My thesis is that what makes a person exceptional is, to quote the column, to be “at least a little bit above average in an interesting combination of ways.” It doesn’t necessarily matter what that combination is, as long as you can find the way to make use of it in a way that gives you a leg up.

The difficult part is, of course, that it isn’t always obvious how you can usefully combine, say, chemistry and economics. Many people go through life without discovering what that is. Sadly, it seems that like with many of the other things I’ve written about this semester, I have thoughts and not answers. I wonder if that makes me a bad columnist?

All told, it’s really making me wonder whether I should make the effort to work toward getting hired by some of these companies. It seems at this point that most of the financial services companies, along with banks, are going through such a rough period that any hiring they actually do is not guaranteed at all.

In the end, this is the business world, and there are no guarantees in business. Rather, it is a matter of working just a bit harder and researching companies just a bit more, in order to ensure the position a new college hire gets isn’t swept out from under them in a matter of weeks or months.

The solution for both parties seems simple, and it’s the subject of my column: No matter how outstanding you are, the rest of the applicant pool is just as smart and just as talented. Likewise, from the corporate perspective, the top students you want to hire all have countless options before them. The emphasis cannot just be on how wonderful an applicant is, or how prestigious the position is. Rather, the question has to move to one of fit: Is this the company that is most in line with my goals? Is it the one to which my background holds the most appeal?

In the real world, however, these sorts of questions are notoriously hard to evaluate. You often don’t get a feel for the culture of a company until after you’ve worked for them for a while, and companies are well aware that the interview process doesn’t tell them nearly everything they would like to know. The solution to that remains elusive. Whoever finds it will, I think, make the world of job-hunting a much better place. And probably make a boatload of money in the process.