"Hard lesson; As Wall Street convulses, business schools respond with a helping hand for graduates, curriculum changes" by Robert Weisman, Globe Staff | September 29, 2008
Last week, Harvard Business School mounted its own emergency rescue mission on Wall Street.
In the school's first intervention on behalf of newly minted graduates, seven Harvard career coaches flew to New York to huddle with 18 members of the Class of 2008 who had taken jobs at troubled firms like Lehman Brothers Holding Co. and Merrill Lynch. All were still working, but didn't know what the next day would bring. Harvard's delegation promised to set up interviews with other employers.
"We wanted to help them navigate very choppy waters," said Jana P. Kierstead, managing director of MBA career services at Harvard Business School, where 44 percent of this year's graduates went into financial services. "What they thought they signed on for has changed. The dynamics of the industry have changed. So they each have to decide whether they want to pursue other opportunities."
Business schools are responding with counseling, classroom analysis, curriculum changes, and case studies to the convulsions that have led to the bankruptcy or fire sales of leading US financial firms and a federal bailout. At schools that have long funneled graduating MBAs to Wall Street, professors are teaching about the crisis, even as their students ponder what it will mean for their careers.
"It's shocking," said Akbar Thobhani, 31, a second-year student at MIT's Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, who interned at Lehman Brothers last summer and had hoped to land a full-time job there. "No one's getting offers now. They told us, 'Thank you for your summer.' Now a lot of us are reconsidering everything."
Many longtime faculty members and administrators say they have never seen a series of events with greater potential to transform the focus of business education - and the career trajectories of their students.
"This is the intellectual lodestone of the 21st century," said Carl Kester, deputy dean of academic affairs and finance professor at Harvard Business School. He said a number of professors already have begun researching case studies on this month's spate of bank failures. "Our biggest responsibility right now is to grapple with this intellectually. We want to understand what got us in this situation, what needs to be done, and the shape of Wall Street going forward."
For some students who'd thought they were Wall Street-bound, that "real job" might be in the corporate finance department of a technology or a manufacturing company.
Oh, we are gonna LOVE YOU on the FLOOR!!!!!
It might be in a financial niche, such as private equity, less affected by investment banking problems. Or it might be at a start-up or in a field outside of finance.
Yeah, I found out the hard way that a HISTORY DEGREE meant SQUAT!!!!
The impact has been cushioned on those business schools that haven't been major feeders to Wall Street investment banks. More than 200 companies attended a career fair last week at Bentley College in Waltham, which places many students at Boston asset-management firms like Fidelity Investments and State Street Corp. as well as in the finance and accounting departments of non-financial firms.
Even in the classroom, Bentley has soft-pedaled the crisis.
Then TELL it to the DAMN CONGRESS and MSM!!!!
A Sloan alumni career adviser, Ken White, said he already has had individual counseling sessions with about a dozen Sloan alums working at Lehman Brothers, which has filed for bankruptcy protection.
White said at least one is considering a career switch. He's thinking about becoming a financial regulator - potentially a growth field in the aftermath of the crisis.
"I'm telling them not to follow the crowd," White said. "If everyone's flocking to hedge funds, go someplace else. Go to the feds." --more--"
Yeah, you don't want to work for the hedge funds.
BECOME a REGULATOR NOW?!! The STENCH of FASCISM is in the air!!!!
