Tonite, tonite

Time is never time at all… believe, believe in me…Billy Corgan is in charge of inspiring me tonite.

Stressful times are over. The awful week is gone. Outcome? A grade above the average in Finance (not good enough to get an A, though), a good Firms & Markets exam (waiting for the grade) and a big failure in Stats ( I was really f*?#ed up!!!). But the week is over. One of the toughest weeks of these two years, as people keep telling us, is gone. Nice to see so.

To celebrate properly I have gone out tonight. It’s nearly 4 am and I have just arrived at my place. We have spent the night at Hotel Gansevoort, Meatpacking district. I really hate how uptight Meatpacking is. You are either ready to pay 300 bucks for a bottle at a popular club or you go with some chicks. Otherwise you won’t make it inside. That’s why I prefer the Village, no strict rules. In any case, tonight it was three of us and we finally made it through Hotel Gansevoort’s bouncers. Great choice. 13th or 14th floor, amazing eye-views, good looking chicks...the downside the expensive drinks. Around 80 bucks for 5 Jackies and coke. I am not still used to how easy it is to talk to American girls. It’s even easier when you say that you have spent some time in Barcelona. It’s like that Friends’ episode about going backpacking to Barcelona when Rachel hits on Ross following Joey’s techniques…good fun!

I really needed a night to stress out. I am glad I have been able to go through the first hurdle. I guess now I will have some more spare time to focus on my career search and to paint New York red from Monday to Friday. I do not want to be very optimistic though, since workflow keeps coming and never stops…

My mom is coming next week. It will be a fun experience to see her around. I know she’s really excited about this trip and I just hope she won’t be coming back home disappointed.

I am going to get some sleep. Tomorrow I am waking up early for our soccer practice. The UCLA tournament is getting closer and I need to get a littler fitter. So it is the "Gotham Cup" next week vs Columbia - we kicked their ass in Yale a couple of weeks ago. After a few weeks of hard work I can hardly remember what working out means....

Portishead's Dummy tells me that it is now time to go to bed.

I'll keep you posted.

Ciao

Stressful days (II)

After yesterday night’s “digression” I am back to reality. In fact, reality is about to provide me with my first proper Stern exam in around ten hours. The Firms & Markets (i.e. microeconomics) mid-term exam is gonna test me seriously for the first time at Stern. I think I´m ready. Hope I’m right!

Tuesday will be the Finance day. Another mid-term. We have been told that it is probably the tougher exam we will be facing in the first year, so I better get ready. I have almost covered all the stuff but I will have to make good use of the time tomorrow evening.

Then, a Stats quiz on Wednesday and the take-home mid term exam for Strategy due Friday. After that, it will be time to paint the town red, for sure!

The last two weeks have been intense from an academic standpoint. Lots of assignments, time constraints and so forth. Anyway, the end of October – and the most demanding time in biz school for me – is just around the corner.

But let’s forget about academics for a while. I want to tell you about the trip to Yale a week ago. Maybe I have watched to many American movies from the eighties and early nineties but one things I really wanted to do before coming to the US was becoming part of one sport team from school. In my case, it’s been football (i.e. soccer). On 6 October six of us hired a van in midtown and left for the Yale Cup. After a two hour ride we arrived in New Haven – quiet town that, don’t ask me why, reminded me of Back to the future’s town – had dinner and partied for a couple of hours with some locals. It was funny though, b/c we met some chicks in the street and we managed to make it through the VIP line of a popular club with them.

On Saturday morning we woke up early, had breakfast, bought Gatorade and water for everybody and around 830 am the rest of the guys arrived from NY in another van. Three games later we were classified four quarter finals (including a great victory over Columbia in the NY derby). We were pretty optimistic at that point.

On Saturday evening we had dinner at an Italian restaurant (where they served us the hugest courses I’ve ever seen – one guy ordered mussels and they brought him, I don’t know, maybe 3 kg….). The atmosphere was great. Btw, it was my birthday and we celebrate it with some singing and stuff.

Sunday morning. Ready for action. However, all our illusions vanished when the guys from Yale Med School kicked our ass. Pretty easily to be honest.No much else to say. Back to NY and end of the trip. Our next step will be UCLA in around a month. I can’t believe I am gonna make it west!!!!! I'll have to skim through Kerouac's On the road before departing (although I will be travelling by plane, the feeling is still there!) I’m sure it will be great again. The team’s camaraderie and atmospehere was excellent and playing in LA will be kind of a dream.

Ok, I am gonna finish here. Gotta get some good sleep to be fit for tomorrow’s challenge. I’ll tell you about this week’s performance in future posts. Ciao

Drunken confessions

Amour et degout. This is the song by Souvenir that I am listeningo to right now. And I can feel inside “degout” rather than any other thing. I was supposed to wake up in around half an hour to go on to the Multiple Sclerosis trek ( a bike ride against MS). My blocks’s community service, actually. I have not gone to bed yet and I am afraid that I am gonna miss it…. and I am not happy about it. Disappointed. I had committed to it and I am failing…. Well, I hope it will be the only failure this week.

A few hours ago I decided to go out for dinner, just for dinner, with some friends... I would be coming back home early. But I am too easy to persuade. The outcome is that here I am at 630 writing this post. Wrong choice. It’s been a great nice out with a nice dinner at a Spanish restaurant with some friends and some drinks thereafter (including being forced out from a bar b/c one girl friend was smoking when not allowed to do so) in downtown. You never know when a girl comes along… you let yourself go and... well, nothing happens. Things look pretty much the same way now than a few hours ago.

It’s mid-term exam time.I have got three next week, essentially on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Firms and markets, finance and stats. A lot of work to do. I think I am doing well.I am almost done with Finance and tomorrow will be the F&M day…I better strive! I rely on my last minute efforts. I hope I am right.

I would like to write sth else but I need some sleep now. Maybe tomorrow I ll be able to write some deeper stuff.

Ciao

D.

Stressful days (I)

I can’t believe it’s been nearly two weeks without writing a single word. Well, if I look back now at how many things have been going I guess it may reasonable…

Recruiting. That’s what has been driving me crazy in the last two weeks. Stern is a school particularly strong in finance and around 40% of the students end up joining an investment bank. Thus, all the big banks have been – and still are – in campus lately: Citigroup, JP, GS, Lehmans, UBS,….time consuming corporate presentations and a number of events that one must attend in order to make it into the closed list due November, that is, the key for the interviews for a summer internship and, probably, for a postgrad job.

Life is hectic in campus at the moment. Students who want to go into IB are pretty busy with all these activities. Then you also have the students who do not want to go into IB, who are more relaxed. And you finally have the ones who do not have a clear idea of what they wanna do (that’s basically me).

Business schools like Stern provide so many opportunities that, if you don’t have a clear idea of what to do, you may be overwhelmed in one way or another. For instance you may broaden (even more) your options or, on the other hand you may be easily sucked in by the IB recruiting process (you know, the gimmick of the so called sexy deals, amazing compensations, luxury presentations, etc). In the latter case, we had been warned about it. As I said before, most students go for IB so they have lots of action going on….and if you are not part of it you feel like you are missing something that everyone is “enjoying”.

That’s been my problem. I was kind of sure that I didn’t want to go into IB b/c I already know from my “lawyer times” what an awful work-personal life balance is and I still remember how pissed off I used to be. I have already experienced what the "sexy stuff" that banks sell is. And I don’t want it any more even if I may make 200K+ a year and may pay off my dues in one year. My mom rang me three or four days ago to talk for a while and she asked me about jobs and stuff and I spent some time to tell her why I did not want IB….two hours later I was sitting in first row of Lehmans’ presentation asking myself what the hell I was doing there. When the presentation finished I simply didn’t feel like talking to the bankers to network. I just left. It’s been my very last IB event so far. And I feel much better now. But who knows, if things don't turn out properly I may need to come back....

I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing in the short term. I would like to do sth finance related (corporate finance, business development, etc) in the industry…. General Electric, Canon, Disney,…, they are just some of the alternatives I am already tackling but there are many more left to come. The media sector looks particularly appealing to me but it’s very hard to make it through. We´ll see….

I am gonna spend most of the weekend studying b/c mid terms are just around the corner. I hope I will be able to write something else about these past weeks.

I have just arrived home from having dinner with my study group. They had organized a dinner for my birthday. So nice from them. I haven't been able to stop cracking a smile all night. People are amazed by how much I smile. I think that nobody ever told me so before. I further guess that it is a sign that, despite the stressful days I'm going through now, I am feeling great...

Ciao