Phil Calian, editor-in-chief of the Brown Daily Herald, could have worked at nearly any newspaper in the nation after he graduated in 1985. He had never considered an investment banking job—that is, not until Wall Street recruiters began appearing on Brown’s campus every week that spring. Calian applied to Merrill Lynch’s mergers and acquisitions department on a lark. “I had to look up ‘capital market’ the first time I had an interview,” he admitted. The interviewer assured him that he did not need any special expertise beyond his undergrad degree.Article continues after advertisement
A year later, Calian was putting in ninety-hour weeks as an analyst, taking his desktop computer home over Labor Day weekend to work on a deal. “It doesn’t take any great brainpower to do this,” he confessed. “It just takes stamina.” Asked about his choice to abandon journalism for banking, Calian expressed few regrets. “It’s much more fun to put together a million-dollar deal than it is to report it.”
Calian was one of thousands of young students from top schools who abandoned other plans to take jobs on Wall Street during the 1980s. In those years, this formerly quiet sector of patrician bankers advising long-term corporate clients became a highly competitive and highly profitable business—one that now shaped the fates of the corporations it had once been content to serve. Banks had long supplied the capital that allowed the industrial sector to expand.
