Wrapping up a great week in Washington DC with my Georgetown classmates and friends. I'm perpetually amazed at how much of a good fit this Georgetown program was for me. A lot of my classmates were deciding between the Johns Hopkins program and here, including myself, and while I respect Hopkins a lot, I'm really glad I ended up here and met these special people in particular.

The core of the week was the business case study competition, which we spent most of each day working on. We played the role of consultants, advising a major fund about the performance of its investments. We had to think about not only about the mechanics of how financial investments work but also about the strategy of how one investment business keeps up with another in terms of AUM--assets under management and how many people with investable money are actually choosing to come to you. My group had some really good synergy. I was really proud of us. We divided tasks out really well and played to our strengths while acknowledging our weaknesses. We in the end finished third place out of sixteen groups in the compeition, which actually did not surprise me. I may write more later about what I learned in this group work about principles of successful synergy and work flow, but I have to pack for my flight soon.

A personal project of mine was to wake up early in the morning (usually about 4 or 5 am) to go to the Bloomberg terminal in the MBA room and finish the 8 hour Bloomberg terminal certification course. I'm really glad I did it; never learning how to use Bloomberg was one of my biggest regrets about BYU, although I did graduate with a business minor in the end. I will say that: BYU's nonprofit management minor pretty much gave me all the key components of an undergraduate business school experience, without conveying any of the actual prestige of having a full business degree. I'm able to hold my own in this master's program, partly because of what I learned at the BYU Marriott School of Business. I remember in particular the day I learned how to pull up a company's annual reports and financial statements on the internet and dig through it to pull out key, relevant data. I remember pulling up Abercrombie's financials, and being like, "woah, I'm a businesss student!" At Georgetown, my group's use of the hedge fund's annual reports and letters to its shareholders was one of the things the judges found most impressive.

I do want to briefly say some kind words about my two closest friends in the program, Ryan and Amelia, pictured below with me. While I feel really happy that I've developed a reasonable diversity of friendships with the 80-some people in the program, these are the two people that I especially click with the most. Ryan is a really smart guy from Boston who at the moment is very passionate about cryptocurrency. Sometimes he posts articles about bitcoin and ethereum and I actually open them and read the whole thing but come out none the wiser, haha. But the parts that I do understand let me see that he is an extremely talented, motivated individual who rides the wave of innovation very well and is going places some day. Amelia is an equally smart gal from Florida. She works in mid-level management for a major US corporation and seems really talented at what she does. She gets to travel a lot for her job and I think this is her second masters degree. I learn so much from her diversity of experiences and from her drive and ambition. Her group actually won the case study competition, first place, a fact of which honestly I am not surprised.

As I prepare to fly out and return back to Utah, I feel inspired to continue working on getting better and chasing a better life. But I also feel proud of the changes and improvements I have made already. Hoya saxa! Cheers for good things to come.​

Time to update this blog, I think. Autumn hit all at once this morning, in a heavy clap of rain and chilliness, showing that God does indeed have a sense of humor. I definitely feel more "ready" for this autumn than I ever have felt for an autumn before. That's the way it should be, I think. I resisted the temptation to stay home from CrossFit even though it was, like, chilly, and rainy and ugly, you know? One of my written goals from therapy this summer was the resolution to specifically continue going to CrossFit even when it's cold and nasty outside, and I'm very proud of myself for continuing to keep that up. Next Friday will basically mark my third month of continuing to go CrossFit consistently. Next Friday is also the day that autumn officially begins.

My goals for this season: hmm, what do I want my autumn to look like? I want my fall to be a time of consistency. Growth, and progress, yes, but also a time of consistency. Because I'm honestly doing a good job of keeping up with my short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals right now. All I need to do, really, is keep it up. Mid-October will be a kind of big "deep exhale" moment. That's when I'll have finished my on-campus residency and paid off my fall semester tuition in full. Specifically by October 20, I think.

November and December will be spent studying for my DELF or DALF (I found a placement test that I need to take) more aggressively, as well as picking up the pace in studying for my CFA exam. I've spent a lot of time talking to mentors in the industry, and I have a much clearer understanding of the difference between portfolio management, wealth management, and investment banking. I need to decide exactly where I want to go, what path I want to end up in, etc., and then start pursuing that.

Today was the last day of my Georgetown orientation weekend. I'm officially a graduate student! Orientation was a really positive experience. I have great classmates, great professors, and great career services counseling resources. I have a lot of options in front of me for where and what I want to be in life. I hope that I can behave and make choices in a way that will not be selling myself short. I don't think I was honestly "ready" for Parsons two summers ago, but I do feel ready for Georgetown. Let's go; let's do it; allons-y.

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Checking in. Okay, so I've been 26 for two weeks. This feels surprisingly easy. I think 26 will be a better year than 25 was. I have a new manager at the bank, and she's really awesome. We seem to have really similar personalities, and we click and get along super well. She was the manager of Wells Fargo at BYU Bookstore around the time that I was there, though I never had any significant problems or incidents that would merit me actually going in to speak to the manager. She has also been paleo in the past, but no longer is now.

The new manager is really excited and on board about the idea of making me a licensed banker. They're saying I'll be able to go for the licensing tests either in October or in January. It would be October for certain, but it's just that I do have to leave to Washington DC for a week in October for Georgetown classes, and that may or may not interfere with my ability to participate in the program. We'll see. What they're saying right now is that if I don't do the October class, I will almost certainly participate in the January class, so I am very excited about that.

Speaking of Georgetown, whew--Georgetown! Class begins in a week, or now, depending how you count. We have a bunch of orientation things that started this week, and then true curriculum classes in arnest will start in the middle of August. I'm really excited to fulfill some of my potential and learn more about the world of finance. I know I'm going to be exposed to a lot of aspects and sectors of the finance world. I am pretty sure that I want to continue down in the world of banking and be a higher-up banker, but who knows, maybe how I feel in two years will be different.

On top of school, I would really like to set a goal for myself to complete my CFA and my DELF/ DALF certifications. They just announced that there will be these super cheap flights from Denver to Paris next summer, so I'm kind of thinking of planning a summer vacation to Paris and just taking my DALF exam there. It would only be one week, because that's all Wells Fargo allows at one time, but yeah I would take off a week around my birthday and go explore Paris for the first time. 

I've been going to CrossFit consistently 4x per week for about a full month. It's developing my body well, and I do have actual abs that I can touch, feel, and see for the first time in my life. I hope that I can keep this habit up when school starts.

I'm going to see if I can try to clean up my bedroom just a little bit before work starts.

So, yeah. Hi. I think it's a good idea for me to have a blog and to write things. 

I read a New Yorker article recently about the end of the era of the online personal essay. The premise of the essaay was that during the Obama years, it was really common for people to write these long, indulgent articles about themselves online. About their personal struggles, about their journeys, about their nuances, whatever. In many ways these articles were the logical culmination of the LiveJournal/ Xanga/ Tumblr fads of the 2000s. But now, during the Trump era, when people are so focused on the serious and often problematic events in the news, the personal essay has mostly faded into obscurity. Websites like Thought Catalog, BuzzFeed.com, and LongReads are becoming less popular. Gawker is an example of a personal essay website that has altogether died out. 

I agree with the thesis of that article. I myself am a product of the online personal essay era. I had a Xanga. I had a LiveJournal. I had a Tumblr. I loved reading longreads articles on lazy Sundays when I was in college.  I thought it was normal and okay to share so much about yourself online. It was reflecting on the repercussions of the end of that era that led me to start this website. I wrote a lot of personal essays on the internet during the past five years or so, and I feel like they are outdated both in their form, i.e. the literary form of the online personal essay, as well as in their content, i.e. conflicted attempts to carve out a nonconformist position within Mormonism. The culmination of that was probably 2013, when this guy at Harvard wrote his undergraduate journalism thesis on me, about my life. I thought it as so cool at the time--like, wow, a guy at Harvard is writing about me!--but now I feel so humiliated and embarassed. I think my Mormon self was really ugly, while in some ways I'm sure I was just as confused as lots of kids at BYU, it's a shame that my struggles in particular are public fodder  for mass consumption on the internet.

When I look at my online landmark, my digital signature, well, 90 to 95% of what you find about me on the internet involves some sort of discussion of race, gender, and/or sexuality within Mormon culture. I no longer identify as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I've come to identify as bisexual rather than gay, I'm pursuiing a career in finance now rather than art history, and I've been doing the paleo diet and have been the member of a CrossFit box for almost a full year now. It's kind of uncomfortable for me to see a digital version of myself, enshrined on Google from four or five years ago, that no longer reflects the person whom I am in the present.  I wish I could just snap my fingers and instantly create a digital footprint that actively reflects who I am in 2017, but I know I can't just snap my fingers and do that right away. So this website is a modest investment in the idea that I can one day reclaim my digital signature and build the online identity that actually reflects myself and who I am.