With economic worries prevailing after bank buyouts and news of falling stock values on Wall Street, John Lapp, professor of economics, said it will be more difficult for students to get jobs after graduation.

“They will probably have to be pretty realistic about what opportunities there are or be less choosy than they would be in more generous times,” he said.

Lapp said the job climate will be especially difficult for those students in the financial sector, like Cayla Jablonski, a senior in business administration.

Jablonski said she is interested in finance, but she is concerned she will have to settle for a job in retail.

“It will be more competitive in the job market, so more people will have to go to grad school,” Jablonski said.

She will try to get a job before considering graduate school, she said, but she could also move into public relations if there are no options for her in finance. Lapp said businesses will still be hiring new workers.

“Firms are always looking for new blood,” he said. “It’d be easy to overstate this thing. There may be fewer jobs than there were a couple years ago.”

Banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms are likely to hire less people, Lapp said, and these are some of the traditional routes for people in the College of Management.

“There’s surely going to be less activity in those fields than there has been in the recent past,” he said.

But when firms are worried about their finances, Lapp said, they are more reluctant to take on new employees, so hiring rates will be lower.

The banking crisis, in which the government has begun bailing out large investment banks to help secure the market, has made investors “scared stiff,” but Lapp said people should not immediately worry about the stock market.

“One thing to keep in mind is that by its very nature, the stock market tends to go up and down a lot more on a daily basis than it moves on a monthly or annual basis,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of sound and fury that doesn’t mean much.”

David Vanpelt, a senior in mechanical engineering, has a part-time job with the Department of Transportation, and said he is not concerned about job prospects because of his fields of interest.

“Considering I’m looking into energy production and resources and government jobs, it’s going to be pretty secure lines of work,” he said. “There’s a very vastly growing need for energy engineers. There are almost definitely going to be spots open in my field, so I’m not too worried about getting a job or having financial difficulties for too long after college.”Students will need to prepare earlier in their search for jobs, Lapp said, because of the availability of jobs.

David Nussman, a senior in finance, said he had planned to return to his hometown of Charlotte after graduation to try to work for Bank of America, but with the current banking situation, competition may be too heavy for that.

“It’s going to be so competitive that you’ve got to have second options and apply to a wide variety of places, kind of like applying to college,” he said. “[You] have to have a fallback plan.”Vanpelt and Nussman said they started internships the summer before their senior years, and emphasized the need to meet people with job opportunities.