Had the privilege of sharing lunch with a group of eight students who had come together to chat with Tom Murphy, a history alum who’s now working with Calyon Investments in New York. By a lucky twist of fate, Dr. Della Fenster in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science sat next to Murphy at a talk given by Jack Welsh, former CEO of GE, that she attended while she was vacationing this summer.
Murphy’s got a great story because he was a student with competing interests - history, finance and tennis. He wound up playing tennis while at Richmond, majoring in history and after graduation, made the jump to Wall Street. It didn’t take much for Dr. Fenster to convince him to travel down to Richmond with his wife and talk to a group of liberal arts majors (mostly math, economics and computer science) about what it takes to succeed in business without the business degree.
Murphy’s first job out of school (not counting a very brief stint selling ad space, from which he admits he was fired almost immediately:-) was with Marsh, a large insurance broker. The guy who hired him? A Richmond grad. He was with Marsh for three years and eventually began interviewing for jobs in sales and trading.
“It’s pretty easy to move around once you’re in the field. You get a feel for what you like doing and you study up on those things. There are so many different types of jobs within the financial market. So you’ve got to talk to lots of people–parents, friends, friends of your parents,” Murphy advised.
“As you get older, it’s kind of neat to just develop these interests. You don’t always write the entire script. One opportunity leads to another and another. After all, that’s really what a liberal arts education is about as well.”
