Careers
Grads Walk Away From Wall Street
Finance majors are seeking jobs beyond the Big Apple.
By Candice Lee Jones, Reporter
From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, March 2009
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At the university of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, 40% of the students seeking a master's degree specialize in finance. But when Chris Gibson gets his MBA in May, he won't be heading to Wall Street -- and he's darn happy about that.
Last summer, Gibson, 28, interned with the New York investment-banking arm of Swiss banking giant UBS. But when he didn't get a job offer after the stock-market meltdown, Gibson decided that a career in corporate restructuring, in which he'd help companies refinance or get out of debt, had a much brighter future than one helping companies peddle stocks to investors. So after graduation he'll take a job with consulting firm FTI, in Chicago. "It will be a much better fit," he says.
With today's dicey financial markets, students who started with designs on Wall Street are now looking elsewhere. Some will land at boutique investment firms in midsize cities. Less affected by the subprime-credit fiasco, these firms coordinate mergers and manage stock offerings like their bigger brethren, but on a smaller scale -- and without extravagant bonuses.
Some finance majors will ply their trade in the corporate sector instead of on Wall Street, working on deals from the boardroom rather than the trading desk. Other students find there's demand for business skills such as sales and marketing.
Consulting demand is still good for expertise in managing corporate risk -- or, as Gibson has found, in working with struggling firms, where business, sadly, remains brisk.
Reader Comments (1)
Posted by: Alan at 02/26/2009 08:55:51 AM
Much of what is going wrong in our society today has the greedy, sweaty hands of Wall Street money men deep into the control system. Whether it's the subprime meltdown, derivatives, managed care, off-shoring, downsizing, mega-mergers, or outrageous executive bonuses, the sharks on Wall Street are always first at the feeding frenzies that leave good, honest, hard working human beings ripped to shreds and bleeding half to death. If we are going to repair the societal damage done by the "greed is good" mantra of Wall Street culture, then people who study business & finance will need to devote their careers to making enterprise serve the long-term needs of humanity, not just the short-term profits of money-grubbing predators. The more we learn about how we got into this economic mess, the more we will see the same kinds of privileged predatory self-interest at work, justifying an orchestrated attempt to return to the freewheeling glory days of the Robber Baron Era. Now that we are recalling the worst excesses and inevitable results of applying these predatory values to our collective economic life, perhaps we will seize this opportunity to reign in the devils of our lower nature and find a more sustainable set of principles upon which to set the machinery of commerce.