Way back in 2000, when I was just a dewy young thing preparing to pluck herself out of the MBA cabbage patch and venture out into the world, there was one small thing that concerned us: the stock market seemed to be a little, well, uneasy. Indeed, I was at the orientation for my Merrill Lynch summer internship the day the NASDAQ collapsed; the HR person fussed ineffectively as all the yuppie larvae drifted out of the auditorium to stare in sick fascination at the CNBC ticker mounted on the foyer wall.
Oh, no, don't worry, we were assured. That sort of thing doesn't happen to MBA's--not to Chicago MBAs. Not to you, adorable you with your brilliant mind and firm (but not excessively so) handshake.
We make money in good times and bad, said the investment bankers; after all, when the market's down and IPOs are dead, that's the perfect time for a stock repurchase or a merger.
We make money in good times and bad, said the management consultants. After all, when things go wrong is when people need us most.
This was, of course, gilt-plated flapdoodle. By my count, a year after graduation, about a third of my class was unemployed, underemployed, or waiting for some never-never job to start. The management consulting firm that I was supposed to work for strung us along just long enough to dump us on the market at the same time as the next class of MBAs. In the year that followed, I experienced something perilously close to utter despair.
Nonetheless we believed these transparent lies with the anxious fervor of a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. There was no reason not to, really: what else were we going to do?
Pray harder, I suppose.
One look at DealBreaker this morning was enough to bring it all flooding back. The summer interns who just got shafted by the Bear collapse; the quieter announcement of layoffs from Goldman. Note to MBAs: if you haven't already, start looking around for a nice refrigerator box. The good ones tend to go quick.
That was EXACTLY the feeling at Arthur Andersen when I started in the summer of 2000 coming out of undergrad. It was obvious that the party was over but we didn't know quite what we were in for.
Megan,
What about those going into b-school in the fall? I'd guess that this is about the best time to do so; losses from working aren't as great when the financial markets look like this and the employment picture will probably look better in 2010 than now.
How did the class of 2002 end up doing?
Notso hotso. I think things started to pick up in 2003/2004. My class got shafted the worse--the class before us had a year's work experience, the class behind us had time to look outside consulting and banking. But it wasn't good.
I was a summer intern at Bear back in '01 and '02... Not on the MBA level - just a puny undergrad intern on the programming side of things. Ironically enough, I was actually working in the Financial Analytics and Structured Transactions group - the people who did all of the foreclosure scenario heavy lifting. Mainframes, supercomputers, distributed computing systems... Those were the tools of that group. My boss had been hired initially due to his knowledge of programming Cray supercomputers.
Strange in hindsight, I attended seminars on how CMOs and CDOs were structured, and why they were so wonderful.
The overall economic problems didn't resonate so much back then - they weren't hitting Bear where it hurt, really.
I have trouble seeing the scale of this in terms that really make sense. I think more about the individual people I worked with there, and the consequences that the collapse is likely to have for them.
I'm a liberal, and it pains me to see the occasional schadenfreude voiced on progressive blogs at this. Corporations are defined by more than their CEO's compensation level. They're composed of a ton of people of all income levels - and the ones who are in the most trouble when things go to crap are the ones on the bottom end of that scale.
I'm not a particularly anti-corporate progressive, but even if I were there's no joy to be found in what happened to Bear. I almost wandered over to 383 Madison on my way home yesterday. I didn't have a real reason, which is why I didn't. I'm not sure what I might have expected to find. People crying in the streets outside? Probably a bit melodramatic, even given the immense levels of stress no doubt present in there.
It's all a bit much to take in, really. It was a great place while I was there. I'm sorry they went down, even if it does seem to be due to their own failings.
As an addendum, as a non-MBA Computer Science major graduating in '03, things were pretty crappy as well. The dot-com failings had left the market glutted with experienced programmers. Trying to find entry level programming work fresh out of school was a nightmare. (I never did find a pure programming job. I took a side step, and slotted myself in between the finance and programming sides...)
Obviously this is gonna be rough times for the financial sector, much as the dot-com crash was for the IT sector, but for those of us economic amateurs out here, should we expect this to hurt the rest of the employment sectors? Should we expect general unemployment to rise?
At least the stock market comes back. My wife got her degree from Georgetown speciallizing in technical aspects of US-Soviet relations in 1992.