The Ultimate Day

Saturday was pretty fun. I met one of my (seven?) roommates and he is pretty cool. He's doing a PhD at Georgetown in Economics so he will probably be giving me advice this semester on how to fix the economy :). We went to a park near to where we live and met up with about 10 other people and played ultimate Frisbee. I'm amazed how seriously people take this game on the east coast. I had never played until I went to college, but people out here are really good at it. They can throw a Frisbee in ways I didn't even know were possible. A few of the guys on my team were extremely good so I usually just threw them a pass and then ran for the endzone. They could pretty much always get it to me.

Washington DC is so different from New York. It's quiet and pretty. I think it would be a cool place to live if you're 30 and have a family.

So someone asked how I'm able to do this internship and still graduate from school. It just turned out that I only have one semester worth of classes left to graduate, so leaving school for a semester won't be a problem. I was planning on taking really fun classes like golf, skiing, cooking, Shakespeare, and stuff like that in my final semester, but now I'll just have to take the required business classes. I figured it would be worth it to spend a semester at Treasury at a time like this.

I am kind of sad when I think about what I'll miss this semester. We're supposed to have a really good football team, so I'll have to watch all the games on the TV instead of actually being there. All of the recruiting events where firms show up and bring free pizza and tell you why you should work for them - I love those things. I'll pretty much miss them all as well. Last year as a junior I went to pretty much every banking and consulting info session I could because it is a great way to network and meet people for when you want to interview for an internship. The same people come back to interview you, so if you can get them to remember you then you're in great shape.

Last year I met a guy from one of the bulge-bracket banks that came on campus who was out hiring for full-time in October. I talked with him a lot and gave him my resume. He called me back the next day and told me he wanted to interview me! It turned out that he thought I was graduating in 2008 (even though I told him I was a junior and my resume said "Graduation 2009"), but you can bet that when internship season rolled around, he actually called me and asked if I would be at the info session because he wanted to catch up and help me get ready for interviews with his bank.

Another guy I met in October took a look at my resume, liked it, and then told me that he would get me an interview with his bank. He then proceeded to threaten me that if I screwed up the interview he would basically kill me, but I promised him that I would destroy the interview. In the winter, he did in fact get me an interview, and I did in fact destroy it - I got an offer from that bank. I didn't end up taking the offer, but it's just another example of how important it is to meet people when they come on campus for the full-time hiring. Even if they say that only seniors are allowed in the info sessions (which is extremely rare, usually anyone can come), if you can just get some one-on-one time and hand them your resume, you will be in a great position.

This all assumes that your resume looks good. I'm going to write a post soon about resumes, but at this time last year was when I was making some major revisions to my resume. It went from having Chuck E. Cheese (my first high school job) on it to looking like a banker-worthy document. I've put over 100 hours into that resume, and I continue to update it constantly. It's one of those things that you need to get up to a certain quality level as soon as possible.

Resume post to come...