Marina Keegan, an Occupy activist and recent Yale graduate, died in a car accident on May 26. Around campus and in the pages of the New York Times she took on Wall Street campus recruiting practices as part of an action known as Occupy Morgan Stanley. “I’m just not convinced that the most productive use of 25 percent of my graduating class’s time is to spend two or three years pushing figures around spreadsheets to make more money for those with the most money,” she wrote in November.

Condolences to all her family, friends, and fellow Occupiers.

Yikes, quite a scare for Occupy New Haven members yesterday when one protester found himself face to face with a man armed with a semi-automatic handgun in the wee morning hours.

Dairres Walden, 22, was caught with "black baseball gloves and a knit ski mask, police said. A loaded Cobra CA 380 .380-caliber semi-automatic handgun was shoved into the waistband of his pants, according to police spokesman Officer David Hartman."

Police said the serial number on the gun had been altered.

Around 1:13 a.m., police were called to the upper area of the New Haven Green, located at the intersection of College and Elm streets. An Occupy New Haven demonstrator had contacted officers about a group of young men who were yelling "wake up" and kicking the occupiers' tents as they walked through the encampment.

According to police, Sabatino said he confronted the men and had a gun pulled on him. Another demonstrator named Henry Rodriguez heard the commotion and left his tent to see what was going on. He told officers he saw one member of the group pointing a gun at Sabatino.

The gunman, along with the rest of the group, took off running west on Elm Street toward York Street.

Yale police caught up with Walden near Urban Outfitters at 51 Broadway. After a struggle, Walden was apprehended and taken into custody.

Walden was charged with the violation of five crimes, including three for weapons violations.

No word on the other men who were with Walden in the camp.

[Hartford Courant, WTNH]

Mayor Bloomberg may have his own personal army to keep tents out of Zuccotti Park, there's nothing he can do to make the "Big Banks" cool again to new college graduates.

As one professor of economics put it, "I teach financial markets, and it’s a little like teaching R.O.T.C. during the Vietnam War."

Via:

The new recruiting climate was on display at Yale in mid-November, when a group of Yale students turned a Morgan Stanley information session into a protest site. While their fellow students, clad in suits and clutching folders with résumés, filed into The Study at Yale, a local hotel, to learn more about the investment bank, a group of approximately 25 Yale undergraduates protested outside. They held signs and chanted slogans like “Take a stance, don’t go into finance” and “25 percent is too much talent spent” — a nod, protest organizers said, to the quarter of Yale graduates who typically take finance and management consulting jobs after graduation.

...

Yale, which has graduated financial heavyweights like Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, is traditionally considered a Wall Street feeder school. But the Occupy New Haven movement wants to change the focus.

Alexandra Brodsky, a Yale senior who helped organize Tuesday’s protest, said in an interview that recruiting “serves to divide the campus.”

Ms. Brodsky added that she had recently begun openly questioning the career choices of her finance-minded friends, because “these are people who could be doing better things with their energy.”

Certainly not all new graduates will be able to resist the promise of high-dollar salaries and perks of the financial institutions, but how many of them are really seeking employment elsewhere?

The New York Times reports that a recent survey showed that the "most coveted positions among young workers these days are jobs at technology firms like Google, Apple and Facebook."

The Wall Street banks didn't even make it into the top 25 most coveted positions. JPMorgan Chase was the highest rated investment bank coming in at only 41st, with only 2 percent of those polled choosing it as their first choice for employer.

Heartbreaking, isn't it?