Predictably, the technology-banking group had almost no work. Also, I was not a good fit with Merrill’s very conservative, very competitive culture. I felt as if I’d decided to intern with a mathematically gifted baboon tribe, and I’m sure they were just as puzzled by me. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get a full-time offer. Having learned my lesson, I very sensibly turned around and took a full-time job upon graduation at … a technology-strategy consultancy. I got laid off even before the bankers.

And they were laid off in droves, along with the consultants and aspiring dot-com employees; during my first year or two in New York, my recollection is that at least half my classmates there lost their jobs. Ten years later, only a few of the people I spoke with were still where they’d started out.

How could we have failed to notice the danger? You know how: It’s the same reason your cousin bought that 16-room McMansion on an option ARM. Everyone else had been doing it for years, with seemingly stellar results. Why wouldn’t we follow in such successful footsteps?

We paid for our naïveté, though. A surprising number of my classmates acknowledge that if it hadn’t been for the 2001 recession (or the even bigger one in 2008), their careers would probably look very different. Multiple studies indicate the same thing: when you graduate really matters. Graduate into a bull market and you’re more likely to get a job, and to get a job that pays well. Graduate into a bear market and you’ll end up with less choice and a lower salary. Moreover, these differences persist: one study of Stanford M.B.A.s shows that even 20 years later, the average salary of a class that graduated into a bear market was still lower than those of classes that had graduated into an equity boom, when high-paying finance jobs tend to be more plentiful. Unemployment can affect your earnings anytime, but according to another study of undergraduates, the earlier it happens, the worse it is, with the most-serious impact on people who suffered an “employment shock” during that critical first year, when skills are gained and résumés burnished.

Exactly how big was the shock we experienced? At the time, it felt like “the worst thing in the world,” to quote a classmate. But however bad the shock was for us, I assumed the current group must be suffering something even worse. After all, the dot-com crash was theatrical, but economically mild; GDP dropped by less than half a percentage point, and unemployment reached 6.3 percent. By contrast, between the second quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009, GDP dropped by 5 percent; by late 2009, more than 10 percent of the labor force was out of work.

On the Monday after the reunion, I tested my hypothesis on Julie Morton, the associate dean for career services and corporate relations at Booth. To my surprise, she disagreed. It wasn’t just our adolescent imaginations: my class and the one after it were hit harder than any of the others before or since.

In part that’s because the worst of the layoffs occurred in that critical first year of our careers. But of course, that also happened to the class of 2008. No, the real reason we suffered such attrition is that we had herded ourselves like deranged lemmings into the financial sector. “Forty-one percent of your class went into banking,” Morton told me. That’s an astonishing proportion, though it didn’t seem so at the time, when employment in the securities industry was near its peak and the banks were so flush that Merrill Lynch flew us to Nantucket on a private jet for a recruiting event. When the money went away, so did a lot of those jobs.