Confessions of a Cat-holic (205)

The bootcamp lasted for around a week. I would say that it was quite eventful. Over the course of our one-week orientation, the interns were asked to sign no less than 10 legal documents. The paperwork was standard, in New York's terms. It started with an agreement to waive my rights to sue the company if I died at the job, which was very similar to those 生死狀 before I opted for a bungee jump. I was literally prepared to end my life for a freaking summer internship that didn't even pay that much. All the interns were obliged to buy insurance to void the company's risks in working the staff to death. Also, with that insurance package, the interns were also entitled to disability indemnity that covered around over 60 conditions, including 50+ kinds of cancers, loss of mobile abilities, strokes, heart attacks, loss of vision, loss of hearing and other rare diseases.

This really got me thinking: gosh, would I die from this internship? Seriously, I was not willing to give up my life with freaking 55K annual salary, which pro rata would be 4500 USD a month pre tax. After tax, it would be something like 3000 USD. Honestly, 3000 USD would not even suffice to pay my rents in NYU after social security.

Another legal document that I was asked to sign was to authorize the company to use my portrait photo for administrative uses and/or marketing. The US legislation stated that if I found my face appearing in the company's marketing brochures or prospectus, I could have asked for copyright fees. By signing that document, Morgan Stanley was then entitled to use my photos for any uses and/or publicity without any consequences.

In addition to that, we also had to agree to waive the rights to withhold all private information when they conducted a background check, which meant that I could do nothing about it if Morgan Stanley decided to seek my grade 1 class teacher for a job recommendation. Basically, they could do whatever the wanted, in terms of digging up my privacy in the name of HR due diligence. That should tell you how nit-picky New York could be when compared to Hong Kong.

Our fingerprints were also collected so they could make sure they could hunt us down if any crimes happened within the firm. Fair enough, I lived in Harlem, New York. I didn't want to die from a murder or a rape in the office as much as I was prepared to get in jail if they wanted me to.

And that was just a starter, with only more to come. During our training sessions, we were given a talk on the sensitivity of our job nature: we were made aware that the information that we dealt with on a daily basis, aka the CRM, the size of the deals, the parties involved in securitization, the book runners and the syndicates of the bond offerings, was highly confidential. Every form and agreement we were asked to sign had to be strictly between the firm and the candidate, meaning that we could not disclose the details of these contractual documents, even after we left the firm. Whether we were in sales, or trading, or IBD, or ECM, or DCM, we were asked to never disclose any information about any deals that Morgan Stanley had a stake in. We were warned that we could be sued for leaking any confidential information about the firm and its business even if we were not given a return offer for a full time position.

Another form required us to acknowledge that all communicative materials, including the internal chats, verbal conversations, text messages and emails on the office terminals, were the properties of Morgan Stanley and that Morgan Stanley reserved the rights to use these communicative materials against us should any disputes occurred. Yeah, so Morgan Stanley was saying that they monitored and recorded everything that happened within the office and they could use such information to sue us if necessary. It could be a sexual harassment complaint or anything that went against the firm's interests.

Was that it, you might ask? No, not just that. The best was yet to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67a_sfCeZW8