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DECEMBER 2003 MBA JOURNAL: SUMMER INTERNSHIP Rich Morris: Learning in the Real World Classroom "About seven years ago, I swore off Wall Street. I'd never work there again. Done. Finished...Well, guess what. I'm back, baby!" My initial stint on Wall Street was a charade. The firm I worked for more closely resembled a chop shop, a la Boiler Room or Born to Steal, than a bona fide financial institution. Regardless of where the offices are located, that's not Wall Street. What is Wall Street, at least from what I saw this summer, is a huge network of scary-talented people whose job it is to essentially figure out ways for clients to do anything they want with their money. You want to bet on the price of soybeans in Japan? Sure, we can do that. Interest rates in Germany? No problem. You don't like the default risk in your credit portfolio? We can take care of that. You need a billion dollars worth of mortgages? We got 'em. It's amazing. After 10 weeks, I haven't even figured out a fraction of everything that Deutsche Bank, or any other investment bank, does. That's sort of scary, I guess, considering that I will be going back there full-time next year (please don't clue my bosses in that I'm an ignoramus). But, considering that my internship was an absolute whirlwind, I have a feeling that I'm not the only new hire who is in that predicament. My summer at Deutsche Bank was split into two five-week assignments: one in Equity Derivatives and one in Global Markets trading. In and of itself, this wasn't too bad. But considering all of the training classes, weekly rotations, "networking opportunities", sponsored events, and the fact that I was essentially starting from scratch, it was all I could do just to stay afloat. Don't get me wrong – I absolutely loved my internship. It was the most educational, exhilarating professional experience I've ever had. But at the end of the 10 weeks, I felt like I had just gone twelve rounds with Mike Tyson. I needed a rest. Everything happens so quickly, it's hard to find your sweet spot. One minute you're learning the intricacies of exotic options and interest rate swaps, the next you're trying to figure out how to set up your Bloomberg account or where the bathroom is. Also, you're doing your best to meet your bosses, the other interns, people on other desks, the lunch lady, the janitors – basically, anyone who works at the bank. And just when you start to get into some semblance of a groove, guess what – your five weeks are up. Time to do it all over again. This setup does have its advantages, however. Looking back, I can't believe how much I learned this summer. As I said earlier, I've only scratched the surface of mastering all of the ins-and-outs of investment banking, but given how much is actually involved, I still feel like I accomplished A LOT. Also, I was fortunate to have met a bunch of great people. If you've read Liar's Poker or FIASCO, you'd think that traders were a bunch of arrogant psychopaths who would slit your throat for a few basis points. While there may be a smidgen of truth to that, by and large everyone I met was extremely friendly and very willing to try and help me out as best they could. It's hard for someone who's monitoring enormous positions that can gain or lose millions dollars in a few seconds to sit down and shoot the breeze with an intern. But everyone was very accommodating (even when they were telling me to get lost), and always made time at some point to answer any questions I had. Also, my class of summer associates was fantastic. There were four of us from Carnegie Mellon, but besides us, the usual culprits were represented: Wharton, Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Stern, MIT, UCLA, etc. I expected there to be a lot of competition among the SAs, but that was absolutely not the case. Everyone was great – which is nice, because we ended up spending quite a bit of time together. Aside from training and meetings, there were weekly social events that everyone attended, which allowed us to relax a bit and not worry about putting on a good smile and "working the room" with people from the business. And besides being extremely bright and talented, everyone was a lot of fun to hang out with. It's refreshing to be pounding through a class on repo financing with people in the morning, and then see those same people on stage singing karaoke that night. It reminds you that it's not just all about money and work. Since I've been back at school, one question that frequently comes up is how much of what we learned during our first year was applicable to our internship. Although the responses vary greatly, in my case, the answer is "Not much". Don't get me wrong – I'm not saying that everything I learned was a waste. On the contrary, I think that I'll be able to apply much of what I've learned at some point and to some degree in the future. Essentially, it seems as though the first year at Carnegie Mellon is designed to give you a toolkit to be used in tackling some of the more advanced classes later on in the curriculum and to give everyone a broad exposure to the different fields under the "business" umbrella. They don't beat us over the head with calculus and statistics so that we can go out and publish advanced mathematical papers. They do it so we can derive demand functions in Microeconomics or understand Geometric Brownian Motion when we cover it in Options. We don't study the core disciplines of marketing, finance, and operations so that we can go into a company and suddenly be the expert in corporate takeovers. We do it so that we aren't just trained to do the "job" we're interested in, but that we understand what goes into running the firm as a whole. And I think that's important, since somewhere down the line, a large majority of us will have to think beyond our individual roles, and the "corporation" will become our number one priority. Or at least I hope. So for the rest of my second year, I'm really looking forward to getting into the meaty stuff – to using my toolkit. There are myriad courses that I'm looking forward to, from the aforementioned Options class (which, incidentally, I've just completed and which I REALLY could have used prior to my internship) to Capitalism with the esteemed Allan Meltzer to Business Acting (yes, Business Acting). Okay, so some classes are just for fun – I am a second-year after all. But this year is where I feel we get to specialize, we get to become the experts, and we really get what we need to hit the ground running when we start our new jobs. And, in my case, to figure out just what the heck it is that your firm does.  
BW MALL
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