coffee table, arms behind his head, watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

He just got back from dinner at New Deck with friends and is relaxing during that awkward time when it's too early to go out, but too late to get any serious work done. He starts flipping through the channels on his digital cable and talking about how he used to caddy, remembering the "good times," when the older caddies would be up at 8 a.m. sluggin' beers, and the young ones would be doing dip.

Matt is 6-foot-1 and 178 pounds, with dark hair and brown eyes. He's attractive in a wholesome, boyish sort of way. The second of four brothers from Chestnut Hill, he opens the door for girls and looks you in the eye when he shakes your hand. His mother is a professor of nursing at Villanova, and his father holds one of the top positions at the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. When Matt was young he didn't know what it meant to be a businessman, but he knew his father loved his job. Matt goes out four to five nights a week, during each of which he'll have 10-15 drinks. He sleeps until 12:30.