Overview:

In 2003, Chad Shampine CC ’00, spent his days on the trading floor hiding phone calls from his boyfriend. He spent his nights out with bosses who treated him to expensive trips to strip clubs, wondering why their best junior trader wasn’t so into the women.

Shampine, now a vice president in the fixed income division of Morgan Stanley, discussed his difficult experience at an alumni panel on Thursday evening hosted by Columbia Pride and the Center for Career Education.

“It really wasn’t the kind of environment where I wanted to come out immediately. Especially since they’d just spent thousands of dollars,” he said.

At the event, five alumni panelists from finance, law, the non-profit sector, medicine and business spoke about the nuances of being LGBT in their respective industries.

For Natalie Edwards, CC ’98 and Law ’01 and an attorney with Linklaters LLP, coming out to co-workers was a non-issue, but for Ahmet Altiner, a resident in dermatology at New York University Langone Medical Center, acting gay or aligning himself with other gay medical students has made him vulnerable to ridicule and hostility from his co-workers.

When Shampine came out, he said his co-workers accused him of coming out to avoid a lay-off, in light of down-sizing at the company, even though he made sure he came out at a time when he was the top trader on his team.

“The take-away lesson is that the world is still a challenging place for LGBT people. There are a lot of issues that need to be managed deftly,” the panel’s moderator, Adam Nguyen CC ’98 and CEO of Ivy Link, a test prep company, said.

One Columbia College senior, who requested anonymity because she said she is not fully out, said she came to listen to the panel because she recently got a job at a start-up finance company and wasn’t sure if she should tell her co-workers about her sexual orientation.

“I guess what I’ve learned here is get good at what you do, and then no one can really say anything to you,” she said after the event.

But another attendee, Dave Ostwald, Journalism ’68, said that being gay in the workplace is never easy.

“I’ve seen people deserving of advancement who are held back on a number of excuses that basically come down to the fact that they were gay,” he said.

Beth Olson, Associate Director of CCE, said that occasionally students and alumni do come to CCE concerned about where sexual orientation fits into the workplace, but she was pleased to see Columbia Pride take initiative to plan the panel.

“We try not to set the agenda so much as take the lead from student and alumni groups like this, who have demonstrated need,” she said.

Jeanette Clark, CC ‘10 and former president of the Columbia Queer Alliance, said that it is important to have this kind of panel at Columbia, where the accepting atmosphere does not always prepare students for the harsh realities of the workplace. “Often times, I think we are in a little bubble of general acceptance,” she said.

But several of the panelists said the game in 2010 has changed for LGBT employees.

Shampine said that finance today is very different from when he first started working ten years ago.

“We seem to have an infinite budget for LGBT recruiting,” Shampine said of Morgan Stanley, a global financial service that is this year’s largest sponsor of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation media awards.

Edwards said that at her law firm, “No one cares so much.”

leah.greenbaum@columbiaspectator.com

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Friday, 26 Mar 2010