For weeks now, a Brown alum working at Lehman Brothers' Tokyo office has been living in an apartment with no furniture. Lehman's bankruptcy, the largest in U.S. history, had left his job in limbo and his fate uncertain.
"I have been living in the eye of a hurricane, witnessing a global financial meltdown from within," he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald - insisting, like many interviewed for this article, on anonymity. "I had no idea whether my company would survive or if my employment would be sustained."
Closure came Monday when Nomura Holdings, Japan's largest securities company, purchased Lehman's Asian assets and said employees would keep their jobs. After days of watching "worried, confused" co-workers "scramble to meet with headhunters," he wrote, the alum found out about the deal and about his job from Bloomberg News.
Lehman's bankruptcy has proved especially frustrating to its employees and former interns, many of whom are Brown alumni and students, because the company has remained largely mute about the fate of its assets and jobs.
A Brown senior who worked at the company this summer said he received an offer for a full-time position earlier this month but has had no official contact with the company since then. "I did hear that Barclay's is expected to honor (Lehman's) summer offers," he said, referring to the British bank's agreement to buy some of Lehman's operations.
However, he said he was not sure he still wanted that job. "I'm definitely not as excited about working there in the current environment as I would've been about working for a healthy Lehman," he said.
The Career Development Center does not have exact figures regarding the number of alumni and students that work for Lehman Brothers. Director Kimberly Delgizzo said only that Lehman and Brown have "a strong relationship." The company has been in contact with the University about recruitment and the fate of those students who received job offers, but has yet to make any definite decisions, she added.
"Lehman is optimistic at this point, but we don't know," said Barbara Peoples, senior associate director of the CDC.
"There's all this uncertainty," said Graham Neray '09, who said he has decided to focus more on finding consultant work because of the crisis. "It doesn't make any sense to go into an industry that is in shambles."
Brett Finkelstein '09, who worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs this summer, was optimistic about finding financial work. "We'll all eventually get a job," she said. "The industry moves in cycles. They've had to deal with this before."
Delgizzo said it is still too early to tell how the current financial crisis will affect students' job prospects for next year. "Things are evolving day-to-day," she added.
No companies have yet contacted the CDC about paring down their recruitment efforts, but some have stopped doing on-campus interviews or changed which positions they are hiring for, Delgizzo said. Last week, Morgan Stanley canceled its posting on the CDC's Web site for a Sales and Trading Full-time Analyst and replaced it with a Sales and Trading Fixed-Income Full-time Analyst position.
The CDC sent an e-mail to the senior class last Tuesday about the financial situation, encouraging students to use the CDC's resources, because "for some of you, these developments will necessitate an unanticipated change in your career planning." The center has seen an increase in the number of students and alumni seeking career advice in the past week, and has met with many students who were thinking about finance and are now looking at consulting jobs, Delgizzo said.
While this may be difficult year for financial hiring, a lot could happen between now and next fall, Peoples said. "We are 11 to 12 months out right now from when full-time offers would start," she said.
The Brown senior who was worried about his full-time offer from Lehman said the upside of the company's bankruptcy is that it happened when it did.
"All things considered, the timing was about as good for me as it could have been," he said. "A few weeks earlier and I would not have had the great experience I had this summer and the job offer I put on my resume. If it had happened in December, I might have accepted a job at a firm that ceased to exist."
He said he is applying to several other jobs and trying to keep his options "as open as possible."
The restructuring of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley last Sunday into bank holding companies may pose an additional challenge to job applicants. Because holding companies are subject to greater regulation and required to maintain higher deposits than investment banks, the roles of whole categories of finance jobs may be eliminated or reduced.
Professor of Economics Ross Levine, though, believes the investment banking profession will outlast the crisis.
"The job situation is uncertain, but many troubled assets will be sold and many financial firms will be restructured," he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. "Investment banking will survive, though some of the activities like securitization will be a smaller component."
Despite the uncertainty he faced over the last few weeks, the alum in Tokyo regards it all as a learning opportunity.
"Some would see this experience as something to curse, but I've enjoyed it very much," he wrote. "How often does one get to experience such an educational experience and witness a once-in-a-lifetime event like this from the front row? I joined this firm to learn, and that's all I've been doing."
