Wharton Unveils New Class OIDD 325: Justifying a Useless Career

Wharton will be offering a new class in the spring, titled “Justifying a Useless Career,” Dean Geoffrey Garrett announced Tuesday.

The class, which has a 700-student limit, is taught by visiting professor and former head of analytic financial engagement database management at InvestCo, Jane Smithfield. It is expected to fill up quickly.

Smithfield said she was excited to teach the course. “Over my fifteen years at InvestCo, I had a bunch of friends and family members ask why I was spending my whole life doing something of no value to the world,” she said. “At first I had a hard time justifying my decisions beyond just saying the word ‘money,’ but now I can come up with fantastic excuses. I hope to impart as much of my knowledge as I can to these students.” 

Wharton junior Manny Bonfiglio said that he had wanted a class like OIDD 325 since coming to Penn. “I guess I might be thinking too far ahead,” he said, “but I know that someday I’ll have a job selling things that don’t exist to people who don't matter in deals that have no impact on the world, and I’ll need some way to justify that to people.”

College freshman Luisa Gomez agreed with Bonfiglio, saying, “I’m looking to go into the industry of crunching numbers for securities based on other securities based on real estate based on other securities, and I’m going to need more excuses than just ‘I’m satisfying the demands of the market, the noblest profession of all.’”