Faculty Candidate Writing Sample

January 3, 2010

In the space provided, please describe a time in your life when you experienced a tremendous amount of professional or educational change.  Describe this transformative experience, and the effects it yielded in your life.

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Change is a constant.

 Surely you’ve heard that bland platitude dished as cold comfort when chaotic outside forces dictate circumstances seemingly beyond our control.

 8:00 AM, Tuesday, September 11^th greeted me with absolute certainty that all continued right in the world and my given place in it.  Azure skies and golden sunshine shown down on lower Manhattan as its citizenry poured out of subways, into Towers housing banks, trading floors and courtrooms.  An absolutely ordinary morning set to a metered workday march that was about to break into a sheer hellish run for cover.

 8:00 AM, Monday, September 18^th saw me and 1,300 of my closest Lehman Brothers colleagues jammed into the Metropolitan Ballroom of the Sheraton New York at 51^st and 7^th.  Dick Fuld, the Firm’s imposing Grand Poobah was addressing the jittery crowd of I-bankers and underlings to assure us that our $13 billion of liquidity insured our survival as a Firm.  Fuld espoused, “A building was just that—it was our intellectual capital and collective resolve that made us ‘One Firm’”. Thanks to our close relationship with Starwood Partners, The Sheraton Hotel would be our new home.

 So began my 15-month tenure working from room 963.  Everyday was greeted by unctuous and grateful hotel staff relieved to have full occupancy into the foreseeable future.  Our daily routine included hot coffee and assorted teas in the morning, soup-of-the-day room service at lunch and fragrant white towels at poolside for that after work swim and workout in the hotel gym.

 I communicated daily and nightly with my alarmed global clientele via my new baby blue cell-phone ratcheted up with 2000 minutes and a world calling plan. My “office” consisted of a hotel room without beds, a room safe, four six-foot folding tables, stackable cardboard files purchased from Staples and a Bose Wave radio set to WQXR—NYC’s classical music station. Our television sets were removed by Management as we nerve-wracked type A’s could not stop monitoring CNN throughout the day.  We had to make-do with one set placed by the elevator banks on each floor at which we periodically congregated like swallows.  I diligently worked out of my new hotel home until January 2003 when our new office at 399 Park Avenue was finally finished and ready for occupancy.  The hotel staff threw us a festive Hawaiian Luau goodbye party and was genuinely sorry to see the last of us go.

 9/11 taught me that people and relationships, not job titles and trophies make the sum total of your life.  Patience is not simply the ability to smile and feign interest through another mind-numbing and pointless meeting, but the emotional steadiness needed to calm the nerves of a fellow employee who is so despondent that they feel that they cannot ride the subway one more day to work within the confines of a stale hotel room.

 Science recognizes that every seven years, the human body replaces every cell with a new one.  In effect we regenerate our entire beings.  For me and others, the day of September 11^th was transformative on a cellular level. What changed most profoundly was my psychology.  My sense of security and entitlement to increasing material gain was obliterated.  I now realize there is no demilitarized zone, not in lower Manhattan, not in the formerly “friendly skies”.  Preparedness, access to information and resilience became prerequisites for our new world order. As a result of my experiences my ability to deal with stress and handle sudden and unperceivable change has been improved, and with it the recognition that change can bring unexpected opportunities, new life paths, self-awareness and growth.