Br!ton B!ts
short takes
Two Minutes with . . . Perry Myers By Jake Weber
Perry Myers is an associate professor of German.
So . . . you left business for college teaching, and now you’re preparing students for international business careers.
Io Triumphe!: You clearly followed an unusual career path to get to Albion.
I came to Albion to help develop the Language and Culture for the Professions track, which seemed a natural fit for me, given my background, but I am also very focused on my research, which does not relate to business. I teach courses that make connections between cultural studies and the real world. I can relate my experiences to the theoretical, historical, and literary things we read, which brings added value for my students, I think.
Okay—tell us more about life as an expatriate investment banker. I worked for Merrill Lynch and then J.P. Morgan, teaching German institutional investors how to use futures and options, which were very new there at the time. It was an extremely stressful job but one in which I learned a lot and could travel frequently. Once, one of my sales desk brokers at J.P. Morgan misunderstood a sell order and bought instead. We had to cover a position of about $500 million. The error cost us about $250,000, but we were actually relieved it wasn’t any larger. By that time, though, I knew I wanted a more intellectual challenge. I had always been an avid reader and interested in any subject in the humanities and so to pursue graduate studies seemed logical, though maybe not very practical.
With financial markets computerized and everyone speaking English—isn’t business “just business” now? Having been in business for so long, I can tell the students how much culture does matter. Business is about relationships. The fact that I could speak German, and another financial adviser couldn’t, often made a big difference, not so much because of the language but because of my ability to understand German culture. In today’s world, global barriers are coming down in some ways, but cultural barriers are still rampant. Intercultural understanding and learning a foreign language are actually even more important. Learning a foreign language is an essential gateway to understanding the world we live in. So what’s your next career? I can see myself teaching and pursuing research until I retire. I’m always thinking about new things to do. I just finished a book about German visions of India at the end of the 19th century. Germans had become fascinated with India at the beginning of the 19th century because of the discovery of linguistic links between Sanskrit and European languages including German. My
D. LAWRENCE PHOTO
Myers: My undergraduate majors were history and business administration—the possibility of an academic career was never on my radar screen. I went on for an M.B.A. and then I decided to go to Germany and take a four-month language course. I didn’t speak a word of German when I arrived the first time. I came back to the U.S., worked in a bank for a year, tried pre-med for a year, and then decided to go back to Germany, study some more language, and look for a job. Before going, I went to the U.S. consulate in Houston, and they told me, “You’re crazy. . . . You’ll never find a job.” After six months I was out of money and had to call my parents for a plane ticket home. That was on a Thursday; the next Monday I got a job offer in the financial services industry and stayed for 11 years.
After having begun his professional career in Germany, Perry Myers returns there each summer with his family while he pursues his current research on 19th-century German culture and history. These sojourns to Germany, which include visits with his wife’s family, keep him in tune with the country and provide his two daughters, who are both fluent in German, with unique cultural experiences.
book studies how German intellectuals later in the century and into the twentieth contemplated their own cultural, religious, and political concerns by mirroring them through their perceptions of India. This has been a fascinating project for me because it shows how our views of others in virtually any context are powerfully colored by our own subjective needs and concerns, just like these Germans a century ago.
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