by Deirdre Norris
Every friday, the Punch Bowl allows its staff to submit articles for the website. This one goes out to all you kids double concentrating in finance, real estate, and finance, compliments of one Deirdre Norris, who is doubling majoring in Econ.
Inside the Mind of a Second-Round Interviewee
I’ve been preparing for these half dozen weeks since I decided I wanted to live in Greenwich on an estate with minimum four garages and two Ecuadorian landscapers. I’ve had it all planned out: manipulate my college course load so I have the perfectly balanced number of guaranteed A classes while taking enough finance courses to nail my interviews. I even head a volunteer club for West Philly kids, whose families wouldn’t be so poor and ignorant if they weren’t lazy. I landed the crucial summer internship last summer, so I’ve got a solid hand going into the final dance this year.
Doing deals, reformatting text boxes at 4:30am, and beating it in the bathroom stall while reading the day’s Wall Street Journal, I’ll become the ultimate i-banking machine. Sure there will be days/quarters when I’ll be so stressed out I’ll chronically throw up or have some extreme sleep disorder—having nightmares about imagined errors in a dilution calculation—and I’ll undoubtedly become addicted to both The Patch and Jack Johnson as means for both quelling and having emotions. It’s part of the lifestyle, so I’ll embrace it.
Then I’ll make the transition to either a private equity shop or a hedge fund, where my salary which was already obscene for a 23-year old who never read Ulysses, will allow me to move to the Upper East Side to a building with both a doorman and an indoor pool. I will travel everywhere by corporate car. I’ll be working between 80-100 hours a week, a dramatic difference, for I might have time find some Barnard girl who’d fuck me.
Another 15 years of this, maybe less barring any scandals, and I’ll be retired, owning homes in all three US time zones and in Corsica, spending my free time between my luxury yacht and the golf course. I don’t want kids anyway—they’re too risky and time intensive an endeavor, with likely sub par return on invested capital (losers).
OCR has not been going as smoothly as I was hoping, however. Yesterday, I was skipping a midterm to go a very promising second-round OCR interview. Just before I got to the entrance, I got shat on by a bird. The shit got in my eye and luckily the acid from the pigeon’s excrement only burned through my contact. After removing the contact, I used my sleeve to wipe the remaining white lumpy dribble out of the corner of my eye, but my engraved cufflink got caught under my eyelid and ripped through the skin—the tear looked like a bloody version of Cleopatra’s eye liner. At this point, I forgot how to value a company and remembered how to curse like a South Boston drunk. I thought to myself, at least now I have a valid excuse for missing the midterm. The blood started running down my cheek, quite profusely, and dripping off my chin onto my new cordovan shoes (which were highly recommended by GQ). Concurrently, my superbly starched sleeves were failing as hemoglobin sponges. At this sight I began hyperventilating. Next thing I remember, I was laying on the brick sidewalk, a few guys in suits and girls attempting to wear conservative heels, rubbernecking at me while rushing into the interview suites and trying not to forget the yield on the 10-year t-note. One girl threw me a tampon and I simultaneously felt disgust and relief as its label, ultra heavy, came into focus. Desperate, I ripped it open and applied pressure to the blood-covered flap of skin struggling to remain attached to my face. Then I realize that my leather-bound interview folder was missing—a thief was in possession of multiple copies of my resume beautifully printed on 24lb. 100% cotton watermarked professional paper. This was the last straw. I struggled to my feet, averting my eyes from my tragically wrecked shoes. Determined, I stumbled into the waiting area, leaving a trail of blood in my wake. Unsympathetically, the Career Services representative at the front desk shot me a glare. No one else reacted to my entrance and they carried on with their nervous pseudo-friendly banter. I took a seat and straightened my tie, it being the only article of clothing that escaped the blood bath. The tampon was almost totally drenched and I suavely slipped it under my chair. Seconds later I was swiftly dragged outside, following my blood trail. In shadows, the burly Penn Image security guards then berated me for breaking the code of business formal, and putting at jeopardy the sanctity of OCR.
My OCR privileges were revoked for all time. The DP then exposed my resume on the next day’s front page—critiquing its .8” margins, inconsistent font size, and repeated use of the “wishy-washy” verb assisted.
I think my next step is to either personally contact HR from all the banks for which I was still in the running. I’ll just explain to them the series of unfortunate events which befell me, or else threaten to expose their concurrent affairs with desperate (and married) managing directors. There’s always a place for a kid like me where people want to make money, anyway. Else, I’d rather drown myself in the Schuylkill than work in such a plebian industry as marketing. Talk about bitch-work.