Another anxiety dream

I had a dream that I was at my interview for the hedge fund on Thursday. It was going pretty well, and the interviewer was obviously interested in hiring me. So, he says, “I’m going to ask you one more question, and if you answer it as well as you have my other questions, I’ll give you a job right now.” I say, “Sure,” and he says, “Walk me through your resume.” Now, this is a pretty standard question that I’ve been asked at every single interview, so I start on my spiel; I’m a second year, I’m majoring in economics and law letters and society, etc. After a few sentences, he interrupts me, and shouts, frowning, “No! That’s wrong! I’ll never hire you!” Come on now, subconscious. You don’t have to be this stressed out.

Lots of work. Lots of studying. Lots of reading. And lots of dreams. I enjoy dreaming; it’s a good distraction from reality. Indeed, I sometimes fall asleep just so that I can finish a particularly good dream. But I wish I wasn’t this stressed.

Just a boring Monday

I woke up, went to classes, and did homework; not very exciting. I actually don’t have that much to do for Tuesday and Wednesday, but Thursday is going to be killer; I have a midterm, an interview, and I’m meeting with my psyc TA to discuss my upcoming experiment.

Saturday, though, was pretty exciting. The night felt like it lasted for days. We started off at 6:30 watching Pirates of the Caribbean, which was quickly abandoned as dinner was ready at 7. We invited a few people over and proceeded to eat delicious food and finish off the bottle of Grey Goose (which I got as a gift for writing a recommendation for my friend – he got into the Stanford Graduate School of Business – go me). Then we went to a party, came back home and sat around for hours talking and enjoying life. No good stories, but a very good time.

Serge: 1, Psyc TA: 0

My psyc TA emailed my professor, who responded that I was allowed to do my psyc experiment. To which I respond: owned.

This weekend was pretty crazy. Where should I even begin? Friday night, I went to DU (one of the many fraternities on my campus). So, I’m standing in line at DU (they capped the party at 350 people and I had to wait for people to get out so that I could get in). When I get to the front of the line, the guy collecting money (parties cost $5) says, “Are you going to pay for the girl, too?” So I look around and there’s a moderately attractive girl standing behind me, so I agree. The thing is, even now I have no idea why I did it. I think that I had some small hope inside me that she would hook up with me if I paid for her, but that didn’t happen.

I took the drunk van home from the party and I’m afraid I might have been a little belligerent. The driver said that she wouldn’t take me to my dorm, and that made me rather unhappy. I proceeded to shout things like, “Let’s go to [my dorm]!” or “How come we aren’t going to [my dorm]?” or “Why are we going in circles?” (We really did make a circle at one point, I swear.) I also commented about how the bus was a magical fairy ride and acted as a conflict mediator when another drunk van patron commented that another passenger (not me) should “go back to Mexico.” In the end, the driver capitulated to my unfailing insistence and I arrived home safely.

Work is not so fun

I have a five page paper due tomorrow at five and I’ve written a page. This is not good. Fortunately I’ll have five hours tomorrow to work on it, but I still need to get the majority of it done tonight.

I woke up this morning, stood up, and the world started to spin. Apparently I partied a little too hard at bar night last night. Bar night was pretty fun, but I don’t remember anything really interesting happening. When I got back (around 3 am), I decided to visit my friend Jenna, who was sleeping at the time. Upon walking into her room, I realized this, and left. However, I miscalculated the strength with which I closed the door and it woke her up. So, Jenna storms into my room to bitch me out for waking her up. I run away, out the other door (my room has two doors), walk into her room again, and close the door after me. When she walks back into the room, I say “Boo!” and she freaks out. No hard feelings, though.

Apparently I’m ludicrously racist

I can’t do my psyc experiment (which involves asking people whether or not they study in groups as well as their ethnicity) because asking for someone’s ethnicity is “unethical.” No, let me tell you what’s fucking unethical. When I first told my psyc TA about my experiment, she wrote, and I quote, “I think you should stick with your experiment... Also, your hypothesis is good… You are on the right track!” When I handed in the sheet of paper with exactly same experiment and hypothesis, she wrote, “Your hypothesis has not been approved. I am having some trouble understanding the basis for your hypothesis… Asking personal/invasive information (besides major, sex/gender, year in school) is unethical because it can cause people to feel anxious, nervous, offended, embarrassed.” What the hell are you smoking, woman? Maybe she’s a schizophrenic, desperately seeking a cure for her out-of-control disease.

New interview!

I got an interview with a five hundred million dollar New York hedge fund. That’s pretty cool. I think I would find it much more exciting than investment banking, anyway – the difference between being on the buy and sell sides of a transaction is that the buy side seems more exciting (hedge funds are on the buy side).

My econ class is getting slightly more complicated, which is good, because it’s been ridiculously easy thus far. Not that I like doing work, it’s just that classes that are too easy always put me on my guard because I think that I’m missing something. I also planned to write my five page Sosc paper today, which meant that I wrote one page of my Sosc paper today. Good thing it’s due on Friday.

I didn’t get the second round

Just to make that perfectly clear – no suspense or anything. I thought that the interview went well – certainly a lot better than any other interview I’ve had. However, apparently this feeling was not mutual, as I got a letter of rejection a few hours after being interviewed. I wasn’t really expecting to get a second round; after all, I’m only a second year, but it was still lame to get rejected. Maybe they weren’t even seriously considering me; the interview seemed too easy. Whatever – it’s over.

I saw Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room today. It’s a really good documentary about the rise and fall of Enron. I think that after the movie, the person I feel the most sorry for is Gray Davis. Honestly, the man was screwed out of being governor by an evil corporation. Amusingly, I found this movie to be more exciting than The Constant Gardner. What a boring life I must lead.

A good weekend

Saturday was pretty fun. In the afternoon, I had a practice consulting interview, which turned out to be pretty cool – a lot more exciting than the standard financial services interview, mostly because of the case style of interviewing. The case is basically a problem where you’re given a situation; say, a department store that has rising costs and fixed revenues – and you have to figure out a solution. It’s very exciting and it gets the interviewer to see how your mind works.

In the evening, I saw The Constant Gardener; a decent movie. I didn’t think that it was amazing, because it seemed to be extremely slow. However, I still enjoyed watching it. English people are so funny to observe; they’re so polite! When I came home, we had a rockin’ impromptu party in my room with around fifteen people. And a good time was had by all.

Stressful

Meeting new people is difficult, especially when they’re intimidating investment bankers. I was at a casual networking meeting today, trying to impress the people who will be interviewing me on Monday. This is difficult to do, primarily because investment bankers have no lives. It’s hard to find activities that I have in common with them because they don’t really do that many things. So, we have no common point from which we can talk about things. Still, the networking went pretty well except for the last person I talked to. I introduced myself and asked her if she knew someone else in the New York office, where she was from. She replied that she did, and then she said, “Don’t you recognize me?” Quickly scanning my memory, I responded, “Yeah, you were at the info session, right?” Wrong. We were in the same investment club last year! I think it’s pretty unreasonable to think that I would have remembered her, though. I mean, she never even introduced herself to me. Maybe I would have known her if she knew how to pronounce my name.

Then, I come home and decide to make myself a ham, cheese, and egg sandwich after my stressful two hours. I turn on the stove and see that for some reason, the frying pan isn’t getting any hotter. I look over at the dials, and realize that I lit the wrong burner; the burner I lit has a large glass casserole dish on it. I reach to take it off when it EXPLODES. Fortunately, I jumped back and didn’t suffer anything except for a few minor scratches. It seriously scared the shit out of me.

The meaning of life (again)

This update is late because I was arguing with my friend Yang about the meaning of life. Her views are just so ridiculously socially radical that I couldn’t tear myself away. She basically argued that we should intend to help society as much as possible and that because of this, early retirement is a bad thing. The problem with her argument, however, is that it would imply that you would have to live in poverty, have no children, and donate all of your paychecks to your cause. She, she amended her argument to having a “threshold” for leisure, where some leisure is justified but other leisure is not. However, creating thresholds for leisure is hypocritical and cannot justify her initial argument. Besides, different people would have different thresholds for leisure, so it cannot be objectively decided.

I slept through my history class today. This was a great disappointment, as I had gone to all of my classes up to now. Still, it’s not too bad – the professor basically lectures from the book.

Diet Coke killed my father and raped my mother

Last week, I decided to switch over to Diet Coke instead of regular Coke. I think it’s healthier and switching gives me an excuse to drink more delicious soda, since it has no caloric content. Diet Coke has become my master and I am the slave. It is my constant companion and comfort drink. I crave seeing the bottom of a can so that I can run and open another one. I’ll have to exercise my understanding of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in order to beat it. Don’t pray for me, people – I can conquer this demon in an aluminum shell.

I got an interview at a major investment bank today. I can’t possibly describe my excitement and nervousness. It’ll be on Monday – so basically, I have to go into super interview prep mode, learn a lot about the company, and do well during the interview. I had a practice interview over the weekend and the only complaint against me the interviewer had was that I am I very monotone speaker. It’s not my fault! I think I am monotone in English because it is my second language. I guess I’ll have to fake excitement to get some energy into the interview.

Damn! Beaten by history again

Someone seems to have already performed my psychology experiment. Yes, apparently way back in 1974, Dr. Kastenbaum hypothesized that fear of death and fertility are directly related phenomena. In fact, after experimentation, he concluded that procreation was “one among several desirable forms of self-continuation.” I’m glad that history is there to back up my ideas, but it’s kind of lame that my experiment wasn’t original.

My new idea works more with cultural psychology. Richard Nisbett, a social psychologist, has found that the basic thinking style between Westerners and Easterners differs. Among other things, Westerners tend to be “independent” and autonomous, stressing their individuality, whereas Easterners tend to be more “interdependent” on each other, stressing their sense of being part of a collective. However, I think that this interdependency disappears in the realm of competition, such as a classroom. Moreover, I believe that there will be no statistically significant difference between the independence or interdependence of Westerners and Easterners. I guess we’ll find out.

And the emotional roller coaster continues…

Nothing really happened today – I just continued the internship charade of going to info sessions and pretending to care. I’ll be pretty happy if I get an internship. It’ll be a step up from last year, anyway. I also called my dad and found out that my step-great-grandfather had emergency heart surgery. I can’t say that we’re particularly close, but it’s worrying.

This somber event seems to be going in line with my thoughts recently. We’re supposed to come up with a project for psychology; something relatively simple that we could do and then present in a poster. So I started thinking about death attitudes; if someone is primed to have death on their mind, will they want to have children more so than someone who isn’t? I think that they would. If I am correct, it would seem that the priming would simply be a manifestation of the biological clock; perhaps women in their thirties want to have a child simply because they feel closer to death. But of course, I have no idea.

I feel like a million dollars

I didn’t finish all my Hobbes reading before class – it was impossible. Hobbes is really hard to read. Even still, I participated in class discussion and I think it went pretty well. I also finished the PowerPoint presentation for Blue Chips – we pitched PetSmart. It went really well – I think it’s a great stock. In fact, I bought it on the 8^th of December and it’s already gone up 7.69%.

I’ll finish all my reading over the three day weekend. Speaking of three day weekend, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a HUGE deal at the University of Chicago. Not that I care about diversity – I don’t. It’s just that this quarter, we now get two days off. That’s a 100% increase from last year, which is just amazing. I just don’t know what to do with all the free time.

Today was a pretty frustrating day

Earlier this week, I sent an email out to everyone in the college saying that people could sign up for the video game tournament every day this week in the Reynolds Club. Last night, I found out that no one had been there to sign people up, which was ridiculously frustrating since I’m trying to have the video game tournament act as a dorm fundraiser. Today, I find out that even though there was someone signing people up, he left all the money and the sign up sheet in an envelope on a chair in the Reynolds Club. So, we lost $50 and the names of the people who signed up. I can’t possibly understand under what circumstance you would leave money lying around in an extremely public place in the hopes that someone else involved would come pick it up.

I also had a ton of work to do with Blue Chips and internships, not to mention 160 pages of Hobbes. Needless to say, I’m still reading Hobbes.

Second week

And I still have a 100% attendance rate to classes. That is pretty good, as I have a 9:00 or 9:30 class every day. Getting up early so much like real life, it’s scary. I think there’s about a 50% chance that I’ll end up going into academia, so maybe I’ll get to evade the real world forever. Getting up at 6:30 every day for my DHL job couldn’t have possibly sucked harder.

There’s a girl who stares at me in my econ class. For some reason, I didn’t even notice her until Janet and Akhil pointed her out. It’s kind of bizarre – I mean, she didn’t smile or anything when I glanced at her. Maybe I should ask her out to coffee. But how would I even begin such an invitation? “So, I noticed you staring at me in econ…”

This story isn’t for the faint of heart

New posting policy: I don’t like updating my blog on Fridays and Saturdays, mainly because I don’t like doing anything on Fridays and Saturdays. From now on, I will update my blog Sunday through Thursday, since those are my weekdays.

I’m sitting on a couch at one of our many fraternities, enjoying being absolutely trashed. A girl comes out of nowhere, sits down next to me, and starts making out with me. She seemed attractive and I was extremely drunk, so this was a pretty good time for me.

But of course, such things are not meant to last. After a little while, she leaned over and threw up on my pants. I guess she didn’t feel like talking.

My Econ class is pretty cool

As in, much, much better than the last two quarters of Econ. The professor is a good teacher (although he goes a little slowly), but most importantly, when he’s done introducing the concepts, he introduces really interesting discussion questions, which my previous professor never did. This is awesome because I can learn the regular concepts on my own, but discussing them in class is truly fascinating. Then again, maybe I’m just happy to have a better teacher. An added bonus is that he’s also a Nobel Laureate. That’s just cool.

As it stands right now, I’ll be going to around eight company presentations next week (if I go to all of them). That is a ridiculous amount of presentations to go to. Networking is such a bullshit thing to do. You’re creating a forced relationship with someone just to get a job. Then again, I’m probably not the most qualified of students at the University of Chicago, so maybe it’s good that I can rely on the little interpersonal skills I have.

I have ridiculous amounts of reading

About four hundred pages to read by Monday. I was so happy earlier today when I finished half of my Econ reading. Even more worrisome is the fact that a lot of summer internship applications are due in a week. I think I’ll apply for most of them over the weekend, but it’s tough with all the reading I have to do. And an Econ problem set.

So far, I have a 100% attendance rate for my classes. Let’s home that it keeps up. My New Year’s resolutions are 1) to do better in my classes (my aunt told me that I should get my GPA up to 3.7; I sincerely doubt that this will happen, but I’ll do my best) and 2) to exercise more often. Of course, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions…

The updates begin again

Sorry, everyone. I somehow lost motivation to update my blog for the second half of break. However, now I’m back in school and procrastination is a way of life, so writing my blog seems like a second nature.

On my flight over here, I was fortunate enough to be selected for random security screening. “Fortunate?” you ask in disbelief. Yes, fortunate. You see, being selected for random security screening means that I got to skip all the long lines waiting to go through the metal detectors and have their stuff screened by an x-ray machine. My stuff got put in special red bins and was thoroughly searched and examined. A security guy also went over me with a wand and then patted me down – probably looking for those often elusive plastic guns. However, it was all over very quickly and I went on my way, knowing that America was safe from terrorists forever. At least, until they send a black belt to hijack a plane.