On the evening of October 19--the day the stock market took its worst beating ever--an anxious senior called the analysts with whom he had worked the previous summer to find out the word on the Street. Though it was long after the market had closed, the would-be investment banker found that his friends were still at the offices of Bear Stearns & Co.--trying to make sense of Black Monday.

"Right on that day they were kind of uncertain what was going to happen to them," David M. Kanter '88 says, recalling his phone conversation.

The market's 508-point drop shook up the business community and has made the future financiers from the Class of '88 proceed with caution in their job searches. Nonetheless, the storm seems to be over, and its wake was not powerful enough to frighten most seniors away from Wall Street.

"People realize that the economy made it through the crash," says Kanter, who will be working at the investment bank Lazard Freres & Co. "Most people came through it safely."

A spokesman for the Office of Career Services (OCS) says she has not noticed a major change in where seniors want to work. Although statistics are not yet available, Linda Z. Chernick, associate director of the OCS, says, "We had a very slight decrease" in the number of students interested in investment banking. "It wasn't a hugely dramatic trend, one way or the other."

Most of the seniors contacted this week say the troubled market concerned them this winter but played little practical role in their career choices.

The crash "has not affected my decision to pursue investment banking," says Tad W. Guleserian '88, who is still searching for a job on Wall Street.

"I wasn't deterred [from entering investment banking] because I figured they were still leaving positions open," says Mary L. Rakic '88, who this fall will begin working for the investment firm of Paine Webber Inc.

Rakic says she believes the market is now returning to stable ground. The senior says she thinks the crash is "not going to have any more repercussions. For the next 10 years, it's safe."

Many seniors seem to share Rakic's views, as investment banks did not suffer noticeable drops in the number of applications received this year.

"We continue to have more applicants than openings," says a spokesman for Drexel Burnham Lambert, Inc. "After the crash, obviously, there was perhaps less of an interest in Wall Street, [but] we haven't really noticed anything."

While students who were committed to investment banking did not alter their plans, OCS officials and students say the crash may have changed the minds of those who were wavering.

Chernick says she thinks a small group of students who might have been interested in investment banking held back this year.

And Karen A. Levine '88, who will work for a consulting firm, says she thinks people who were undecided about their job choice before the crash may have steered away from investment banking because of the ailing market.

"It's not very much fun to work in an industry that's going through a recession," says Levine, who has been hired by Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc.