By ALEX WILLIAMS

Before Nicole Wong took a job as an analyst at JPMorgan Chase after graduating in 2001 from Brown University in Rhode Island, she wasn’t exactly sure what one did every day as a junior financier.
“I really entered the industry not knowing what the heck people did,” she said.
But that hardly seemed to matter. To her, Wall Street was where the action was. Inspired by books like “Liar’s Poker” and movies like “Wall Street,” she thought a career in financial services would be an adventure as much as a vocation.
And for a time, that’s what it was. Days spent working on multimillion-dollar trades were followed by lavish nights entertaining clients at hot restaurants. It was a challenging but exhilarating life, “and somebody else was picking up the tab,” said Ms. Wong, 28. “ This is why I moved to New York.”
And, yes, the money was good.
But after the latest turmoil in the financial sector, she is not sure Wall Street life will be the same any time soon. “Even if you do have clients to take out, you’re not going to be spending as much,” said Ms. Wong, whose position selling mortgagebacked securities for UBS was eliminated in spring. “This is definitely going to suck the fun out of the industry.”
And perhaps not only the fun.
The most recent generation of Wall Street strivers, those in their 20s, arrived in a boomtown where money was seemingly being minted in hedge funds and private equity, and investment banks were paying huge bonuses. Now, thousands of layoffs loom , and even when recovery comes, profits will most likely be lower, bonuses smaller and regulation tighter.
“There was so much optimism,” said Delilah Rothenberg, 25, an associate at Bear Stearns until it collapsed in March, who now works at a private equity firm. Even recently, she added, investment professionals in their 20s “were buying all kinds of luxuries on credit because they expected the money to keep coming in: watches, cars, apartments, boats.”
Last year, a first-year Wall Street investment banking analyst made $125,000 to $150,000, including bonuses, according to Options Group, a recruiting and consulting firm . In the future, said Michael Karp, the company’s chief executive, bonuses will be “substantially lower in investment banking as well as many other areas.”
Young traders and bankers were willing to endure long workdays and high stress to taste a rarefied New York life, said Dr. Rosalind S. Dorlen, a psychologist in Summit, New Jersey, who sees Wall Street workers in her practice. “There is something nice about being king,” she said, describing the mind-set of young Wall Street players. “The sense of power, the sense of omnipotence, the sense of testosterone. ”
Such swagger meant Wall Street hotshots were never beloved figures on the cultural landscape. The protagonists of movies and books like “American Psycho” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” tended to be narcissistic jerks . But their industry helped reinvent a nearly bankrupt New York in the 1970s, the writer Kurt Andersen said: Wall Street highfliers, and the huge sums of money they brought, rebranded the city from a tired postindustrial necropolis to a 21st-century financial dynamo.
That is New York today. Or it was. From September 2007 to June, the city’s financial services sector shed 9,200 jobs, according to the state comptroller. Analysts say thousands more may disappear.
That makes business students very wary. Steven Song, 29, who recently left a job at a hedge fund, runs a volunteer group that provides guidance to college undergraduates who aspire to work in finance. Several students he works with have expressed reservations about pursuing jobs on Wall Street .
“There are fewer banks out there now, and each one that’s out there remaining is hiring fewer people,” he said.