The evil geniuses at Long or Short Capital.com have outlined a clever strategy for getting a leg up in the job market: adjusting your GPA on a pro forma basis.
It appears that students have realized what investment bankers have known for years: if you don’t like a number, you can change it.
Say you are an investment banker at a large Wall Street Firm, like Silverman Sachs or Layman Brothers, and you are trying to syndicate Theoretical FCF Corp’s bonds. The problem is that Theoretical FCF Corp seems to lack any actual cash flow and will almost certainly never actually pay down any debt. What do you do? Just pro forma their EBITDA to what their cash flow would be if they actually generated cash flow, as you kinda expect they may sometime in the future.
Now for a student, their GPA is basically the equivalent of a firm’s 4 year trailing cash flows. The number itself carries huge weight in job interviews, yet for decades students have reported GPA exactly as it appears on their transcript. While entirely accurate, this is a huge mistake. Job applicants are now realizing that adjusting their GPAs can give a more accurate misrepresentation of their performance and expected future production.
Just read the whole thing!
Monday, February 12, 2007
Don't work for your grades, make your grades work for you
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1 comment:
When people land jobs with fictional info in their CV they should be paid with fictional money.
Trust the accountants to come up with this stuff.
Ask a mathematician what the answer to 2+2 is and they'll say "4".
Ask a philosopher the same question and they'll say, "One could imagine a whole universe of possible realities wherein the fundamental laws of each would render the true answer to be many things other than 4."
Ask an accountant this question and after locking the door to the room and drawing the blinds they'll respond, "What do you want the answer to be?"
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