Take Two.(The Talk of the Town)(JumpStart NYC for laid-off wall streeters)

On a recent weekday morning, a laid-off trading-floor worker and a laid-off control officer were sitting in the basement of the Levin Institute, a business school in a town house on East Fifty-fifth Street, drinking coffee and talking about life after Wall Street. They were both in their forties and were wearing oxford-cloth shirts and khakis.

"I've been out since November," Andrew Lubow, who had been at the Bank of New York Mellon, said. "November was dead. January was beyond dead--it was ten feet under. The job search only really began in February."

"I was laid off in September," Ed Keever said. "Oppenheimer & Co." He had found work at a friend's company, removing mold from office buildings. "It was very manual," he said. "You have to wear a mask and sometimes a full Tyvek suit. We looked like the men from Mars." He paused. "When I was little, I wanted to be a dentist."

The men were participants in JumpStart NYC, a free, government-funded program that is training laid-off Wall Streeters for new careers, the idea being that, even if you've come to terms with no paycheck, trying to do business without a Barron's subscription or a Bloomberg terminal can take some getting used to. The hope is that the program's graduates, after their attitude makeovers, will join startup companies. Tom Moebus, the school's development director, had sorted through almost two hundred applications for the fifty spots, and he thought the candidates showed an encouraging degree of self-knowledge ("My strengths lie in customer service/support. My other big strength is in being a 'right hand man' "); goal-setting ("I now hope to start a brewery in New York"); and introspection (a former trader: "Having spent several years following the foot soldiers of Wall Street, head-to-toe, I find myself at the focal point of self-reflection. Where am I? What am I doing? . . . These are questions tattooed into my psyche").

It was Day Three of boot camp: each student was supposed to practice managing the budget for a pretend startup company. (The second phase of the program is an unpaid internship.) Lubow and Keever put down their coffee and joined the other students in an auditorium. The teacher was Chris Trimble, from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "We're going to get you right into some fast-paced decision-making!" he said. He walked to a whiteboard and drew a series ...