Unexpected upside

Staff at Christie’s prepares a Lehman Brothers sign for auction in 2010, two years after the 158-year-old investment bank filed for bankruptcy, a casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis.

The Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford doesn’t recommend graduating in a recession. It’s not ideal timing.

Research shows that college graduates who start their working lives during a recession earn less for at least 10 to 15 years than those who graduate during periods of prosperity .

- Oyer 2006, Kahn 2010, Wozniak 2010, Oreopoulos et al. 2012

I trust their data. But I don’t think the numbers tell the whole story.

I was just a few weeks into a full-time MBA program at Yale in the Fall of ‘08 when the investment bank Lehman Brothers suddenly collapsed. 

Lehman Brothers was founded in 1847. The American firm survived the Civil War and The Great Depression. But not the subprime mortgage crisis. In 2008, they declared bankruptcy after operating for 158 years.

And it was just the beginning. 

My classmates and I quickly realized that most of us weren’t going to Morgan Stanley or McKinsey.

In some ways though, graduating from business school during the Great Recession was a gift. In a bull market, more of my classmates would have ended up following more traditional post-MBA paths, like investment banking and consulting.

But not necessarily because those careers were right for any of us.

In a bull market, banking and consulting are the paths of least resistance for graduating MBAs. It’s what MBAs do.  

When I graduated, I moved to Nashville instead of New York. I joined a startup instead of an investment bank. Early in my career, I learned how to hire and fire. And coach. And build. And operate. And sell. And I got to teach Vanderbilt students one evening a week as an adjunct professor.

I haven’t figured it all out yet. I still have a long way to go to achieve many of my professional goals. But today, I know myself better than I did in 2010. And I’ve no plans to work at an investment bank or global consulting firm.

For the record, investment banking and consulting are excellent career paths for many.

But probably not for me. I might have done okay. Probably survived. But I wouldn’t have thrived.

Building a better career over the long term isn’t about chasing titles. Or brand name employers. We build better careers by knowing ourselves. Our strengths and limits. And by creating uncopyable value by giving the world what we can uniquely offer.

The COVID-19 recession is behind us, and that’s good for all of us. Especially the class of ‘21.

Given the choice, it’s probably best not to graduate in a recession.

Probably.