Caltech Grads Discover the Lure of Wall Street
It’s not that the double helix design in Caltech’s campus reflecting pool will ever change to $$$.
But here comes Wall Street to a campus where Albert Einstein taught, where 22 Nobel Prize winners theorized, where world-renowned earthquake experts toil. In the past few years, recruiters visiting the campus have included J.P. Morgan, Kidder Peabody & Co. Inc., Salomon Bros. and Merrill Lynch.
Wall Street companies, graduating seniors said, offer the money and stability that science or engineering firms cannot.
“Forget the better mousetrap,” said senior John Krowas, 22, a materials science major who has a second job interview scheduled with a financial consulting firm in Los Angeles.
Graduation is Friday, and in the rush of last-minute papers and finals, not all of the 225-member graduating class have reported their employment status yet. About half a dozen seniors say they are taking jobs with investment or management firms--and an equal number are accepting positions with major aerospace companies.
Most of the remaining students go on to graduate school and then to science, medicine or academics, according to Caltech’s career development center.
That’s a turnaround from 1984, when aerospace giants snatched up 22 of 213 graduates; that year, Wall Street recruiters didn’t even bother showing up.
Some students say they don’t see much future or money in science, while their math and analytical skills are prized on Wall Street.
“Simply given the complex nature of financial services today, what we require is hard-core, quantitative analytical skills,” said J.P. Morgan Vice President Carol Schafer, who recruited at Caltech this year.
Not that Caltech will stop training the Keck telescope on distant stars and start monitoring the Dow Jones industrial average.
“These sort of busts and booms in particular fields are always with us,” said Rod Kieweit, dean of students.
These days, aerospace is a bust. California’s aerospace industry has lost more than 130,000 jobs from a peak of 376,200 jobs in 1988, a new UCLA study found. Moreover, it found, half of the aerospace workers laid off in 1989 were jobless two years later or had left the state.
That is not the kind of future that Caltech senior Ronti Pal had in mind. Pal, 23, is headed for a job in the bond portfolio department of Salomon Bros. in New York.
“I was bored with engineering,” said Pal, an engineering and applied sciences major. “Also, the bottom line is it pays really well.”
That means in the $50,000 range, compared with about $35,000 for an engineering job.
About 140 recruiters from various fields visited campus this year, the same number as in 1992, said Sally J. Asmundson,director of the career development center.
But the good offers were coming in from Wall Street while the job prospects for those who have their hearts set on science look glum.
Senior Michael Nassir, a 22-year-old physics major, will seek a doctorate in astronomy at the University of Hawaii. “I’ve postponed having to face reality for five years,” he said. Caltech students traditionally post job offers on the dorm wall right-side up, and rejection letters upside down.
When Nassir was a freshman, the walls were plastered with right-side-up letters. Last year was a different story: upside-down letters everywhere.
This year, few people are even bothering to post letters.
