Karry Lu
In life you can count on two things: tuition never stops rising, and business schools always look nicer and have nicer things than the rest of the university they're affiliated with. With that in mind, and with news of a recent $100 million donation for the venerable Ross school coming at the same time as an invoice from the university bursar, I decided to pay a visit to the campus' paean to modern capitalism. It loomed in front of me like the ancient Colossus of yore, proud and stately, sunlight from the bluest September sky flooding through an ultra-chic glass facade and off rows of starched collared shirts hunched over laptops. Sure, I thought to myself as I passed three separate people manning a desk entitled “Technology Concierge,” they might have these fancy new classrooms and a tastefully decorated, wood-paneled interior hallway, but let's drill down to the core issues. What was their free food like? And would anyone care if I rolled up in my jeans, T-shirt, and bike sweat and helped myself to some?
Fortunately, there just so happened to be a “Healthcare and Life Sciences” Forum to answer my queries. Presumably, one works up quite an appetite when discussing the finer points of selling life-saving medicines for $500 a pill, so working on a hunch, I headed downstairs... and eventually found myself on a buffet line in the cafeteria, plate in hand, examining the day’s offerings with an experienced moocher’s eye. Lunch featured an admirably cosmopolitan yet hopelessly focus-grouped stab at cultural synergy: Mexican/Cajun for people who've never been below the Mason-Dixon.
I sampled the rice first, which looked a bit like jambalaya, cooked by someone who hadn’t the vaguest idea of “rice…but with spices” and tried to compensate by going overboard on the tomatoes. Still perfectly sufficient, but what do I know, I'm from the north. Next up was a “build your own taco” station, with all the classic ingredients for white-people tacos: flour tortillas, refried beans, a choice of chicken or steak, and an array of fixins'. I like variety, so I did both steak and chicken, topped with iceberg lettuce, pre-shredded orange cheese product, a smattering of salsa, and a few healthy dollops of non-store-bought guacamole (the most pleasant surprise of the afternoon).
Every so often I have to relearn that flank steak that has been sitting in a steam tray for a whole morning tends to be disappointing, and today was that day. Biting into the first taco was an experience akin to what a cheetah must feel if it ever bit into a gazelle made of rubber bands. I felt a distinct self-awareness creeping over me as I emerged with a strip of steak hanging out of my mouth, eventually tearing it apart with my hands and then eating the rest of it with a plastic fork. I looked around. No one noticed. Grace under pressure and all that...someone get McKinsey on the line.
The chicken taco fared better, because cold breast-meat chicken hours removed from the flame tends to be brittle, and this one even had a grainy, gritty quality. At some point I think the guacamole just overwhelmed the chicken itself, and I ended up polishing off half a mashed avocado taco, which actually turned out to be fairly decent. Having polished off the main course, I went back for a bite of dessert, which was a small roll of cardboard caked in sugar, but if you were an enterprising marketing type and you told me that it was actually a Mexican churro, I might've believed you for a second, before questioning the value of your education. And to wash it all down, a cup of Tazo “juice tea”, which tasted like Hi-C, but hey, I was at a b-school luncheon, so something about upmarket branding right? Shift that paradigm.
By then, the buffet had been packed up, the finance bros in their networking faces had begun to stream out leaving a trail of discarded resumes behind, and I was left alone to contemplate my meal. In terms of quality, I'd rate this two stars, with the chicken being pedestrian, the jambalaya being decent “bulk food,” and the steak being not fit for human/mammalian consumption. As for quantity, five stars; it was de facto all-you-can-eat, assuming of course, you were there for the food and not there to discuss strategies for patent trolling with execs from Genentech.
While I stood in line I chatted briefly with the catering guy who was idling there. I asked him who this was for. He shrugged and replied that these bonanzas happen on a near nightly basis. We locked eyes briefly; a tenuous kinship forming in that moment; him, probably making $10 an hour, me, actively losing money by the second just by being in school, both of us ready to blithely feast on banker largesse. Go for it, his expression seemed to say. I nodded. Steal from the rich, give to yourself; that's the grad student way.
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