Confessions of a Cat-holic (213)

By the end of the second week, we met again with Vic Garber. Amanda was also there. The good news was that all the interns got a salary raise. The starting salary for analysts across all the banks, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Lehman, Citi, Bear Stearns, etc was 55K. It was industry standard and we had no room for negotiations. It was a public secret, it really was that transparent. Every Ivy League student, even if you were some sort of a quant MIT genius, got paid the same. There was no such thing as a relocation package, unlike the common Hong Kong practice. Hong Kong natives who had lived under a well for their entire life would not understand this. As a matter of fact, expats in New York were often exploited because of their alien status. Whether it was finance, IT, marketing, PR, or design, international hires were often paid 50% lower than industry standards because the employers knew that they needed the sponsorship for their green card. Aliens would die to get a pay cut to stay in United States, even for a stressful job. This widely known universal truth might be hugely ignored and deemed incomprehensible by those who never left the pacific island. I was really tired of Hong Kong natives looking at the payroll system in New York with a local-island lens and perspective.

I never knew of anyone privileged enough to get paid more than the common starting salary. If they were an over-performing star analyst, they might get a good bonus, as fair as that. As I said, I never wanted to stand out or get paid differently, so I was pretty content with my 55K standard salary. Goldman's offer was the worst, it was somewhere around 50K when I was a junior. Again, Goldman liked to be different. They paid and treated their staff worse than industry average, everyone knew that in New York. My offer from Citibank and JP Morgan was the same as Morgan Stanley. Really, major banks usually differentiated their pay in discretionary bonuses. Same as law firms. The industry standard for a law school graduate in the top law firms in New York was 160K per annum, back when I worked at Skadden. They only gave you relocation allowance if you worked in an outpost.

Vic Garber added 5K as a stipend to our annual salary package, which would add up to 60K per annum. I didn't even receive my first paycheck yet and I already received a salary raise, so I really could not complain. After tax and rent, I might be able to even afford a shopping trip down in Soho every two weeks. I was pleasantly surprised with the incentive. I was not paid anything less or more than my peers, even though deep down I wanted a job cushier than that on the trading floor.

So we signed a few paper works and received a new offer agreement. The salary on my offer package was no longer 55K, it was 60K in total, around 5K more than industry standard across all the bulge bracket banks. Vic promptly signed and approved our new contracts at the meeting.

I quickly called my mom about my pay raise. She asked me if she needed to wire me with more cash. I reassured her that I should be fine by myself. I wanted to live independently as a grown up with ambivalent emotions. I had worked at Morgan Stanley long enough to observe that this career and this internship looked like a bitter sweet symphony. I was mindful of what lay ahead of me.

The next Monday, we had to go to another desk as part of the rotational program. Vic Garber said that he wanted us to stay on one desk for the entire summer, just long enough to experience how it felt like to be a full time analyst, while also learning about other products through rotation. The rotation required the interns to leave their desk for an afternoon to sit with the manager of another group to shadow his work.

My first orientation was the foreign exchange desk, where my acquaintance Cyrena Chih had worked. I was introduced to Cyrena by our common friend, Ronald Po from Capstone Prep. Ronald, a Canadian who knew Hong Kong well, introduced me also to Caecilia Chu from St Mary's and Wharton/HBS.