#55. Interview Day (Monday, January 20, 2014)

What was your best day…of doing something successfully, but not knowing it had been successful until later?

If you define an “interview” as “any instance where me and one or more people had a serious discussion on my qualifications relative to a competitive position I had been seeking”, to this date I had been zero for twelve.

Penn and Columbia undergraduate (Winter 2008)
Summer student at five different government institutions (Spring 2009 – Spring 2011)
Research assistant position at a certain institution I’d soon become very familiar with… (Fall 2011, #59)
Full-time position in a government financial officer training program (Winter 2012) (in fairness, the interview went well, I just didn’t have the requisite accounting courses for the job)
Morgan Stanley and Macquarie summer analyst (Winter 2013, #71)
Five Rings analyst (Summer 2013, #71)

Of course, I had held my share of jobs up till then – teaching assistant (#92, #106), bank intern in China (#61, which got arranged via family friends), among others. But still, my failure at these interviews had been a major hamper to my career up to this point; so a lot of time by now had been spent trying to figure out why this was constantly happening.

I never came to one clear answer. All I know is that in the one week preceding this interview – where I had flown back home – I prepared intensely in terms of the whole range of questions they could ask me.

Then, on the Monday of the interview: it snowed. A lot. Like feet upon feet of snow; which made what was usually a 30-minute drive from my parents’ house in the West End instead a two-hour type drive.

Well, I didn’t plan for two hours. More like one-and-a-half. So as the road (literally one main road) linking our neighborhood to the city core slowed to a crawl; an intense panic set in. I was about the blow this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

At some point, I calculated in my head whether it would be better to get off and take the bus, and maybe only be a little bit late. Good thing I didn’t. Because once we got through that one road, the highway by some miracle was smooth sailing, and I got registered about five minutes before our guides got there.

It was one of those “interview days”, so there were about fifteen or so MA hopefuls there, all interviewing for different positions across all the departments. First we had morning introductions. Then a lunch at the nearby hotel. Then this Q & A session with an HR person. Then to the room with my interview.

The interviewers are: (1) a woman from HR; (2) Mathieu Remillard, (my future close friend, #110) who was a senior analyst in the foreign reserves group and on that day one of the most intimidating-looking people I had ever met; and (3) my future director.¹

The interview goes pretty well. By the end of it, I feel like I did slightly better than most previous interviews, but it’s still up in the air.

Then my parents pick me up and drive me straight to the airport to catch my flight back to North Carolina. I take off not sure if I’ll ever have occasion to come back to this city ever again.

(NB: See #65.)

At that time, she was only a principal analyst. But two months after I join, the director moves to another team and she replaces him. She remained my director until moving to our Toronto office in late 2020; when I moved to foreign reserves to start 2018 (#110), she also moved there at the same time.