It has been very hectic for the past 3 days. It all began on my group's preparation of the update presentation of our electrical & computer engineering design program, the culmination of my undergraduate years at Carnegie Mellon. We're implementing a variation of the MPEG-2 encoder/decoder on a piece of Digital Signal Processor (DSP) board. I spent the entire Sunday editing a mix of spoken word (sajak) and music for my sound recording class. It can be a very addictive activity as one will never be satisfied of his creation. The DSP update was on Monday afternoon and the music demo was in the evening. A financial econons homework due Tuesday so I spent the entire night last night building CAPM and Fama-French models on Excel. The assignment required us to do everything from scratch (i.e. finding the historical stock prices).

The above is not my usual way of life this semester. I think I spend more time these days watching full webcasts of NBC series like Studio 60 and 30 Rock.

I finally close my job search with 4 offers for analyst positions, all from financial services firm in New York City. West coast giants Google and Microsoft never took my skills and abilities seriously into consideration. My employer for the past summer, Bank of America, wanted me to return to my old team at Global Markets Technology as a software developer. A final round phone interview with Citigroup Technology landed me with a second offer. I attended a Superday with Goldman Sachs Technology in New York to interview for 2 groups - Foreign Exchange Proprietry Trading front desk technology support and Risk Technology. An offer came with Risk Technology. The managers brought me out for lunch at Goldman's cafeteria, something that was outside my schedule for that day.

I was called for a Superday with HSBC investment banking, an effort that was not fruitful despite the hours put to practice for interviews. Found out that I was missing the work experience and coursework in finance although I know one or things about corporate finance. My competitors were former ibanking interns themselves. The day before HSBC's, I interviewed for the Portfolio Analytics Group (PAG) analyst position at Blackrock. Their office at 55 East 52nd St, between Park and Madison avenues, is a very sleek place. It's in the Park Avenue Plaza on the East Side of Manhattan.

Last Monday, the Monday after the two Superdays with HSBC and Blackrock, a director from Blackrock called me to extend an offer to join them. By Friday, my signed offer letter was its way to the HR department in New York. I was eyeing for the PAG position for quite sometime. I heard of it being a reputable group to work in one of the top investment management in Wall Street. Blackrock is still a small firm yet they are managing over $1.05 trillion in assets. Graduates of PAG are highly regarded as I was told. The reputation came with a price, I also heard the hours are long and demanding especially during the first year but I think I must be prepared to earn my stripes if success in a professional career is my target in the years to come. The nature of the position is semi-technical and semi-finance-based which is suits my background heavy with computer science courses, projects and courses.

I'll be flying home on Dec 15 and going to be in Bintulu for a month before flying back on Jan 16. The next 4 weeks is the last stretch of the semester. The last dash as I sometime call it.

Good game. I thought we're going to lose and bid goodbye to the season.