• I generally feel good about my work and my teammates. Very friendly. I"ve received decent feedback about my performance so far but still have trouble shaking the feeling that I am hopelessly incompetent. Just trying to keep a sense of humility! ;)
• The quality of life has turned out to be excellent. I work about 11-12 hours per day and do some work on Sunday, which, by my standards is doable, although for some that would be unacceptable. (I was chatting with a GSBer about her summer and asked how her hours were. Long, she replied, 8:30 to 5 ... I couldn"t suppress my look of astonishment ... well, long for me! she retorted. Fair enough.)
• Best of all is the degree of flexibility and autonomy in my work - I am paid to sit around and read the Economist and think about innovations in technology and the political structure of Brazil. Etcetera. Not bad work. Most of all I am paid to have opinions. Strong opinions. Opinions worth betting a few million on. I try not to think about that part.
• On bad days, I remember that equity research can be fantastically boring, flexibility and autonomy be damned. I hate accounting and SEC filings on these days.
• The markets, as you probably are painfully aware, are challenging, to say the least. And investing, never the most obvious activity, is even more strange and baffling. However, I started my career post-tech bubble so I tend to assume the world is always crashing around one"s ears. But, according to my bosses, this is one of the worst periods they have ever experienced. Nice.
• The worrisome part is whether this means, in the case of superb summer performance on my part I may still end up without a job offer. Not recommended in general, but especially disappointing as I really love this firm and want to work here full-time. I feel that this firm is not so short-sighted but it seems that they have grown quite rapidly in recent years and given the current business challenges might want to just work with what they"ve got.

Oh, well. It will all turn out ok. At least it"s been a nice summer.

On the baby front, Y and I enjoyed 2 completely baby free nights of unbroken sleep this weekend. Eight hours in one go! Amazing. I thought it would never happen.

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3.23 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."