HOT

So today it was over 100 degrees in New York City - pretty much miserable. I left the apartment at 7:45 and was instantly overheating. I can't believe how warm it has been the last three days. I can't sleep at all because I don't have AC or a fan. It's terrible. I guess tomorrow it's supposed to "only" be in the 80s. Thank goodness.

Today I think I finally really saw the fruits of the hard work I've done since I got out here. The analysts are starting to trust me more, and so today I had work all day long. This might sound like a bad thing, but when you're only here for eight weeks and your getting an offer is based upon the work that you do, you want to be working all the time and not just sitting around. I usually have things to work on, but lately the quality of the work has been increasing. Today none of the other interns were staffed (which is very rare), and I was working on two deals at once. It was stressful because both deal teams had deadlines and wanted me to be getting them their stuff right away, but it was also a good experience to work under some pressure and perform well.

I just got staffed on a live deal and was told tonight that I'm in charge of modeling the accretion/dilution. Sweet! Of course it will be checked over by the analyst and then the associate, so there's no chance that what I do will eventually come back to me, but it's cool to be the one building it out. This also came about because I took some initiative last week. I worked on an M&A deal and I asked the analyst I was working with to walk me through the Acc/Dil section of the model. He showed it to me and we talked about how it works, and that was it. Then I stayed late a few nights and re-built the accretion/dilution model from scratch to make sure that I knew how to do it and that I could actually see the moving parts coming together.

So today the analyst that I'm working with told me that he had heard that I rebuilt the acc/dil model and asked me if I felt like I could do it for real on this deal that we're doing. I told him that I knew I could do it (you always have to be confident in yourself even if you don't feel like you know what you're doing). So tomorrow I'll be working on some acc/dil. Cool stuff.

Thursday is my mid-way review. Basically they survey the people that you've worked with and then talk to you about what you've done well and what you can improve. I think that I already know what they'll say. I just need to pay even more attention to detail. I need to think, "What is the analyst going to have to do with this when I give it to him/her?" and then go and do that one-off task.

Well it's late and I have to be in early to get a book to an MD. He's pretty old-school and likes to just draw slides on a paper with a pencil and then say, "Make this happen." So with the crazier slides we usually ship it to the production people and they do it, since I don't have time to build out a multi-variable bubble graph, but the production people do it in their sleep. Anyway, the book is due by 8AM and I told the analyst he could sleep in and that I would take care of it. Sacrifice for the team.