Year Two: Confidence?

I've been spending a lot of time with first-years for the past few weeks.  In fact, between the MSCF program, the Graduate Business Association, and the Graduate Finance Association, I have actually been officially assigned as mentor to a whopping SEVEN first-years!  In addition, I find I am unofficially reviewing 2-3 first-year resumes a week as it is, so I think somebody owes me some cookies or something, don't you?

To be honest, though, I am flattered that they value my feedback, and I'm happy to help.  I remember being absolutely terrified at this time last year.  I was worried I would fail out of the MSCF program, not find a summer job, and just generally humiliate myself at every turn.  I'm happy to say that I have not failed (although I do have a couple more months to go), I did find a job, and, well, okay I actually I did humiliate myself quite a few times along the way, but it was character-building.  In fact, let's just go ahead and make this post about my top humiliating moments last year and see what I learned from them:

FIRST-YEAR UTTERLY HUMILIATING MOMENT #1:
Readers of this blog who have kept in touch through my web relocation may recall this first incident as it was mentioned in my first-year student journal.  I went on an overall fantastic Wall Street networking trip with our Graduate Finance Association and had a lovely lunch in a lovely 32nd floor executive dining room overlooking Battery Park and had the luck to sit right next to the head of an internship program I knew all about from some of the second-years.  I must have impressed this man with how I had done my homework, and he e-mailed me the next day to tell me he wanted to talk to me some more about the internship program.  I said, sounds great, why don't you call me at 3:00 on Thursday?  Turns out he didn't really want to talk to me about the internship program.  He wanted to talk to me about a capital structure arbitrage model.  Needless to say, six weeks into the school year and five years out from the last time I had interviewed for a job, I was not ready to talk about such things - the call was a prolonged, humiliating disaster.

Lessons learned:

1. Requests for phone calls need at least one-week turnaround and should be scheduled in such a way that I have some time to prepare (i.e. not squeezed in between a company presentation and a hockey game.)
2. All, in fact, is not lost just because you blow one interview.  In fact, I often refer to this experience as the best thing that happened to me all year because it put the proverbial fire under my you-know-what, and I went on to nail quite a few interviews later in the year.

FIRST-YEAR UTTERLY HUMILIATING MOMENT #2:
Let's come full-circle and revisit the starting scene for my first utterly humiliating moment.  Well my second one actually lasted for about six hours and took place in a very poorly air-conditioned office overlooking, you guessed it, Battery Park.  I sat in this office while interviewer after interviewer from an unnamed bank's quantitative strategies team came in and raked my self-esteem over the coals.  Repeatedly.  I had seven or eight of these, and they all went something like this:

Interviewer: "So, what are you doing here?"
Me: "Well, before school, I ..."
Interviewer: "Yeah, I don't care about that.  You know we don't really hire MBAs don't you?"
Me: "Right, I'm also an MSCF student ..."
Interviewer: "Okay, anyways.  Let's talk about a dice game.  [asks dice game brain teaser]"
Me: [Think to self - lucky me!  I know this dice game backwards and forwards!    Pretend not to have ever heard dice game before, going so far as to clarify rules and setup, and then proceed to deliver correct solution, at all times making sure to reveal orderly, logical thought process - yeah - nailed it!]
Interviewer: [Asks series of incredibly challenging follow-up questions to dice game]
Me: [Uh oh - uncharted territories.  Have left land where good memory will help and am now relying solely on rigorous training and nerves of steel to stay focused.  Overall, pleased with answers, though]
Interviewer: "That's fine, Rachel.  But how would you write a C++ program to solve this problem?"
Me: [PANIC!  Mind turns to jelly, responses become death spiral combination of rambling and flawed logic.  Feel face turning red as blood vessels join brain in turning against me.]

Lessons learned:

1. While I didn't exactly turn into a rock star by the end of the day, I have to say I was actually sort of relaxed by the time my last interview or two came along.  By then, I knew there was actually no way things could go any worse.  No amount of aggression or stress testing could really phase me at that point.  So, maybe I didn't wow my last interviewer, but I sure as heck wasn't blushing anymore either.  I just gave it my best shot and tried to communicate myself as well as I could.
2. The biggest benefit to this day of humiliation was in the week of interviewing that followed.  I went into that week no longer afraid of what mysterious terrors might await me in an interview because I had actually lived the worst day of interviews I could possibly imagine, and I survived!  From then on, I woke up the morning of an interview, looked in the mirror, gave myself a big smile and said, "Bring it on!"  And what do you know, by the end of the week, I had a job!