Got back from Chicago last week. Pretty eventful and exciting past two days. DRW flew me in to the Windy City on Saturday for their Callback Weekend aka Superdays. Around 30 intern and fulltime candidates and each of us were put to a nice, sexy, sleek room in the W hotel. Another boutique hotel that is catching up the designer interiors etc. The hotel has an obvious theme: sex. Dimmed lighting with many candles throughout the building. The lobby looks more like a trendy club. Staff dressed in black. Lounge music played through its pipe music system. Definitely a place I would bring my significant other for a weekend of intimacy :)

DRW was very lavish with us. Had dinner in this Brazillian steakhouse called Brazzaz along Dearborn St. Awesome salad buffet and waiters would come up to you with skewers of a variety of meat. Grilled lamb, barbue chicken sausage, NY strip, fillet mignon etc. I ate a week worth of meat. Free flowof wine.

In life, you'll be curious in learning about other's culture, way of life, languages etc. Also, you'll be curious in learning various occupations that are out there. Me talking about traders doesn't mean me want to be a trader. I had a tour of DRW's electronic trading desks in the office. Each trader is surrounded by 7-8 21" LCDs. There's a radio communication from the desk to DRW's pit traders down at the Chicago Merchantile Exchange where they trade stuffs like Eurodollar futures and account for 20% of the trade volume for this particular type of security. I could hear the shouts from the pit traders over the radio. It seems unreal especially I would think this kind of environment are military-like. "Get me those March contracts at 50!!" shouted one of the traders in the office and a pit trader would shout back over the radio with a "DONE!!!".

Traders are a special breed of people. Like pilots, these ppl are supposed to be able to make very quick judgments. They are living calculators. This characteristic was obvious from the way they played poker. Even the trader assistant candidates had such qualities of quick with numbers. I lost early in a tournament later in the evening to a bunch of kids from Stanford, Berkeley and MIT and eventually volunteered to deal their cards after that. I thought I was good in the game but these kids are way much better.

Got another offer from an investment bank for IT. The IT recruiter from Credit Suisse called me up while I was enjoying my Brazillian dinner with the guys from DRW. I am requesting DRW to give me a reply by Tuesday when I will have to make a decision.

Btw, congratulations to Max for getting his long-waited offer in investment banking. Guess we'll hang out in NYC over the summer. Probably we'll room together with that Persian chick from MIT than you mentioned. 10 weeks in the Big Apple, like the lifestyle idealized in the many movies we've watched.

Wrapping up my internship search for this season. My power suit has served me well despite being dry cleaned only once for 30 interviews that spanned over 3 months. I thank God first and foremost for everything He has provided. Thanks to my family for their prayers and support. Thanks to friends like Max for helping me out with the preparation especially during the Futures in Finance event in NYC last December where I had the first round interview with BofA.

The coldest day so far this winter. The weather web site registers -13 C for Pittsburgh and the "feels like" value is -18 C. 2 days ago, it was everaging 15 C. Pelik giler.

There are friends who really know how and where to eat. Brian (not Brian Tong but Brian Loo) is one of them. One of the best things about him is that he always introduce new, non-Asian restaurants to me. He once told us that "why come all the way to the U.S. to eat Malaysian food". So tonight, together with his lady company, El, and King, we went to this upscale Spanish place called La Casa (the House?) to drink Sangria and eat plates of Tapas. If you don't know, Tapas are Spanish dim sums. Appertizers or snacks served on small plates. I was not dressed as I didn't expect the place to be of such standard. Food and decor are awesome. Had this grilled squid Tapas that inspires me to create something similar someday soon. Almost every Tapas we had featured olive oil.The Sangria (wine mixed with fruit cuts) accompanied the Tapas well. Pretty pricey at $24/person after tax and tips. Still hungry but I think such an experience is not wasteful at all.

And I got an e-mail from DRW Trading inviting me for a second round interview at their Chicago headquarters next week. Hotel and flight covered by them. Most probably going since it's before my BofA deadline. Position is for quantitative research. The proprietry trading firm is known for its brain teasers during interviews.

Hope can meet up with Max, Seng Seng and Alex on Feb 24/25.

DRW Trading is awesome. It does only proprietry trading which means it only manages the funds of its extremely owners or partners. Crazy. The guy who interviewed me was pretty cool. He looks more like a software developer but he's in fact a quantitative researcher.

My brain teaser question is crazy but I manage to come up with the solution at the end:

- Given ten buckets. 9 buckets are filled with an infinite amount of stones weighing 1 gram each.
- The other bucket is filled with an infinite amount of stones weighing 1.1 gram each.
- Given a chemistry lab weighing machine, develop a method to identify which bucket has the 1.1 gram stones.
- Can only use the scale once. Gather all the stones you need anad press "weight" once.

Got stuck and he told me to scale it down to 3 buckets. I managed to solve it.

Then he asked me to come up with a solution for the case there could be more than one bucket with the 1.1 gram stones.

Solved it too using a sequence of base 2 numbers.

It is very cool to be rich one day and employ a bunch of geniuses to manage your money like a hedge fund do. Sounds fictional but firms like DRW do exist!

Rescheduled lagi. This is the second time in less than a week that I came to the career center in the morning and was told that my interview is postponed. The interviewer from Goldman Sachs couldn't fly in from NYC as the result of the heavy snowstorm over the weekend. Luckily I was there last Wednesday instead of today. Else, I might be stranded at La Guardia as well.

I want to suggest the career center should come up with a systematic way to handle last minute cancellations of interviews. It was pretty annoying for me to wake up iron my shirt the night before and put on a suit just to find out 5 minutes before the scheduled time that the interviews for the day have been cancelled. I might want to suggest that they should have an automatic telephone reminder for the interviews. Just like what Orbitz has to remind its customers of upcoming flights. I think it will be awesome if I get a call at 7 a.m. saying

"Good morning. This is a reminder from the Carnegie Mellon Career Center of your scheduled ... first round interview ... with ... Goldman Sachs ... for a ... summer internship ... in ... Investment Banking.. at ... 9.30 ... a.m. .... today for ... 30 ... minutes. Please be at the waiting lounge 10 minutes before the scheduled appointment. Thank you."

On the other hand, if there's a last minute cancellation, the system should have an automated call to the candidate's cellphone informing the cancellation.

Fuh. I think I can do something like this. I was part of a research project at Intel Pittsburgh on music recognition service during sophomore year.

* this entry is not a mere tell-my-friends-what-did but for a future reference. pretty much like a diary except that it is not secretive.

A hard-earned day of rest after a busy and tiring week.

Tuesday - had a Citigroup interview rescheduled. I was the second candidate for the day and I was only told about it when I was five minutes from the scheduled slot time.

Wednesday - flew out on a morning flight to NYC for a superday with Credit Suisse for a position as a Summer Tech Analyst. Lost my suit jacket's top button as I walked into my apartment's elevator. Tried fixing it with a safety pin bought from a pharmacy on CS's building but wouldn't work. The superday was very structured with more candidates than mine at Bofa. Had a group exercise with people with from UPenn and other colleges. I was the only undergrad candidate from CMU that day. The rest were grad students in the MISM program. Then, there were three one-to-one interviews. Had a tour of CS's office in NYC. Three buildings joined by sky bridges. The place has a gymn (normal), a barber shop, postal office, grocery store and laundry. CS employees can even live from the cubible all week. Tech at CS is less trading-involved as the Bofa position but there's opportunity for travel. A CMU grad who just joined CS Tech last year has already travelled to London 3 times and Zurich ones in the past year. His boss is in NYC while his director is in London. The 2005 tech associates who brought us around are very friendly. There was this new hire Cooper Union guy who even hailed a cab for us to get to the airport. Even the new hire at Bofa was also very friendly during the trading floor tour. I guess they felt what we feel as college was not very far in the past for them. I got back to Pittsburgh with three other MISM guys I made friends with. Tired, I almost slept in my suit. Btw, the flight to NYC cost CS over $900 which is enough to get me a return flight to Malaysia.

Thursday - EOC (career job fair) but nothing much. Investment banks and other reputed tech and wall st. firms have started their summer recruits search earlier in the year.

Friday - interviewed with Barclays Capital and Yahoo!. For Barcaps, it was for an i-banking position, my first and only ibanking interview so far. Two associates and they really impressed me from the way they talked and dressed. Yahoo! was pretty casual with this lady giving me one a tough programming question involving getting values from random positions in a list. Sounds easy but with a list that you can only reset once and only a next function and also a random number generator that takes no bounds as arguments, it was really a code to write. My interviewer even wanted me to come up with solutions that provide some kind of distribution. Sweat my way through but managed to solve with some hints from her. I felt solving the problem was very funny as an experience that I held myself from laughing as she explained life at Yahoo! to me.

next week...
Monday - Goldman Sachs for Technology
Tuesday - DRW Trading for Technology
Wednesday - Citigroup for Quantitative Trading

Pasta

Two consecutive evenings of great dinings. Food at Cheesecake factory is really good although rather pricey for a college student like me. You can't leave the place without the desert. Brian got his first paycheck from Keithley and gave me and Wendy a treat at some restaurant at Shadyside. Both evenings I had pasta and these dishes made me realize the flexibility that one can go with the durum dough.

I am looking forward to making my own pasta. Probably I should invest on a second hand pasta maker. Explore the use of dried tomatoes or maybe mushrooms. Lessen the tomato gravy. Infuse more garlic and olive oil.

The Search for Internships

Got a verbal offer from Banc of America Securities this morning. The recruiter from New York called me to convey the good news. A formal letter will arrive in my mailbox by the end of this week. I'm given till Feb 28 to decide whether I'll take the offer or not.

BoA flew me in to New York on Thursday evening. I was put up in a boutique business hotel along 57th St steps away from their NYC headquarters. Room was awesome as it has a view of Central Park. Steps away are Trump's Tower, where The Apprentice is shot, and the Plaza Hotel, where Home Alone 2 was shot. I spent the entire Friday morning interview by 7-8 VPs, one or two associates and a managing director. Every half hour, a VP walks in, asks me either technical or behavorial questions. Since Ali Basah as my surname brings me to the top of the list alphabetically, I got to have the 32nd floor conference room.

We had a tour of the trading floor too. Occupies floors 2 and 3 ENTIRELY. Nearly wall-less. Bullpen as they call it I think. Traders sit around 8-9 monitors with a Bloomberg terminal as its main machine. Phones kept ringing. Every two rows of desks, a huge LCD TV hangs showing market news.

The search is still going but I'm very impressed with BoA especially on how technology dominates trading. Analytics are important part of Sales and Trading. Will be flying to NYC for another day of interviews with Credit Suisse this Wednesday. Two first rounds on campus and a career fair.