Confessions of a Cat-holic (211)

Vic Gaber said during our orientation week that the interns should strictly follow industry practices. In his words, it would be "do in Rome as the Romans do". Sanjay had a private conversation in his room on the first day. He told me that sales and traders were not allowed to use or browse their phones on the trading floor unless it was an emergency. The fact that I checked my phone on the trading floor was hugely unprofessional and it looked really bad, almost like committing a crime or something. It was common practice on Wall Street to keep cell phones off from work. Obviously, they didn't want us to be approached by competitors or headhunters. But the major reason for that was that the markets were so active during the day that we hardly had time for distractions.

So I kept my phone perpetually away from my workstation. I could only carry my cell phone with me when I went to the bathroom. I didn't even have the time to poop in the office for this freaking job.

I learned to be smarter in the next few days. I no longer wore a skirt to work. Instead, I was in a pair of work pants. At the end of every week, on Friday late afternoon at 3pm, Vic Garber would give a speech and meet with the interns in summary of our weekly progress. All the interns within the fixed income division had to be present, no excuses allowed. Vic said to all the interns that finance was in essence a "people business". He encouraged us to mingle and initiate talks with our respective bosses. He said a conversation with our senior managers would never hurt. He also added that we were in good hands at Morgan Stanley. Each of us was handpicked by Vic Garber, and placed in our divisions according to our strengths and experience. As a matter of fact, our HR manager, Amanda received over 10,000 resumes for every opening. We were the very selected few among the most competitive. There were only around 20 people in our intern class that year, as opposed to Goldman's 390 in fixed income alone. Vic Garber said that all the interns were given a return offer in the previous years, and we were no different. He assured us that we had nothing to worry about. He wanted us to succeed and thrive.

I was very naive at the time and I really believed what I was told, as a fresh grad with not much work experience. Well, they said that fooled once, shame on you; fooled twice, shame on me. Fooled three times, I would need to check my brain. Really, I was not perfect. I made mistakes. And I believed that things like love and work could bring me fortune. I did, I really did believe so. I still worked hard at the time. I didn't want to be all jaded by my early twenties.

So I went back to my desk, being all chatty and stuff. I talked to Sanjay and his junior. Well, I sat right between them as you could tell. I told Sanjay that I learned how to use the Bloomberg machine in my previous job and that I helped my team execute trades issuing order tickets and stuff. I said my responsibilities included calculating repo rates, and I knew how to formulate the dates (which included backdating and forwards) and determining the margins and collaterals for the agreement. I told him that my clients were the central banks of Asia, including the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and China. I also followed the treasury auction schedule closely. I sometimes had to stay until New York market opened to place orders for the clients. I told Sanjay that my fellow intern from Lehman, David Sheng from Princeton, was about to start as a full time analyst at Morgan Stanley Fixed Income in New York. We were good friends and buddies back in the summer at Lehman. He even asked me to play tennis with him in my club house with a bunch of other interns from the firm.

As I said, Sanjay didn't like talking. Within a few seconds I initiated the conversation, he left his desk and asked his junior to man the Bloomberg for him. I didn't know where he went and it was so abrupt that I felt like I said something wrong.