“People were very successful, but they also seemed deeply unhappy,” Chen says. People would brag, “Man, I haven’t even been home in two days!” After a bit more than a year on the job, Chen was slated for promotion, but her 9/11 experience led her to take a closer look at the people above her on the corporate ladder. At first the hours seemed almost overwhelming, but she soon realized that people treated working late into the night as a badge of pride. She worked hard and enjoyed considerable success, helping to put together business deals worth huge sums of money. When work at the firm resumed, Chen threw herself into it. I realized how quickly everything you love can disappear.” From that moment on, I began to view life differently. Finally, we learned that his father had been in the building when it collapsed. He kept phoning and phoning, but could get no answer. The rest of the day and all that night, I was with a colleague who was worried that his father had been in the World Trade Center. “When I finally got far enough away that people were no longer running,” Chen says, “I stopped to catch my breath and turned around. I started running as fast as I could, but I was in high heels, and I was certain I was going to get stampeded and die.” “There was a loud rumbling noise,” Chen says. Within seconds, Chen says, “She told me to get out of the building right away.” As Chen left, she could feel the heat from the burning first tower, and before she could get more than a block away, it collapsed. As soon has she arrived, she phoned her mother to share her excitement, but she realized immediately that her mother sounded quite worried.
At times, it could be intimidating.”Ĭhen’s office was located about a block from the World Trade Center. Many of them came from affluent backgrounds and already knew so much about business. It answered huge questions, like ‘Are we in a recession?’ And it was amazing how smart my fellow students were. You could collect the data, run the equations, and come out with an exact number. Determining how well a particular business or the economy as a whole is performing was fun. “It was fun to see how what you were learning every day would apply in the real world.
When she arrived, she quickly realized that many of the students had a clear plan: To get their degree and go to New York to pursue a lucrative career on Wall Street. So Chen chose to attend one of the nation’s top business schools. But her father encouraged her to explore a variety of career options, and her mother had always been very interested in business and the stock market. So a career in medicine would have been a natural.
Her father is a doctor and her mother a pharmacist.