Cultural Capital

I just got back from a meeting for Women In Business for a mini track called “InFocus: Consulting.” Consulting is something that I’ve heard being thrown into conversations here and there. But besides people talking about it here, I’ve never heard of it elsewhere. Maybe I’ve just been in my Oakland bubble for too long and was extremely ignorant as a kid in grade school. Anyways, point is, I heard that a lot of Harvard students graduate from here and go into consulting for a couple of years, it just wouldn’t hurt to learn a bit about it. Since consulting was a job that I might want to hold in the future, I was extremely curious to learn what it was about and how it worked, so I decided to go to that meeting.

Sometimes I wish I knew what consulting was before I came to Harvard. The job sounds like a pretty fun one but sometimes I feel as if I’m not on the right track to obtaining it for my future. If I had known earlier what it was about and realized what I now know, I would have joined different extracurricular activities, minored in a different concentration, and just done some things differently. But now that I’m a junior in college, it just feels like it’s a little too late to start.

As mentioned in Lecture 16: Cultural Capital and Class Reproduction, cultural capital is "general cultural background, knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are passed from one generation to the next." Where I come from, no one I knew worked as a consultant. Because of this, the knowledge of such jobs did not translate into my cultural background. This is absolutely an indicator of class difference. Most people I knew worked blue-collar jobs and did manual labor. Therefore, these were the only jobs, that I really had exposure to. If I were exposed to this culture at an earlier age, I wonder if things would have been different. With recruiting events coming up, I hope I will be prepared in time.