As a recent graduate of Queens College (2009), having majored in economics and corporate finance, as well as someone who is currently working in the field of finance, I'd like to offer some humble advice as to the best ways students can leverage their QC experience into a potential job.

Upon graduation, I started my professional career on the high yield trading desk of Jesup & Lamont Securities, where I worked on developing programs to provide credit analysis for high yield bond securities. However, after passing my FINRA Series 7 and 63 licensing exams, I moved to Emerson Equity, a boutique investment bank, where I have been an investment banking associate since April 2010. At Emerson, I have had the opportunity to assist clients in both short-term bridge needs as well as long-term capital fundraising. I have typically focused on raising capital for commercial real estate opportunities and providing growth capital for middle market and small cap publically traded companies. As we continue to face one of the worst job markets for college graduates in history, the question is, how did I manage to find a job? My Queens College course work provided a strong foundation, but there is more to it than a solid academic record.

If you have a resume, or have begun to work on one, you should know that there are three primary aspects involved in getting a job, and all three are made available to every QC student.

Academic work: If school doesn't come easy to you, as is the case for most students, seek out your professors for extra help. I can't tell you how many times I stayed after class with a professor to either go through the material again, make sure I wasn't completely lost or to just chat about life. QC professors are down-to-earth. Some of them have been in the business world themselves and can really help guide you both in your current studies as well as in your post-college planning. Always remember, they are there to help you and can be one of your most valuable resources.

Work experience: Students in the Department of Economics are blessed with a great career planner in Linda Korkes, who works in the college's Career Development Center. Linda is there to work with students majoring in economics or finance to polish their resumes, hone their interview skills, and use her relationships to assist students in obtaining an internship or a full-time job. Not only did she help me write and fix my resume, but she also played an integral role in the application/interviewing process for my internships at both Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch. No matter where you are in the process, I strongly urge anyone looking for a job to visit the Career Development Center.

Extracurricular activities: Having had the opportunity to serve as president of both the Economics Honor Society and the Economics and Business Club, I truly saw the benefits of actively participating in an extracurricular club. In my time at the EHS we were fortunate to bring in speakers from some of the country's largest financial firms (Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Met-Life), government entities (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) and QC's very own Career Development Center. This gave students the chance to sit in an intimate setting with the very people who will be hiring, looking through their resumes and possessing the knowledge and ability to answer any and all questions regarding what they are looking for in potential job candidates.

To wrap up, I'd like to share the best piece of advice I received from one of my mentors. He told me that the competition is fierce, and one can never get lazy. If you are excelling academically, you must remember that there are people who are doing well in school AND holding down a job or an internship. If you are doing well in school and working, why aren't you part of a club. And if you are part of a club, why aren't you on the board? The point is that there is always something MORE you can be doing. Don't let yourself become complacent. Those of us that may not excel in one of these areas shouldn't get discouraged but rather should look to become stronger in another.

Unfortunately, many students in the finance and economics world believe that the best jobs are not available to them unless they graduate from an Ivy League school. I have had a number of potential employers tell me that they specifically target Queens College students because of their work ethic. Many QC students work part-time to pay for their schooling. This shows employers that QC students work hard, multi-task and will do what it takes to accomplish what they believe in.

I ask you again to please use the resources that are made available to you by Queens College. Feel free to e-mail me any time at AMOrlofsky@gmail.com if you would like to discuss anything I've touched on, if you want another set of eyes looking over your resume, or if you just want to chat about the trends I'm seeing in the job market today.

I'm Jerry Katzoff, and I graduated from Queens College with a major in economics (and a minor in math) in 1967. After a year of graduate work at the State University of New York at Buffalo, I transferred to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where I completed my economics doctoral level course work in 1970. Like Ken Heyer, our Spring 2009 QC economic alumni profilist, I have spent a lifetime career in the federal government- I'm now in my 40th year and still going strong!

I'm currently a branch chief in the Bureau of Health Professions, part of the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). I work in our agency's central office, located in the city of Rockville, a Maryland suburb in the greater Washington DC metro area. My branch is responsible for developing policy strategies and implementing programs that support training for several health professions, including physicians , dentists , and psychologists.

In my position, one of the true highlights of my career has been working as the Executive Secretary (chief staffer) for the Federal Council on Graduate Medical Education. This council is an advisory body charged with providing recommendations to Congress and our Health and Human Services Secretary on physician workforce policy. It's a good time to be a federal civil servant, and given the push for health care reform, it's an especially good time to be a health policy analyst within the federal government!

In 1998 I was honored to receive the DHHS Secretary's Award for Distinguished Service-the highest award in the department- for my long term contributions in the field of physician policy analysis and planning. Two years later, as part of a year-long executive development program, I was privileged to work with-and shadow-Dr. David Satcher, who was then both the Assistant Secretary for Health and the Surgeon General of the United States.

A word of advice to our students: Try to keep a good relationship with your professors if you can!

In 1970, my last year as a doctoral student at CUNY, I was taking a one-on-one research tutorial with Professor Walter Eisenberg, the chair of the Hunter College Department of Economics. As the term was about to end, he and I engaged in discussions concerning my career plans, and he asked me whether I would be interested in the federal government. He indicated that he had a professional relationship with the New York Regional Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The commissioner, the late Herbert Bienstock, many years later retired from government and became Professor and first Chair of the Center for Urban Policy Studies at QC). If I were interested, he said, while he could not guarantee me a job offer, he could at least be instrumental in getting me an interview. The rest for me is history… I spent my first seven years in the federal government as an economist in the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics before accepting a promotional transfer to the Department of Health and Human Services.

I have great memories of QC and its economics department. It imbued me with a love of the field, and its professors showed me how rigorous a field it could be! I give tribute to among my favorite professors Dr. Babette Solon, who first introduced me to the exciting field of applied microeconomics. (I have not spoken to her since graduation in 1967. I trust that she is doing well - and that she will see this profile!)

I can be reached at jkatzoff@hrsa.gov in case any students or alumni are interested in getting in touch!

Although I'm one of the new faculty members in the Department of Economics here at Queens College, I know the campus well. Things were a little different when I walked on campus in 1996. As a scholar-athlete I knew the track well, but it was made of dirt - not the brilliant surface we have today. I was here long enough to have seen the New Science Building open and then become just the Science Building. Finally, I was known as Inas Rashad--until this last July 15th when I married Don Kelly.

I have many fond memories of my years as an undergraduate at Queens College, what with being an economics major, a Business and Liberal Arts (BALA) minor, a math minor, and a pre-med student. Moreover, I enjoyed being on the track team for my four years as an undergraduate. After graduating, I returned to Queens as an adjunct professor while working on my PhD. In many ways it feels as if I never left.

It's wonderful to have my former professors - Professors Hendrey, Nix, Dohan, Devereux, Edelstein, Feliciano, Gram, Riskin, Roistacher, and Thurston - as colleagues now. My foundation in economics was formed at Queens, and I couldn't ask for a better place or a better set of faculty to teach me the core principles I needed to go to graduate school and then subsequently join the faculty of the Department of Economics at Georgia State University.

As a Queens undergraduate I worked on a research project on workfare using data and econometric methods with Professor Anne Hill. Sadly, Professor Hill passed away. Though I had the privilege of speaking at her memorial gathering at Queens, she is sorely missed and I remember her very fondly.

After graduating from Queens College, I attended the City University of New York Graduate Center and was able to work with some of the very best health economists, including Michael Grossman. There I was also able to become a Research Analyst at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where I am now a Faculty Research Fellow.

In Atlanta, after completing grad school, I gained a lot of experience shaping the undergraduate curriculum, mentoring graduate students, and working on research projects in health economics, a field that very nicely combined my dual interests in health and economics. I had some wonderful colleagues at Georgia State and was exposed to groundbreaking research in various fields, such as public finance, experimental economics, and environmental economics.

There are so many resources and opportunities available at Queens College, and I would strongly encourage students to take advantage of what's available here. Seek things out. They won't automatically come to you. For example, my minor in BALA allowed me to do an internship at The New York Times Syndication Sales Corporation, an invaluable experience. I'm the product of a public school education, from elementary school in San Francisco to graduate school in New York, and I am glad not to have accrued the debt of a private university education. My experience here was invaluable. I strongly encourage all students to seriously consider graduate school.

I currently do research in demand-side health and labor economics, with a focus on our decisions surrounding nutrition and physical activity. I am now regularly at Queens College or the CUNY Graduate Center. I am more than happy to speak with students about academic life and my path from Queens to graduate school and after. You can reach me at Inas.Kelly@qc.cuny.edu.

Hi, fellow Queens College alumni and students. I'm Ken Heyer, and I attended Queens College during the mid-1970s. After graduating with a major in Economics, I headed west and attended graduate school at UCLA, where after many late hours in the library I eventually received my PhD in 1983. Since the early 1980s I have worked as an economist for the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, first as a staff economist, and since July 2001 as Economics Director, the highest position held by a career economist in the Division. In 1999 I was honored to receive from then Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein (a name that should sound familiar to fellow New Yorkers) the Antitrust Division's first William F. Baxter award for outstanding contributions in the area of economic analysis.

Not too bad for a QC graduate.

I work with the Division's Deputy for Economic Analysis to supervise the staff of the Division's Economic Analysis Group ("EAG"), a collection of some 50 + PhD economists who specialize in the economics of industrial organization. I also provide independent economic analysis and case recommendations to the Division's legal deputies and to the head of the Division, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust.

The Deputy for Economic Analysis is a political appointee, typically a renowned economist on leave from academia, who holds the position of chief economist at the Division for perhaps one to three years. The current Deputy is Carl Shapiro from UC Berkeley. I have had the extreme good fortune to be able to work over the years with and for a succession of the profession's most illustrious economists, and I am proud to consider many of them now to be personal friends.

During my long career at DoJ I have worked on numerous interesting and challenging investigations implicating a wide variety of industries and covering virtually the entire range of economic issues implicated by competition policy. Categories include the analysis of proposed mergers, the investigation of monopolization claims, and competition advocacy to influence in a positive (i.e., efficient!) direction the regulatory policies of other federal agencies.

Among the more noteworthy matters I have had the opportunity to work on were the investigation of, and litigation against, the Microsoft Corporation for illegally maintaining its monopoly over PC operating systems, the (ultimately unsuccessful) litigation effort to block the acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle, the investigation of large mergers between Maytag and Whirlpool and XM and Sirius, and most recently our analysis of (and decision to challenge) a proposed joint venture between Yahoo and Google.

When not working on active investigations, I spend some of my time writing and publishing on issues relating to the economics of competition policy. I've published papers in both the Antitrust Law Journal and Competition Policy International on antitrust enforcement and policy issues, and regularly co-author an annual article in the Review of Industrial Organization on economic activities at the Antitrust Division. Most recently, I co-authored a Working Paper on merger analysis of firms in financial distress.

I have very fond memories of my time at Queens College, and was very pleased when I was invited back to speak several years ago at the Economics Honor Society's annual dinner and awards ceremony. I give Queens College, and especially the professors who taught me economics there, credit for sparking my interest in the subject and with motivating me to pursue what has been a very rewarding and satisfying career in the field. I was particularly thrilled to see at the awards ceremony that many of my former professors, including at least Professors Edelstein, Gramm, and Roistacher and Tabb, are still actively teaching and motivating the current generation of students.

Queens College is a very special institution (a judgment I make not simply because it happens to be where I went to school). The college plays an extremely important role in training and providing opportunities for an amazingly diverse collection of students from a wide set of backgrounds. What a treat it was to spend my college years in such an environment. Personally, I wouldn't have traded it for any of the Harvards or Stanfords that many of my DoJ colleagues claim as their alma maters.

Finally, if any of you are interested, I am happy to interact with current Queens College economics majors. I would encourage any who might have questions about graduate school, careers in economics, life at the Justice Department, or substantive economic issues (so long as they do NOT include "How in the world did we get into, and how do we easily and at low cost get out of, the current macroeconomic mess?") to contact me at ken.heyer@usdoj.gov. Also, I am always open to invitations to come and give presentations to QC economics classes.

(Editor's note: Professor Tabb has retired from teaching since Ken Heyer last visited campus, but Professor Tabb continues his extremely active professional life.)