The Bowdoin Orient

November 17, 2000
Volume CXXXII, Number 10

Druckenmiller encourages students to take risks

by Jane Hummer, STAFF WRITER

   Investment banker and familiar Bowdoin alumnus Stanley Druckenmiller ’75 spoke to a large crowd in Morrell Lounge at last Friday’s Common Hour. His speech started with a brief history of how he ended up at Bowdoin and his first impressions of the College.
    Unlike most of his classmates at a private high school in Virginia, Druckenmiller chose to look beyond the University of Virginia, and decided to attend Bowdoin on the advice of an English teacher. He described his arrival at Bowdoin as a “profound culture shock” to a self-proclaimed “hick from Virginia.”
    He emphasized the benefits he gained from learning to take risks while at Bowdoin.
    “The key to my Bowdoin experience was I ventured outside my comfort zone in both the curriculum as well as the personal.”
    He originally wanted to be an English professor, but after taking an introductory economics course during his junior year, he decided to double major in English and economics.
    Druckenmiller stressed how much he learned from the wide variety of friendships that he cultivated at Bowdoin, saying, “I milked the diversity of the student body for all it was worth.”
    He described experiences such as visiting a rough section of New York with a Latino friend and visiting a gay bar in Portland with a homosexual as critical learning experiences. His group of friends included people from all racial backgrounds, socioeconomic levels, and political schools of thought and interests.
    Druckenmiller then spoke about Bowdoin’s contribution to his success in the financial world.
    He said that he believes that the fact that he never took a business course actually helped him, saying, “There are no specific facts I learned in any classes that I drew upon subsequently to enhance my performance in navigating the financial markets….
    “The markets have changed so dramatically over the 25 years that any ‘answer’ I might have learned may have resulted in an inflexibility or a lack of open mindedness to change that could have been disastrous.”
    He said that his liberal arts education taught him the critical thinking and problem solving skills and the openness to new ideas necessary to keep one step ahead of the financial markets’ fluctuations.
    “Anticipation of change is the number one ingredient to success in the financial markets.” After dropping out of a Ph.D. program in economics at University of Michigan, Druckenmiller began his career on Wall Street on the advice that he shouldn’t expect to get rich but that he would “love the intellectual stimulation.”
    At the age of 26, he became the youngest vice president in the history of the Pittsburgh National Bank. After one year of managing their $6 billion Trust Department, he decided to start his own investment firm, against the advice of his superiors, saying that he “was starting to feel intellectual stagnation and had learned at Bowdoin not to be afraid of the unknown but to seek it out and flourish from it.”
    He founded the Duquesne Capital firm. After successfully surviving the stock market crash of ’87, he was hailed as the “heir apparent to the Dreyfus empire.” He ignored the advice of his advisors, once again, to stay with Dreyfus, and instead jumped into the global markets and accepted a job with George Soros.
    Soros was known for having fired eight partners in seven years, and Druckenmiller said, “To tell you the truth, I figured I would be fired but not before I got the equivalent of a Ph.D. in global markets. The next 12 years took me on a magical intellectual journey….
    “It is a pure coincidence that the financial rewards have been so ridiculous in a job I truly love and would have been perfectly happy in had they been much less.”
    Druckenmiller then spoke on the obligation of “those of us who have reaped disproportionate benefits” to become active philanthropists, not to just “blindly write checks but to take the distribution of those gains very seriously.”
    He and his wife concentrate their philanthropic resources in four areas: youth development in at-risk areas, worldwide human rights, cancer and infectious diseases, and education.
    “One of the biggest jokes in our society is the praise and awards heaped on philanthropists. What else are we going to do with the money-take it to our coffin?”
    Druckenmiller expressed his genuine admiration for Geoffrey Canada ‘74 and his work at the Rheedlen Center in Harlem, and said that not everyone was cut out for that sort of “in the trenches” work.
    He advised students to keep in mind that “when you leave this place, there are many ways to serve the common good…., whether you do public service work, join the medical profession, whatever; but for many of you, it may be working in a field that provides outsized financial renumeration. If so, I urge you to fund the Geoff Canadas of the world, not just for society but for yourself.”
    He concluded by saying that the more that students learn to take risks while at Bowdoin, the more they will be able to make the smart career choices later on that will allow them to be in a position to make the maximum contribution to the common good.