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At Brown’s upcoming commencement ceremony, future finance bro Ryan Chapman ‘25 will be graduating with a huge network of people who despise his guts.
“I just love business. Shaking hands, doing deals. It gets me going. I spend 30 minutes every day cold DMing on LinkedIn and usually another 30 minutes on the phone with LinkedIn customer service trying to get unbanned. I actually have two LinkedIn Premium accounts so I can reach out again if someone accidentally blocks me. I also enrolled in a bunch of online master’s programs so I can get that sweet .edu email to cold intro more people,” said Ryan obnoxiously loudly, failing to notice scores of people changing direction to avoid him. “I’ve noticed most people are introverts and need an extra text message or three to convince them to come coffee chat. I looked through my yearbook, and I know every single person there and their starting salaries. Mine is definitely higher than most of them, but that’s just what I deserve for networking so hard."
“Yeah, I know Ryan. Everyone does. He coffee chatted with me freshman year and told me I was going to be poor forever because I didn’t know what a DCF was,” stated one of Ryan’s acquaintances who specifically asked not to be identified as one of Ryan’s friends. “I think I saw him wearing a three-piece suit at every networking event I went to. I know he has like 2,000 LinkedIn connections, but he has no actual friends.”
“He’s that guy always zipping around campus wearing a Patagonia vest and taking a phone call on his AirPods like he has something to do other than copy a microeconomics PSET,” continued another acquaintance, hanging out with his friends instead of cold calling first-year analysts. “I told him my concentration, and he just laughed at me and said, ‘Good luck finding a job.’ Then I explained I was planning to be a doctor, and he told me that I was an idiot for wasting four years of earning potential in med school. We don’t talk much.”
At press time, a CS concentrator was graduating with a whole folder of AI friends.
