I was a woman who was in the fight place<br >at the fight time. During the spring of my second year at<br >Harvard Business School， I had thirty-two job offers from<br >investment-banking firms， management-consulting firms<br >and Fortune 500 companies. It was a time when corpo-<br >rations were hungry for bfight-eyed， ambitious young<br >MBAs and especially eager for women. My only major<br >dilemma at the time， and it was an enviable one， was<br >whether to work for the formidable， blue-blooded Morgan<br >Stanley investment-banking firm or the more aggressive<br >and dynamic Goldman， Sachs. I was weighing the pros<br >and cons of these over a can of Campbell s Chunky Soup<br >when the phone rang.<br > The caller， an older man， identified himself as J. Leslie<br >Rollins， a recruiter for several of the Fortune 500 com-<br >panies and a former assistant dean at the Harvard Busi-<br >ness School. He said he had a very interesting job he<br > wanted to discuss with me and wouldn t I like to meet<br > him in downtown Boston to discuss the details? Actually<br > I d just come from an interview at the renowned Boston<br > Consulting Group and dreaded another taxi fide into town.<br > I had enough offers to retire on and thought I might cause<br > a mutiny at school if I received one more (the Business<br > Mary Cunningham //5<br >School was a pretty competitive place). My caller， how-<br >ever， was not to be deterred. He said my professors had<br >described me as one of their best students. In fact， he<br >said， one of the Harvard deans had told him， "Mary Cun-<br >ningham has the best chance of being the first female<br >graduate of the Harvard Business School to become the<br >chairman of a non-cosmetics company." Wouldn t I just<br >give him an hour? If only because I was curious， and<br >because I felt I had better not refuse the invitation of a<br >former Harvard dean， I agreed. But it would have to be<br >a very good offer to make me turn down a $55，000-a-year<br >starting salary in New York.<br > For the students at Harvard Business School， there<br >was no higher calling than investment banking. It was the<br >fastest and least painful route to the top. A few years at<br >Morgan Stanley and a conscientious MBA from Harvard<br >could become a chief financial officer by age thirty. The<br >fast track appealed to me but I had deeper urgings as well.<br >My strict Catholic upbringing made me take seriously my<br >mission "to do good" and yet at the same time instilled<br >in me a longing to carry this conviction into the real world.<br >I thought business was the perfect answer. I could try to<br >be a force for good in the business world. Growing up in<br >the sixties had only reinforced this desire. At the same<br >time I could get a taste of the action too. It was a novel<br >approach and one that sometimes antagonized my class-<br >mates. You just couldn t be ambitious and high-minded<br >at the same time.<br > The fact that I was successful didn t helta much either.<br >The day I was admitted to the Century Club， an elite<br >organization for Harvard students considered the most<br >promising by ;heir professors， was the day I lost many ot<br >my friends.t<br ><br >