Work has been great. I’m happy. Still a bit confused as to my purpose in life, but happy, so I guess that’s good. I’m learning a lot, everything is interesting. The feeling is much like when I was an intern at a real estate company. I didn’t really have any interest in real estate, but because I have 0 knowledge about buildings and land and stuff, everything was fun and interesting. Celebrating pouring cement into a hole in the ground? Awesome! Thinking of a hundred different ways to describe a spacious condominium unit? Simply fascinating!
I would never have even imagined that I’d be working in a bank. I used to tell myself that I’m okay with any work, just not working for a bank. This was in high school, and some part of college, back when I was still an ignorant fool who knew nothing about the world. Then miracle of miracles, I took a Finance elective on the advice of a blockmate, which was supposedly about personal finance, that is, how to manage my own money and make the most out of it. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), the class was changed last minute into a class about derivatives, one of the more advanced topics in Finance. Which is just insane! Me, who has absolutely no interest in Finance, who only got a B in my basic Finance class, take an advanced Finance elective?
But once again, there’s that stubborn part of me who refuses to accept failure and just assumes that I’ll be okay. Even if I was already scrambling to get at least an honorable mention. I needed all A’s that semester (my last semester) if I wanted to graduate with honors. And I was taking a class about derivatives, which I had absolutely no knowledge about. In the end I didn’t drop out of it. Not because I felt confident. Slightly because I felt that I had to know something about Finance, even if this wasn’t the right class to do it. Mainly because I was too lazy to switch classes, and also because I didn’t know how to do so (I’ve never dropped out of any of my college classes, not because I never got bad classes, but because, as I said, I always thought everything would turn out okay. Well, everything did turn out okay, but they didn’t turn out great, so there’s that.)
So derivatives it is! My first encounter with derivatives was on the first session of that class. My second encounter with derivatives was on Wikipedia, where I read up on what I was going to be learning for the next semester. It was like an alien language to me. Granted, Wikipedia isn’t a good source of technical knowledge, so that was a stupid thing to do, but I didn’t know at that time. I just wanted to figure out how I was going to survive that class!
The silver lining to all this was that the instructor for that class was a great teacher. He started slow, he knew that not all of us were Finance majors/minors, and that some of us had no background in Finance at all (which meant that I, who had taken one Basic Finance class before, had an edge over maybe 10% of the class, but still lagged behind the rest who were true blue Finance majors/minors).
Over the next few months, I learned about foreign exchange, about the stock market, about how the whole banking system works. It was a 6-9pm class, but those 3 hours were always chock-full of knowledge. I loved it. I still don’t love-love Finance, but now I have a deeper understanding of all the things which used to be a big blur to me. Which used to be some ridiculous human construct that made absolutely no sense. It still is a ridiculous human construct, but now that the inner workings have become clearer, there’s bound to be some appreciation there as well.
I worked hard for that class. I studied, I analyzed, I took down notes, I attended every single lecture. I learned how to convert PHP to USD to EUR to any currency in the universe. I devised my own derivative for start-up businesses in a take-home long test. With a couple of people I didn’t know, I did a report about the Egyptian financial environment after the resignation of their prime minister Mubarak. I took 3-hour exams, and I got an A on one of them.
I was qualified for a B+ exemption for the final exam. This meant that I could just not take the final exam, but still get a B+ for my final grade. But I needed an A, desperately. I still took the final exam. I studied hard for it. After the exam, I kind of felt good about it. I could get that A, I thought. I was confident, as I have always been. Not because I’m any good, but because I don’t know any better.
I ended up with a B+ as a final grade. I could have just not taken the final exam. What a total waste of time. But, for some reason, I didn’t care. I did my best, I worked hard. If the fruit of my labor wasn’t as I had expected, it doesn’t mean I failed. It means that somewhere along the way, I picked up a life lesson. And that lesson may just change my life. Every single college student may probably have experienced this exact same thing. Maybe. I wouldn’t know. I don’t care.
Today, when people ask me why I’m working in a bank, I don’t tell them this story, because it’s so long, and it can all be summarized in probably a sentence. But this is my story. There are probably a hundred other factors that have all influenced my current career decision, but this is the story.
So is it finance or Finance? Is money the root of all evil? Could banking really be the right career choice for me? These questions, I still cannot answer. But I guess now, I’ve learned to ask them.
