Jeffrey Moses had high hopes of becoming an investment banker after he graduated. But in light of the stock market’s status on Wall Street, Moses decided to forget about his first ambition and pursue a new one.

Moses, a junior at Syracuse University, switched his major from finance to information technology, a field he said has more opportunities for stable jobs.

‘I originally wanted to be an investment banker, like my friend’s brother who was making six figures a year. All of his friends were, too,’ he said. ‘Now, none of them have jobs. They are so much more qualified than I am, so how am I supposed to find a job over them?’

Like Moses, some students at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management are rethinking their careers in finance since the collapses on Wall Street. As a result, a number of them are changing their majors and career aspirations.

For some, the SU Career Fair this month made the realities of a shrinking job market seem even more threatening.

The market crash left thousands of people unemployed, and finance majors are falling further into a state of panic, as the market’s unpredictability can affect prospective job opportunities.

Fernando Diz, an associate finance professor at Whitman, described the Wall Street recession as a kind of snowball effect, with more and more companies falling, filing for bankruptcy or being bought.

The end result: the crisis has reached the level where ‘even the normal consumer is nervous about keeping money in the bank,’ Diz said.

‘So the government has to intervene to stop the hemorrhaging of financial institutions and pay for the loans that started it all,’ he said.

Moses was already changing his major from finance to information technology when the crash occurred.

‘I knew finance was cutthroat, and now it will be even more cutthroat after this,’ Moses said. ‘If companies are hiring and there are such limited positions, they’re only going to be hiring from the top business schools – not Whitman.’

Tom Barkley, assistant professor of finance in Whitman, said there were fewer companies at the career fairs this year, especially the ones this month after the most recent drop in the stock market.

‘We had accounting ones, but there were fewer companies that came and seemed as though they were looking for people,’ he said. ‘Some still came so it might not look as dire as we think, but it has definitely affected areas that students like the most, like investment banking and asset management.’

When Justin Tannenbaum, a senior economics major, heard about the career fair, he left his house early to be one of the first to turn in resumes.

‘To say I was disappointed is an understatement,’ Tannenbaum said. ‘These firms used to hire like crazy if you were qualified, and now no one’s going to get a job.’

Tannenbaum said he didn’t even bother to wait on some of the lines, because there were hundreds of people already lined up to submit their resumes.

John Chavis, senior finance and marketing major, said even with the advantage of having an internship at a big firm, the future of major finance professions is unpredictable.

He’s learning this firsthand.

After a promising internship at Goldman Sachs, a global investment banking and securities firm, Chavis was supposed to hear back about a job offer by Labor Day.

‘Usually they hire a good percentage of interns, about 50 percent,’ he said. ‘But when I was there, they were cutting employees left and right. They kept their high-end brokers, but the rest weren’t necessary to the company.’

Chavis got a call after Labor Day, and the company told him it could still be another month before they would know if they could offer him the job – the same one that seemed so promising in August. He’s now moving his focus toward IT and marketing.

‘I’m still interested in the stock market, but if I don’t get an offer from a high-end financial firm, I wouldn’t mind,’ he said. Dan Massarsky, a senior finance and advertising major, said that since the Wall Street collapse, he has been looking more seriously into financial planning, rather than investment banking.

‘I had an opportunity in January at Bear Stearns, but now it is no longer in existence. It made me reconsider what aspect of finance I’ll be going into out of school,’ he said. ‘Now I’m planning on getting a job in financial services. A few years ago, I never would have expected to start looking into larger firms like GE or into finance from a corporate perspective. I never even considered those, and now those are the places where I’m submitting my resume.’

Some students, like junior marketing and finance major Jorden Meltz, said even though they are reconsidering their majors, they think the fluctuations on Wall Street will begin to cease in a few years and everything will be headed back to normal.

‘Before the market was going down I was thinking I would be an investment banker, and now I’m thinking financial planner to plan people’s retirements,’ Meltz said.

Meltz said there will still be a demand for finance majors in the workforce.

But Moses said even if the stock market improves in a few years, he would rather remain in IT, his new major.

‘Maybe the market will go up,’ he said. ‘But even so, good luck, because how stable will your job really be? Things have been going up and then plummeting hundreds of points. Even when you’re hired, you just don’t know.’

kapapo@syr.edu

Published on October 29, 2008 at 12:00 pm