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Students Say Goodbye Wall Street, Hello Pre-Med
Careers in high finance were once the top picks for ambitious young
men and women, particularly from immigrant families. Now, the current
economic crisis is forcing many of them to turn to more stable careers.
New America Media, News Report, Viji Sundaram, Posted:
Apr 22, 2009
At 28, Nelson does not exude the confidence you’d expect from someone
whose bank balance statement reads $103,873.
Nelson, who didn’t want his last name to be used lest it jeopardize his
job chances, says that was his balance in 2008 before the implosion on
Wall Street. Now it’s about half of that.
He will also tell you that his unemployment check is “only” $1,800 a
month before taxes, when just a few years back, he says, “I was making
$105,000 a year” as a research analyst on Wall Street. “In the financial
world, you can go from $50,000 a year to $2 million in under 10 years,”
he said.
Nelson didn’t stay long enough to see if that would happen to him. He
got laid off in 2004, at age 23, and returned to the San Francisco Bay
Area, where he grew up. Then he began mining every opportunity he had,
hoping to fatten his savings, working at such corporations as Gap Inc.
and a Canadian bank. But last September, when Lehman Brothers crashed,
Nelson decided it was best that he look at other options.
He is now taking pre-med courses at a community college in the Bay Area,
planning to become a doctor. Why that profession?
“Because I’ll have at least an upper middle-class lifestyle for the rest
of my life,” Nelson said frankly. “I grew up in Oakland. I knew what
life was like on the other side of the tracks. I don’t want to
experience that again.”
A California Young Adult Workforce Survey conducted recently with
funding from The California Wellness Foundation suggests that youngsters
now consider the health care sector to be the most likely place to find
a good-paying job with benefits.
Eighty percent say it is likely that people could find a good job in the
health care industry, with just under half, 49 percent, saying it is
very likely.
The telephone survey was done jointly by Goodwin Simon Victoria Research
and Fenton Communications to assess how younger people felt about the
economy, job market and employment prospects, and to measure attitudes
toward work in the health care fields.
Forty-four percent of respondents said they or someone in their family
are more likely to consider working in the health care field than was
the case before the current economic downslide.
Nineteen-year-old Kendra Davis is taking prerequisite courses in nursing
at City College in San Francisco. Being a nurse, she says, will not only
give her emotional satisfaction, it will offer her the financial
stability she has not had in the past.
“I don’t like to be without money,” Davis said.
The sweeping changes on Wall Street are taking the shine out of the
world of finance for many youngsters like Nelson and making them rethink
their career goals. The former high rollers in the finance sector have
become the new face of unemployment.
The California Young Adult survey seems to bear this out. More than
one-third of respondents of the survey, 36 percent, said that the
current job market and economic situation is causing them to consider
making a job change or career switch, while another three percent said
they have already done so.
This is a sea change from the dot.com boom in the 1990s, when
youngsters, especially those from immigrant families, saw the world of
finance and high-tech as sectors that would earn them top dollar.
Parents steered their children toward Silicon Valley or Wall Street.
Now, it seems, they are letting them make up their own mind.
“A lot of second-generation kids are drifting away from high-tech,”
observed Kalpana Mohan, whose husband is a computer scientist in Silicon
Valley, and whose 19-year-old daughter is on the pre-med track.
Aken Desai said he decided to switch his major from business to medicine
at the University of Michigan after he saw how quickly his friends were
losing their enthusiasm for their jobs on Wall Street. “They liked the
money, but not the work,” Desai, 23, said. “I decided I wasn’t going for
that.”
China-born Tony, 31, who did not want his last name used, worked for a
few years in finance after earning a degree in managerial economics and
computer information systems at U.C. Davis in 2001.
Coming from a family of modest means, he enjoyed the money he was able
to pull in, but couldn’t stand the long hours of monotonous work, not to
mention the constant fear of being laid off.
“I couldn’t see myself doing that for a long time,” Tony said.
So last year, Tony enrolled in the two-and-a-half year physical therapy
program at Peralta Community College in Oakland. He believes that he is
more temperamentally suited for that career because, he says, “you have
a greater connection with people” and you can make fairly good money
without looking at spreadsheets all day. “In the Bay Area, you can even
make a six-figure salary as a physical therapist,” Tony said.
Sujal Parikh, a second-year med student at the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor, says that like his parents, he wanted to be in a career that
was “well regarded.” And did income influence his decision at all?
“Absolutely. That’s one of the nice things about a career in medicine,”
Parikh said.
Nelson isn’t totally disenchanted with Wall Street, its turmoil
notwithstanding. If it turns around, he said, he will more than likely
go back to it and take another stab at making “a million before I turn
40.”
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