I’m an idiot.

That’s the sobering fact I learnt today, after not being able to score 2 extremely easy papers. When you’ve been in QF for a while, you kind of take for granted that you’ll get killer papers, and that no one else can do them too. It’s also well known that the marginal benefit from studying is very little, because unless you have a flair for the math and do some hardcore studying (read: tear through many books written in greek and know theorems with strange names by heart), you’ll never get it. Especially not when there are other courses and other committments that are more urgent and where the results are immediate.

That’s why we always laugh at the impossible to comprehend notes and the insane amount of work that QF gives us. But when you can’t even do the simple questions, it’s not funny anymore. To add insult to injury, it’s an open book exam where I had the answer right in front of me, but when I attempted to do the question myself, I make spastic algebraic errors even a secondary school student shouldn’t be making – and I submitted them undiscovered.

What’s left for today is bitter disappointment. I disappointed both myself and the professor with high expectations for me. He’s a professor I really respect and whom I actually care to impress, but I only disappoint him again and again. That’s the problem with over-promising, I’d much rather stay low profile and do well in my own way.

Making stupid mistakes in exams may be a small thing, well, everyone does from time to time, and I don’t have the delusion that I won’t. But not being able to answer simple conceptual questions quickly and accurately feels terrible – how can I call myself a QF major if I don’t get my fundamentals right? (Actually, it applies to accounting too, except that I’m only an accountant by training, and don’t envision calling myself an accountant – ever.)

The past 2 terms have been a joke – I think I’ve just been muddling through. I really need to get my act together, quit wasting so much time watching TV and entertaining silly interests, and get down to grinding through the math and setting my finance fundamentals straight. I should learn programming proper too. I need to stick to my goal of getting a good masters in financial engineering, which means I need to get myself enrolled in one and get someone to sponser it. That also means I need to prepare myself for it and do well enough at work to deserve a scholarship.

My job in risk will be demanding, and the department’s ties with my professors mean I really cannot afford to screw up. And I don’t even want to settle for mediocrity, so I seriously need to buck up. When I’m left with just 2 accounting courses next week, there should be no excuse for not spending more time and effort on finance. 

Ironically, after the exams, I realize it’s time to hit the books.

Now that there are confirmed plans for after graduation, there is only anticipation. Life’s going to be good, but only when June comes. That’s when there will be change – a different environment, different responsibilities, opportunities, and also, finally being able to concentrate on a specific area of work instead of dealing with 7 while simultaneously entertaining the various silly interests of mine that surface from time to time.

And all the fun I’m going to have in Australia. That will come, I have to be patient.

Meanwhile, I’m in both accounting and finance hells. I wish I could understand Finance Theory better though, or at least be able to sit still long enough to try and understand it. It’s incredibly mind boggling, which makes it interesting, but not very fun when there are 5 other courses to do. As for Accounting Theory, well, maybe… not.

Leaving school and moving on to a new lifestyle will be good. It’s time to get out of this 17 years (!!!) of structured education drudgery which my mind is beginning to reject, showing signs of restlessness. At this point in time, I actually find being the lowest life form in the corporate food chain a strangely attractive prospect compared to being the boss of my own learning. Furthering studies? Most likely, but just not anytime too soon.

The craziness that is work will end for a while. No tearful farewells, havoc parties or emotional speeches, just plain lifting a load off my shoulder; both metaphorically and literally - the Dell computer with its humongous charger is a real big burden.

It has been fun. Tough, lots of complaints, lots of problems and work impossible to do without some superpowers. But I learned a company, heard much about an industry, met lots of people and made my first trips to Korea and Japan. I dined with management, presented at corporate meetings and even got to demand work from people I shouldn’t be ordering around. This company is crazy, they forgot that I’m only an intern, while other less enlightened companies forget why their criterias for picking scholars are different from those for administrative clerks.

There will be no break though, until I’m successfully jobless after graduation. There are things planned for the rest of my time in school. Looking back, I realise that ever since I started working at the age of 18, I’ve worked (intern/temporary/part-time) in 4 companies and for 3 individuals (on separate occasions), all within the span of 4 years while being a full-time student. People ask, what do you work so hard for? Are you that hard up on cash? Do you know you’re never going to be able to enjoy yourself once you start working full-time?

Actually, I don’t really think I work that hard. I complain a lot but I really do secretly enjoy loading on the responsibilities and cramming my schedule to the point that I’ve not had a break for almost 3 years. It’s really just plain greediness. I want to do everything and learn everything at once. And mostly, I just want to keep myself occupied – most of the jobs I’ve taken up are really quite menial, I’ve never had anything important enough that my decision can cripple a company, but I still pick them all up anyway.

What have I learnt? Nothing that I can immediately list down or elaborate into paragraphs.

Still, I have learned much. I know, because sometimes I realize that ideas come to me and I’m able to understand concepts and the deliverables expected from me much easier than people who have less work experience. Coworkers and bosses who belong to the older generation are sometimes surprised by what I know because they never did know such things when they were my age, at a time when internships were not as common for undergraduates.

I don’t have the delusion that I’m better or smarter than others. All that I know, I have simply, very accidentally and naturally applied bits of skills and knowledge picked up from experience. I happen to think of things and understand things faster because I’ve had some rather diverse work experience and have interacted with people from various backgrounds and with different specialties.

I’ve realized that, no matter what the nature of the job, whether or not it challenges you intellectually, does not limit your ability to learn from it. I don’t say this merely because it’s difficult to fault logically. I say it because I’ve personally experienced the effects. And because of this realisation, I know that I will continue to pick up small job opportunities, however “irrelevant” it is to what I really want to do, so long as it doesn’t take up too much of my time or affect my priorities.

Small jobs aside, I disagree with people who think that expectations for something more than the norm is too high an expectation for our full-time jobs. Sure, opportunities may be limited by the job market. But how will we find better ones, if we settle for what is the market average. Aren’t all of us money-savvy finance students obsessed with getting that alpha and beating the beta? Shouldn’t we demand even more from the investment of our time – time that we can never earn back?

Whenever there’s an opportunity for a simple part-time work experience that will take up part of my free time but not affect anything important, I’m not picky, I can be adventurous about what I do. After all, it won’t be a bigger waste of time than idling. But if it’s a full-time job that will prevent me from doing what I really want to do, I don’t want to settle for the average alternative. I believe that I should know and maintain my expectations, and find something close to them. If there are really no opportunities, then I’ll have to plan something and work towards making it possible.

I never believe those who say that taking a longer route is an unnecessary waste of time. I also never believe those who say that there are better ways to spend my time than an “irrelevant” part-time job. Well, maybe you have more important things to do, but for me, I don’t want to go into my full-time job being an ignorant green-eyed graduate with little/no work experience and be mocked by less well-educated coworkers who can do much more than me. I also don’t want to limit the scope of my experience at a time when I can still maintain many roles and responsibilities at once.

You say, you don’t have the luxury of long holidays once you enter the workforce. I say, you won’t have the luxury of enriching yourself and picking up diverse sets of skills once you leave your schooling life.

I’ve been playing with a lot of numbers these days, rows and columns of data that jammed up my excel. I’ve been doing a lot of charting and statistics too, which probably explains my hypersensitivity to the charts our dear PM Lee presented in yesterday’s National Day Rally. A fellow SMU student commented very aptly, “All SMU students know that charts don’t tell the whole truth.” Well, figure that out.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with numbers. Innocent sexy simple sophisticated numbers. I hate to love them. They make my life so simple and painful at the same time. I must be some sort of a masochist – I love things I’d never completely understand.

Today’s Investment and Financial Data Analysis (what a mouthful!) class has been interestingly boring. There’re some people who can make extremely complex concepts seem incredibly simple and intuitive. Then there’s my professor who has a knack for making things I thought I knew and thought were simple sound excruciatingly profound.

But the second half of the class kept me at the edge of my seat. Hell, all that I was trying to painfully figure out on my own for the past month was explained!

I’ll never forget the definition of a random variable. I tried explaining it to an accountant for 10 minutes in the stupidest manner possible “Er, a random number is random. It’s like, 0.524. RANDOM.” That obviously failed terribly at getting the point across.

The next time she (or anyone else asks), it’ll be “A random variable is a variable with an associated probability distribution.” Never mind if she still doesn’t understand, at least I’d put it across sleekly.

Smoke them like salmons.

Thou shalt do unto others what thou do not want others to do unto you.

Considering that they are called “cells” (on the excel worksheet, nevertheless), it seemed pretty redundant to lock them. In fact, I firmly believe that locking excel cells is one of the worst form of torture you can apply on a spreadsheet literate man.

So I didn’t.

I immediately discovered the next worse form of torture – having your spreadsheet’s formulas (which you painstakingly configured to have all the calculations done proper) all screwed up by someone who cared more about finishing work 10 minutes earlier than trying to understand how the spreadsheet works.

Ironically, in the next room I walked into after fixing up the spreadsheet, others were struggling with a locked spreadsheet template with countable cells that could be edited. “I don’t think you can change that,” *click* “Yeah, you can’t.”

All the frustrations I felt magically evaporated and my frowns were replaced by a devilish smile.

Work these days somewhat reminds me of Shark’s Tale, that cartoon where a whale-cleaner fish befriended a vegetarian shark.

It’s tough enough being at the bottom of the food chain. It’s another thing when the top of the food chain expects you to liaise directly with those just one notch below the vegetarian shark, who is too busy with his own stuff.

But after a while, I’ve kind of accepted that “being hated by demanding things from people I should not be ordering around” is part of my job scope. And it’s quite an experience, really. So I’m not complaining.

What is most frustrating though, is the cultural differences when working with people from different places. All the Hofstede cultural dimension bullshit does actually seem pretty accurate. The Japanese never ask questions and don’t tell you the problems they face until you stare them in the face and dig it out of their throats. Plus they’ll always refer you to their boss. All of which I find pretty worrying sometimes because that strong sense of hierarchy should mean that I’m probably already stepping on toes by demanding outside of what I rightfully can, and they’re not going to tell me about it.

Well, I’m only an intern. So it’s not that bad, I’ll just experience this company’s culture as it is, and try my best to contribute (or at least, not cause too much damage). Working with people from different cultures is really something everyone ought to try out. The world is not as globalized as I thought.

I’ve this backside-itchy disorder that I can’t shake off.

Knowing full well that I don’t know any of all those statistical models and that there’s no one around who can (or cares to) help me with it or even appreciate the effort, I’ve decided to go ahead and try to figure it out myself anyway, simply because “that’s how it should be done, theoretically.”

Naturally, theoretical stuff don’t go very well with the practicalities of cruel reality. All the unfamiliar problems of insufficient or unreliable data and messy numbers followed (not surprisingly, they never seem to trouble the textbook examples). Together with it came the constant pressure to produce results, to show something, which comes in the way of fully understanding how the model works and confirming if it’ll even work. “Welcome to the corporate workstyle,” I tell myself, “fight fire without knowing if it’s the right fire extinguisher you’re using.”

Then came a new intern today, someone who seems to still remember something from the business processes course (which I unfortunately, have not taken). A conversation began with the borrowed book from school I was struggling to understand, and it eventually led to the model I was attempting to apply. “Oh, but you need the alpha, beta and gamma.”, he said. I thought, “Finally! OMG, he knows this stuff!”, so a discussion followed and he suggested some methods.

Damn it feels good to finally be able to get some feedback about what I’m doing and learn something about it. At least there’s some validation and value-adding, instead of trying to explain to them what a random number is and how excel is able to generate it for you.

I have a bad feeling about full-time work. Learning on the job with no one to discuss with sure is shitty stuff, especially when you have the full set of responsibilities that comes with the full paycheck you get. For a while I thought I’d prefer working. Suddenly, I feel like just staying in school.

It couldn’t have been the waking-up-on-the-wrong-side of the bed thing. My bed has one side against the wall, and I don’t recall making a hole in the wall.

Maybe it’s the ill-timed call received early this morning or the frustrations of getting to the door 20 seconds after my mum locked it and me not being able to reach my keys because I was balancing 2 bags and had a hand glued to the phone glued to the ear hearing a voice emitting orders.

In any case I was angry all the way to work, and the work attitude of some people just makes even the mildest of tempers fume. And I’m not the mildest of tempers, so I was just short of strangling her.

In-need-of-a-good-strangle: I can’t do it.

Me: Why?

In-need-of-a-good-strangle: Because of x.

Me: Try y.

In-need-of-a-good-strangle: It will be difficult, because of z.

Me: Try harder.

In-need-of-a-good-strangle: I can try, but it will be difficult. Besides, there’s already so much of abcdefghil to do.

Me: …

In-need-of-a-good-strangle: So do you have any suggestions on how we can improve after this interview? Otherwise it would just have been a waste of time.

Me: (I wish thoughts could kill.)

I’m glad I’m not the boss.

So I’m not going to The Philippines after all.

It’s alright because I’m given a very important task here in Singapore. But I was looking forward to Philippines, much more than Japan and Korea. Partly because I knew going overseas was entirely possible, unlike the uncertainty felt when planning for the previous trips. More because I was looking forward to experiencing Philippines, a place I would otherwise not likely visit.

So much for the jokes about “poor people going to far away places to work” and going to work in a place where most of the citizens work overseas.

The best thing is, Big Boss sees what I’m doing as value-adding, and so the boss made the trip sounds like it’s a mandatory thing just to complete the round of trips around the distributors when the person going on the trip is not around. That’s why they’re the bosses.

Learning point: If you can’t give grapes to everyone, make the grapes seem sour to the one who doesn’t get it. ;P

With 5 full days at work and no flexibility to the working hours and working place, the weekends are especially valuable.

I’m falling prey to silly greed, trying to do as much as possible during the weekend even though I’m tired. I figured since I’m going to be tired anyway, it might as well come from play rather than work. So I was out shopping half the day yesterday, and out at East Coast learning to roller blade, then off to explore Tampines and took a super round-about route home across Changi, Geylang and Kallang today.

It was especially bad overseas. Desperately trying to maximise whatever time I have to go around, I dashed across several places in Seoul in a day, even if it means carrying an umbrella and getting drenched because of the rain. Even if it means walking around Tokyo at 11pm with a flush from fever. Philippines should be tough though, considering the poor public security.

Maybe that’s why the people who work full time always complain about being tired. They “work” 7 full days a week!

When I start working full time (which is creepily soon), I think I’m going to miss mostly the freedom to control my own time when I’m in school. And I might pick up some exciting hobbies because the weekends are far too valuable to be wasted away at home.