Marina Keegan, Student Journalist Who Took on Wall St., Dies at 22

Marina Keegan, a student journalist and playwright who once wrote a guest column for DealBook, died on Saturday. She was 22.

Ms. Keegan was a passenger in a car driven by her boyfriend, Michael Gocksch, when the vehicle crashed near Dennis, Mass., on Saturday afternoon, according to The Boston Globe. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Mr. Gocksch was not seriously injured.

The two had graduated from Yale University only days earlier.

A writer with a cleareyed sense of purpose, Ms. Keegan argued in her column in DealBook that college students should try to resist the allure of a high-paying job in finance after graduation. She drew on interviews with her peers, asking them to explain why they were headed to Wall Street. The column, which followed a widely read article she wrote for The Yale Daily News, tapped into a national debate about the financial services industry.

“Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think most young, ambitious people want to have a positive impact on the world. Whether it’s through art or activism or advances in science, almost every student I spoke to had some kind of larger, altruistic goal in life,” she wrote.

“But what I heard again and again was that working at JPMorgan or Bain or Morgan Stanley was the best way to prepare oneself for a future doing public good,” she continued. “Why do students believe this? Because the recruiters tell them it’s true. Personally, I think it’s ridiculous. Those skills can be gained elsewhere.”

At Yale, Ms. Keegan helped organize a protest challenging campus recruiting, known as Occupy Morgan Stanley. Students gathered outside the hotel where Morgan Stanley was holding an information session, chanting slogans like “Take a stance, don’t go into finance,” DealBook reported at the time.

Ms. Keegan had planned to start a job at The New Yorker magazine in June, as an assistant to the general counsel, according to The Yale Daily News. A musical she wrote, “Independents,” is set to be performed at the New York International Fringe Festival this summer.

In a recent essay that was passed around the Internet as news of her death spread over the weekend, Ms. Keegan reflected on her four years at Yale and offered advice to her peers. What she wanted to find in life, she wrote, was “the opposite of loneliness.”

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over,” she wrote. “The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

Source & Image : New York Times