The lightbulbs don't flicker down there.
It's built like an underground bunker. Winston Churchill would have felt comfortable planning the Normandy storming here. It could also be a huge psych ward with patients distributed in wings in accordance to insanity or sanity. It's also the place where on campus recruiting happens.
It's fluorescent.
Starting at 745am the place begins milling with juniors and seniors playing ant farms in pretty black and gray pinstriped suits. The great tango we entangle ourselves in is carefully punctuated by the same awkward conversations.
Person 1: Zup. Um. Who are you interviewing with?
Person 2: Big Bank One, and Private Equity Firm Two, and Venture Capital Three. You?
Person 1: Nice, sick, nastry, congratulations, awesome (I don't know who you are). I'm doing just this one today.
Person 2: Oh... (shift gaze to the floor looking for that pernicious piece of lint he dropped 20 seconds ago) Well good luck with that.
Interviewer: Person 1? - Pause for smile, handshake.
Bump. Set. and Spike. The role playing begins.
Maybe the interviewers are playing good cop, bad cop. Two separate tables or just the one little one. The place feels clinical.
You've prepped for days now. Maybe you did a case in preparation for a finance interview. you reviewed the basic concepts of finance and accounting and your life - in that order of importance.
The major firms will teach you their own models leaving everything you've left in the classroom where it belongs. In the classroom.
At this rate finance majors should simply stop regular schooling at grade 4th once we've mastered the basic add, multiply, subtract and divide. Everything else is on the job experience. It would certainly give the markets a very naive quality to them. A certain innocent quality that not even Volcker could question, n'est-ce pas?
Willingly we file into the beast knowing we will be spit back out, tail between our legs, our head still dangerously held high - it's that ivy league sense of entitlement.
Love OCR.
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