Were you cleverly manipulated into a career in financial services?

You may think that you opted for a career in financial services because of the great opportunities, the intellectual stimulation, and the wonderful colleagues, but were you simply sucked in by a slick marketing campaign?

According to former McKinsey consultant James Kwak, bankers are typically former Ivy League students with a susceptibility to banks' particular brand of careers marketing.

Here's how you were manipulated

Kwak suggests banks are adept at:

1) Exploiting Ivy League students' vague and undefined ambition to have a positive impact on the world.

2) Exploiting Ivy League students' fear of not being a success, rather than their concrete desire to do anything in particular.

3) Exploiting Ivy League students' desire to only do things that increase the possibility of future overachievement.

4) Exploiting of Ivy League' students' established tendency to end, 'each phase of their lives by taking the [clearly delineated] test to do the most prestigious thing possible in the next phase.'

5) Offering, 'the lifestyle.' This includes brochures depicting, 'the well-dressed, well-fed, jet-setting elite,' and offices, 'with fresh flowers and all-glass walls and free food and modern technology everywhere.'

There is no escape

If you were had by the advertising and are now slogging away at 15 hour days in a windowless bullpen, Kwak advises, keeping your expenses down so that you can, 'switch careers later.'

If you fail to do so, he suggests, options for escape dwindle:

Your expenses grow to match your income. As the decades pass and you realize that no, you're not going to save the world, the money becomes a more and more important part of the justification. And when you have kids, you're stuck; it's much easier to deprive yourself of money (and what it buys) than to deprive your children.

Or is he just jealous?

Then again, of course, Kwak may simply be an embittered ex-management consultant, and bankers may genuinely be people possessed of, 'a rare combination of high native intelligence, relentless hard work, and grand ambition,' as banker/blogger Epicurean Dealmaker suggests.

Your comments are invited.