Confessions of a Cat-holic (185)

I thought the bootcamp thing was just a name tag, like super day, nothing too ominous. I had also been warned by an NYU graduate who came up to me at Barnes and Noble to share with me his traumatic experiences working in World Trade Center during 9/11. In order to escape for life, he had to walk down 42 floors of stairs down World Trade Center when the national disaster happened. He could not work anymore after that. Again, I overlooked the implications about what it meant to work with the brightest and most competitive people on Wall Street. I didn't know I was stepping into a war zone by agreeing to devoting myself into a banking career. I thought whatever PTSD and psychological harms he suffered was an outlier and standalone case; statistically speaking, I told myself I should look at the bigger picture. If the majority of my peers at Columbia ended up at Wall Street and did okay, I should too.

I had to admit that I went through hell that junior summer but now that I looked back, I would say that my traumatic experience didn't start at the commencement of my internship. It was earlier than that. I went through the first round of interviews on campus at the Career Education Center. Interestingly, I had been asked the same question again and again by different interviewers across different divisions from Morgan Stanley about how I handled pressure. I could not miss it anymore; they were hinting to me that the job was hard to handle and it was a challenging and tough environment at Morgan Stanley. The prime brokerage guys asked me that; the institutional equities guys asked me that; the fixed income guys asked me that. In the end, I was invited for a super day interview by the fixed income department.

I went through a series of 9 interviews in a row. I was grilled by different MDs on the trading floor on one single day. I was asked a bunch of quantitative questions such as cracking the square root of 2000 on the spot. My interviewers from my first round of interviews helped me prepare for these brain teaser questions in advance so there was nothing too unexpected and I did okay. They asked me questions on mathematical programming that was related to the optimization process with the use of setting constraints and solving objectives. The parameters I suggested were straight forward but they said that I was missing a gigantic piece of information; that was risk. He said that risks were a big component when looking at process optimization in finance. Okay, so I said I learned something new that day, and I thanked them for that. I was then interrogated by Bjarne Stroustrup with a bunch of questions regarding the application of Matlab and C coding. This guy was the inventor of C++. He was a big shot in coding. Even for a tech-idiot like me, I had heard his name and his works well before I met him in person. It was known to me that Morgan Stanley had the best people in information technology on Wall Street and I was impressed.

Then a forex (foreign exchange) senior MD asked me a bunch of mathematics questions that involved exponential growth and probability. He said that the foliage grew at a rate of doubling itself every day. If it took a year to fill up the whole pond, when was it that it was half filled? I told him the day before, almost within a second I was asked the question. He said he was very impressed with my response and that I was the only one of the 200 candidates who could answer that correctly on the spot. But it was just my high school mathematical problems I learned in textbook. I was good at memorizing solutions so it really wasn't that big of a deal. It was like those riddle gags and brain teasers, once you learned the trick and the punch line, you would remember forever.

At the end of the super day, I was taken to my interviewer who was the only Asian American on the trading floor to anticipate the results. He was the managing director for trading distressed bonds. He told me he worked in Hong Kong briefly a decade ago and that it was a fun time.