These days, the only cool things about having been a banker are...

......

1. You (used to) have a shitload of money
2. You (still are) an excel god, leaving others slack-jawed as you rip through an 80MB LBO file in 10 min flat...here's a shout out to all the (ex) bankers...yes, Slater, you too:-)

Winding down and ramping up...

I’m at a loss – where do I start? Time flies by so fast at Wharton and so many things are compressed in such a small chunk of time that it becomes impossible to even try to condense everything interesting that I did, into the blog.

At the same time, there’s a growing realization that this time at Wharton is going to end very soon. This is a period of my life that has been probably the most exciting, fulfilling, stimulating and intense of all the phases I’ve lived. While a small part of me wants it to end and to get on with life as usual, a larger part shrinks in horror at the thought of usual life outside of school. The job that starts in September (exciting as the profile…and the money sounds), the end of classes in May (tough as they are to even pass!), the dispersing of friends to their parts of the world, the humdrum of life that begins after Wharton – these are all things I’m SO not looking forward to now.

I realize that I’m dreading something that is 6 months away. All good things have to come to an end and I guess I must continue living by my mantra of carpe diem and enjoy every moment left here to the fullest.

Come winter break, I stop to breathe and go over all that went well and not so well this semester.

Things that went spectacularly well:

Relationships:made new friends and solidified all existing relationships into a lifelong mode. Wharton has been a huge surprise – coming in I had never expected to forge more than a working/professional relationship with people. That expectation has been turned on its head. I’ve made more personal and emotionally entrenched friendships that I’ve ever made in the last 8 years since I started my first job. The extremely team-intense atmosphere at Wharton seems to fuel this – everything is about collaboration and support here.

Academics: haha, I never thought I would claim a spectacular academic run at Wharton, but this semester has been especially kind. I attribute it to the fact that I picked up all subjects that I was genuinely interested in


Photography: Yay! I actually took a course in photography at UPenn! At Wharton we’re allowed to take a non-Wharton course every semester in the University of Pennsylvania. I’d never thought that I’d have the guts to take up an extra credit of work on top of all the Wharton stuff to take up something I really loved. So that’s a huge achievement for me.

The course that I enrolled for was extremely painful. It was back to basics – black & white photography with a manual camera, processing your own reels and developing your own prints. I always thought of myself as a bit of a photographer because my digital camera could take great pictures.

This course was a truly humbling experience. When you go back to making compositional choices that you do not know the outcome of, you’re tempted to whip out the digital cam. When you work on your prints in the darkroom to an extent that you suddenly discover that you spent 2 hours ‘burning and dodging’ a single photograph just to get that perfect effect, you realize that this was really much more than you could chew. And then you spend another 2 hours in perfecting that picture that you’ll probably want to hang in your living room and puff your chest up while showing it to gawking visitors.

You suddenly realize how silly and stupidly easy digital photography is when you struggle to loop your film around the processing tank in complete darkness, or when you see your photograph come to life in the developer tray in that cold, dull-red lab. And of course, when you spend close to 3-4 hours trying to perfect each photograph in the lab is when you realize that good photographers of the yore were truly 'da shit'.

This course was probably the most intense course I’ve taken while at Wharton but at the end of it, I’m proud to say that I know a teeny bit about real photography. At the risk of sounding like a manual photography snob (I can finally identify with them!), I think digital photography is not a skill at all – you put a good digital camera in the hands of a 5-year old kid, and she’ll come up with a great picture.

Yes, I’m taking another advanced course in photography next semester. No, I do not have the time to scan the pictures from my final portfolio submission and put them up here – not for the next 6 months atleast. Yes, I did a nude photoshoot too. No, it was not fun – especially when I spent an entire weekend in the lab trying to get the right skin tone. I’m now seriously considering having a proper darkroom and lab in my house when I finally settle down.

I love my antiquated manual cam!!

Wharton India Club: We had resolved to make the club a really happening one on campus and we’re well on our way to it. I was lucky to have an awesome, awesome team and we managed to pull off the best parties and better first-year mentoring than ever in the India Club. We also did an interview with NDTV about the mood on campus in the face of a recession (link here: http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/video/video.aspx?id=41808). Of course it helped that all of us giving interviews had jobs we wanted…otherwise the mood would have come across as really somber! Personally, organization of the Wharton Incredible India trek which brings 75 Wharton students to India during winter break was my biggest individual achievement in the club. The coordination started in September and by November, was taking up 80% of my time on a weekly basis. Planning and executing a perfect trip for 75 non-Indians across India to make sure that they got a great flavor of the country was the most daunting non-academic task I did this year.


Travel: this semester was pretty good from a holiday point of view. We managed to take 2 quality breaks. 4 days at Puerto Rico and 4 days in Las Vegas/Grand Canyon.

1. Puerto Rico was actually really good – three times warmer than East coast and umpteen times lovelier. Our hotel had a private beach and a variety of swimming pools/Jacuzzis and we spent most of our time in the water. One day we took a snorkeling trip to an island nearby. I’d never snorkeled before in my life and this was definitely the highlight of my entire trip, seeing coral reefs and beautiful shoals of fish swimming in the water all around you! Puerto Rico also has these bio-luminescent bays. You kayak in the middle of the sea in the dead of night into a channel covered with dense jungle, obscuring even the moonlight. Suddenly each stroke of the kayak-paddle makes the water glow phosphorescent green. Fishes darting in the water are like little bright green rockets. This was definitely the most beautifully intriguing thing I’ve seen in a long time. The bioluminescent algae in the sea water glow whenever anything touches it. The kayaking trip was amazing too – I was scared shitless to be taking a flimsy kayak into the sea at midnight and to top it all, it started raining! After about 20 minutes of kayaking in the (reasonably calm) ocean, you entered a side-channel where it suddenly transformed into an Indiana Jones-style adventure, with the forest and reeds all around you while you paddled your kayak across the sinuous and endlessly curving water channels across the jungle.

Getting ready to snorkel around the reefs

The coral reefs are the dark shadows in the water

Waking up to this every morning for 4 days was semi-orgasmic

Beach bumming was never so much fun:)

Bio-luminescent bay

2. Las Vegas – everyone had promised that Las Vegas would be totally amazing. We went in with really high hopes and I was more than disappointed. Las Vegas is a city in the middle of the desert trying to be everything that its not. Definitely the capital of sin, mind-boggling amounts of money have been spent on creating an ambience of needless luxury and opulence. I quite disliked it – probably more than Dubai. Like Dubai, everything was so out of place and so unnatural that it ended up being an eyesore. There were a few really good things in the trip too. We saw a couple of shows: David Copperfield (above average) and Cirque Du Soleil’s ‘O’ (the best performance I’ve ever seen in my life). I could write reams on Cirque Du Soleil but it is something best experienced for yourself. The tickets are super expensive but more than worth it. We spent $170/head for this show and would happily do it again. David Copperfield on the other hand, at $100 per head was a little overrated. The trip to Grand Canyon was awesome too and I wish we had more time to go down into the canyon. We missed watching the Blue Man Group in Vegas, but caught them in NY on the following weekend and I give heavy props to them too – they were really good.

The Lions at our hotel - only in Vegas..

Yeah...thats whats left of all my savings

Various hotels on the 'strip'. I still do not see the point of all this razzmatazz

The Venetian with its canals and Gondolas...ummm..I'll take the real Venice anyday

The Grand Canyon was by far the highlight of the trip (the 5 picture at a time limit of Blogger means I'm too lazy to put anything more)

Things that didn’t go so well (and need to be focused on, next semester):

India Club: I couldn’t do much on the India Club front in terms of career stuff despite the opportunities we had to tie up with Wharton alumni in India and help students that wanted to come back immediately after school.

Other extra-curricular: Flying took somewhat of a backseat with the Incredible India trek taking up most of my time. I couldn’t get started on golf at all. Next semester, I promise myself.

Course selection for the final semester: I’ve taken the easiest courses in the final semester. While I know I’m really going to pat myself for this decision later, I am currently on a major guilt-trip for not taking the tougher subjects that I always wanted to learn. This is definitely the last opportunity to learn from the best in the world and missing that doesn’t feel so good right now. As of now I’m really tempted to commit some hara-kiri and enroll for a couple of really intense courses.

BPUB789: This is a course called Nations, Politics and Markets. It talks about the economic and political choices that different countries across the world have made since the beginning of this century and how it has impacted these countries over the years. It was an awesome course but I missed almost 50% of its classes since I had taken it on a pass/fail basis (ie you are not graded on it) and it happened on a particularly busy class day for me. I’ll always regret not having attended this course properly.


Gymming: started off really well in September and it looked like I was on my way to finally being ripped. As the semester progressed, working out became much more sporadic and finally dropped off my schedule altogether. Gymming without a partner is no fun and coordinating times with one is almost impossible at Wharton. Next semester, my gym buddy and I have coordinated our courses so that we get to work out on a regular basis – lets see how far we go! Getting a six-pack is high on the remaining agenda at Wharton :)


Keeping up with old friends and relatives: I had resolved to keep in better touch with old friends and relatives this past semester but that didn’t work out at all. I’m making up for the old friends bit over winter break, but still need to work out a good way to keep in touch with relatives. I’ve started hating phone conversations over the last few years and need to pick up the phone again to get in touch.

A lot of these form a part of my new year's resolutions...adding to the many many others:)

Summer Internships and being a second year @ Wharton!!

First year ended in May and we had till September to relax, travel and do summer internships. I did two summer internships - one with an Energy Private Equity firm in Amsterdam and the other with the Leadership program of an Energy behemoth in Maryland and London.

The first internship was ok - a lot of finance, shitloads of modeling - the usual banking stuff - and a steep learning curve given that I had absolutely no background in energy. Energy seems to be the flavor of the season and boy, am I glad I am not doing banking anymore:-) Being in Amsterdam was much much more fun though, for the obvious reasons (!) and also because every weekend was a different country in Europe. On the whole I managed to cover Holland, Sweden, Norway and France during the first internship. Pictures will be posted in a later entry.

The second internship was nothing short of amazing. Going into the leadership program, I had been told that I would be rotated across different divisions of the firm, specifically doing projects that I had never done before. It sounded a little scary and I often had nightmares about not being able to understand anything that was going on! The learning curve was extremely steep but the amazing culture of the firm and the work-life balance along with the super-dynamic-yet-accessible people made sure that I absolutely loved the 10 weeks I spent there. It was also a great introduction to Alternative Energy (I spent the time in the AE division of the firm)

After multiple trips shuttling between London and DC and tanking up on enough miles to last me two return trips to India (yay!), I ended the internship just a day before school began.

Coming back to school was super good, for the following reasons:

1. Meeting everyone again

2. Taking all the courses that I really wanted to take and not be bothered about a course that I hated

3. Having 2 job offers from both internships (which I think is the main reason that 2nd year for me has been nothing short of heavenly - especially when I see almost everyone else currently super focused on getting a job of their choice in an environment that is infinitely more competitive with fewer jobs)

4. Focusing on things that I am passionate about: gymming, photography (yeah I have taken a photography elective in Penn which means that I have classes till 9pm on Mondays but its totally worth it!)

5. Getting to explore new interests: sailing, flying and golf.

6. Taking reins of the Wharton India club and trying to ease 1st years into Wharton along with trying to organize multiple events

7. Planning all holidays - Thanksgiving, Winter Break, Spring break - damn, I never imagined I would obsess and stress so much about planning perfect holidays, trying to travel as much as I can while I'm still in school!


I think this is a great time to be in school - all the turmoil on Wall Street is truly scary. While it is definitely not fun seeing classmates who were recruiting for investment banking scramble for every available job, it is great to get a ring-side view of whats happening and an insider's perspective on the the unfolding events from a world-renowned faculty in finance. Everything is cyclical and hopefully things'll be back to normal and this is a shout-out to all my classmates in banking - you'll soon be earning your multi-million $$ bonuses again!!

I'm still trying to decide which offer to take up for the fulltime. Thankfully I have till December to decide, negotiate and renegotiate so that eases things up for me. This week is the Final Interview Period for 2nd years and while I did interview with 3 more firms, it was so much more different going into the process with 2 jobs in hand.

I'm really hoping to keep the blog more current and updated from now on - hopefully all the extra-curricular stuff at Wharton will not be too busy to keep me away from here!!

Adios, while I step out to enjoy the last few days of sunshine in Koo Plaza:-)