Confessions of a Cat-holic (170)

Bei Aixinjueluo, who was obviously the descendant of the Qing dynasty royalty, graduated from Columbia University's Journalism School and School of International and Political Affairs. She had been working as an anchor for different broadcasting channels, including the NBC, since then.

On a personal level, my friend, Sixuan Li, was a year below me from Columbia College. She was most recently an anchor at CCTV. Sixuan had had extensive experience in conducting high-level interviews with world leaders, business executives and entrepreneurs, leading special coverage reports at the G20 Summit, APEC, BRICS summit, etc. She had also been a regular moderator of TV sessions and panels for Annual Meetings of the World Economic Forum, BoAo Forum for Asia, China Development Forum, etc. Prior to joining CCTV, Sixuan had been a correspondent for CNBC Business News for 3 years. Before her career in television, Sixuan had worked as an investment professional at KKR Private Equity and Lehman Brothers Private Equity. She also had investment banking experience at UBS AG and JPMorgan Securities. Sixuan graduated from Columbia University in the city of New York with a B.A. degree in Economics and Mathematics. She served as 1 of 11 global youth advisors of United Nations Environmental Programme and ran ultra-marathons.

Sixuan and I were both part of the SEO program which helped place undergraduate students from colleges across United States into various bulge bracket investment banks. Notable alumni of the SEO program included Jennifer Yu, the founder of the Arch Education and the wife of Adrian Cheng, CEO of New World HK, and Chris Yu, the brother of Jennifer Yu from Brown University.

So indeed, only in New York City, that I no longer felt like the big fish in a small pond. Surrounded by fascinating students and alumni in one of the world's greatest university located in Manhattan, the home of many historic projects including the making of atomic bombs in World War II, I had learned to be humble whilst in collaboration with the diverse talents of my alma mater. I even wrote about this "big fish in a small pond" theory for my SEO application, which ultimately placed me into Lehman Brothers as a fixed income sales in Asia, working alongside with the city's most experienced bond sales team.

But I had to say that my tastes for guys had changed gradually over time, mostly as a result from peer influence, or I would better phrase it this way, "peer pressure".

At the start of my first semester at Columbia, I discussed briefly with my roommate Hannah Temple about the best looking guys on campus. I gave her a few names, Tom Fazzio, Jared Were, the student council elected members were incredibly good looking I said. But Hannah said they were too plastic. She preferred guys who were more like Paul Rudd, the sad-looking type with a bit of sex appeal. And actually, you know what, I kind of agreed with her too. The guys from the student council were too plastic.

Kelly said I should convert. She kept on feeding me with information about Wong Leehom, like he was a perfect score 1600 on SAT and that he graduated from Williams College with a degree in music, which was exactly the biggest turn off for me. I disliked head boys too. None of those academic honors and awards mattered to me. I told her I was not particularly fond of Leehom but I didn't find him unpleasant either. But she said Jay Chou was better. After sharing an iPod with her and a bunk bed with her for more than four years, guess what, she said I finally converted to like Jay Chou and not Wong Leehom.

I had to admit that Eddie was not the type of guys I was particularly attracted to in the beginning. I remembered I found Kenneth Yu good looking, the young looking, pale skinned with small eyes type. It was really silly. I really needed to thank Kelly for correcting my preferences in guys' looks. Kenneth was most recently a managing director at Accenture after graduating from Columbia's electrical engineering department. He still looked kind of young, for his age.