Confessions of a Cat-holic (214)

Ronald Po was the guy who reaffirmed me that if everything failed, I could still work as a SAT tutor and earn a very good pay. Ronald owned a Ferrari / Porsche and lived in Lavotto. He was living a very comfortable life, apparently. He had a degree from MIT and UChicago but I believed he obtained his first undergraduate degree in Canada.

I met him in freshman summer when I volunteered to help him out in a college admissions info session but he still insisted to give me a $500 stipend. He invited Caecilia and Cyrena as well. That was how I officially met them. I had had a particularly fond impression of Caecilia because she went to my sister school, St Mary's Canossian College. She was a scholar of the HKSAF (me too). That scholarship was very selective. All of the scholars had to obtain 7As or above in HKCEE. Not only that, I also found Caecilia's resemblance to the porn star Veronica Yip very amusing. Edmond looked very much like Norman Cheung Lap Gay. And Norman and Veronica were a real life couple back in the 90s. I watched ATV, hey.

Caecilia worked in Citibank's banking division before moving onto consulting. Edmond kept saying that she had committed a crime or something for not staying in banking. That was something weird that I observed about the banking world. If the interns didn't stay in corporate finance, or decided to switch to consulting after a banking internship, it was widely thought that they must have done something irreversible, like sleeping with the boss or offending the entire industry. That was why I was not very persistent about applying to consulting after Lehman's collapse. I doubted whether consulting would take me, because I looked like a complete failure with a reputation of earning my pay through sleeping with my clients and the CEO of Lehman to get the entire China sales department fired. That was a sales team of around 20 people, all from Ivy League colleges with 10+ years experience in the markets. I was quite sure that consulting would not want to take a banking drop out to make them look bad apparently. I believed that the simple minds liked to keep the rumor mills churning for a while. In Chinese, it would be that famous line in the movie, 讓子彈飛一會兒.

Caecilia went to HBS shortly after. With a degree from Wharton undergrad and HBS, her resume was impeccable, even more astonishing than Edmond's. For some odd reasons, Edmond always poked fun of her, saying that she was flirting with 倉底貨 and 觀音兵 when we saw her with a guy in Sogo one time. He didn't know that the Canossian family was tight-knit like that. Women sometimes did support women, especially within the Canossian family. I found Edmond's bitter and disparaging comments about women very disturbing.

Most recently, Caecilia had started her own start up, Youtrip in Singapore. Now that she was in fin tech, I believed she was on a career track much more sustainable than banking.

Cyrena Chih majored in Financial Engineering and Operations Research at Princeton. That was very much like our IEOR program at Columbia. At the time, I was 60-70% sure I wanted to go into business and Operations Research was definitely my top choice. Vincent Yu from St Paul's Co-educational College in my class also majored in FEOR. Unlike Princeton, Columbia subdivided that into OR and FE within the same IEOR department. The IEOR department class was crouching tiger hidden dragon, meaning that they had a lot of hidden gems in there. The professors were mostly from MIT and Cornell. And then we sent almost 90% of the graduates into finance and consulting. It would be the 工商管理 department for Columbia undergrad, because Columbia didn't have an undergrad business school, unlike Stern of NYU or Wharton of UPenn. Eddie matriculated at the IEOR department, and he was one of the major reasons why I wanted to declare OR as my major. In hindsight, he should have taken computer engineering, and me biomedical or chemical engineering.

Cyrena was a very nice and friendly girl. She was a Taiwanese girl from Hong Kong and she went to HKIS. She looked like Aimee Chan and/or Tang Wei.