I read five books this summer. I read more than five books this summer, but these are the five books that I checked out from the Georgetown library. I like Georgetown a lot, and I like Washington DC, so these books are very important to me. They are like a piece of Washington DC out here for me in Utah. I had six things on my list to bring back from Washington DC, on my most recent trip. Five of them were these books, and the sixth was a bowtie for my ex-boyfriend from the Georgetown Brooks Brothers. Brooks Brothers is very, very important to me, but that is a topic for another time. Right now, the topic at hand is the five books that I read this summer.

I read five books this summer. The first book was "Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street" by Karen Ho. The second book was "Jews Queers Germans" by Martin Duberman. The third book was "Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class" by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. The fourth book was "The Road to Character" by David Books. And the fifth book was "Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk" by Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee. They were very good books.

I tried to read in the hot tub at least once per week. I had a six pack that I was very, very proud of. It's fading away, but it'll come back. I'll write more about each book, later.

I finished out my first year of Georgetown with straight A's. I am happy to have accomplished a goal that I set last summer, and I am relieved to be done and out enjoying summer break. I turn 27 in about four weeks, which is really cool. It was about 2 years ago, right before my 25th birthday, when I set a bunch of goals for myself, including starting paleo and CrossFit, and getting to Wall Street by age 30. I would say I'm making reasonable progress toward those goals. I'm actually doing a really good job. I guess the one thing I would tweak in those goals is to say that for the right person I would stay in Park City. More about that later, maybe. I am going to go watch Netflix, read a book, and enjoy some red wine. Talk to you later.

Oh, here are some pics of me with my friends Michael, Julia, and Amelia at the end of year party last weekend in Georgetown, Washington DC. That was a really fun weekend. Okay, now really talk to you later.

I got a 100% on my Corporate Valuation, even when I was honestly not feeling too hot. The test focused on the Weighted Average Cost of Capital and on Deriving Equity Value from Enterprise Value. I hope I can get a good A on my final next week.

Well, there are only two weeks left in the school year. I'm honestly scared to my bones about the final. We are in a class called "Advanced Corporate Valuation and Modeling." We are expected to use a complex, multi-tab Excel spreadsheet to analyze a company's historical financial performance and project its future performance as well. It's really the core of what I'm going to be doing in the kind of job that I expect to one day be doing, as an analyst. So I'm taking it very seriously, and even though I have some catching up to do, relative to some of my classmates, I'm not going to let the size of the workload intimidate or overwhelm me.

Visualizing the future, I know, is the first step toward actually achieving it. So here we go. I see myself on May 26 taking the final and doing well. I see myself on May 27, waking up and having the relief of knowing that there is no more school to worry about until August. I see myself hanging with my best friend, best Utah friend, hopefully that last week before I go to Maryland. I see myself on a cruise in Georgetown's harbor with good friends and classmates, celebrating the end of a crazy yeaar. I see myself going back to CrossFit and developing my muscles and abs even more than they are already developed now. I see myself turning 27 in July. I see myself buying a PCMR pass and learning to snowboard this winter. I see myself making my first dent into ambitious plans to save $30,000 cash by summer 2020.

I see myself doing all of this, honestly. I see myself succeeding at my goals, even though it's scary sometimes, even though I'm "only 26." I'm going to watch Netflix a little more, and then I'm going to drink a little more port, and then I really am going to get some serious studying done tonight. I swear. I promise.

Just a quick note. Just got some new class grades and learned that I've maintained my straight A record at G'town. I put a lot of effort into this, so I'm really happy to keep it up. Hope this continues.

I used to post pictures here more often. I don't so much anymore. This is a picture of me at the Miss Africa Utah beauty pageant last night with Miss Nigeria Utah. She's a very nice Mormon girl from Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. This is my fourth year volunteering for Miss Africa Utah. I had a great time. 

Sunday was the start of Daylight Savings Time. It also felt like the first veritable day of spring in Utah. Warm enough to wear nothing but a light jacket--even shorts if you want. It feels good to welcome the start of spring: new births and new beginnings. It's been almost a full year since I started this website, and it's marvelous to think of all the positive, beautiful changes that I've undergone over the course of the year.

Fall semester was pretty difficult, but I feel like that's not even the most difficult challenge I've endured since last May. Last summer was probably the most difficult time, overall, of the past year, just because I was still getting on my feet and adjusted to a lot of new processes: working 70 hours a week, practicing and internalizing therapy principles, and so on. This winter has been pretty calm and tame compared to the other months, and I expect the spring to pass by pretty calmly. Spring will begin pretty gently with Miss Africa Utah, the Passover seder, lunch with an old friend, and passport renewal. I don't anticipate much turbulence in April, May, and June--just the quiet pursuit of my goals. April through August will be a really important period for me, where I'll be able to really build up my emergency savings fund and get closer to having six months of living expenses saved up.

I wonder what area or career of the finance world I'm going to end up in, eventually. I certainly see the world differently, today, from how I saw it my first day of graduate school. I think there was just, generally, a lot of excitement about the idea of securities--oh my gosh, securities--and the privilege of being licensed or otherwise specially trained to handle them. Not so much anymore; I mean, securities are just a product like any other product. When I was considering becoming licensed at Wells Fargo, I noticed that a lot of the entry-level positions relating to securities have the qualities of low-grade service jobs. I'm more interested in becoming rich enough to earn and own securities now than I am in necessarily being the person to actually trade them.

Ought to buy a nice new button-down shirt to wear to Passover. It would be nice to have something from Vineyard Vines, but I'm probably going to end up doing Ralph Lauren or J. Crew.

Struggle to find the appropriate way to say this, but I'm really inspired by and grateful for my friends. In Park City, friends like Kurt and Cameron inspire me to be creative about the way I think about career development and trying to make the most of this city. My grad school friends inspire me in more was than I can count, and I'm grateful for my lingering connections to Provo and Baltimore friends too.

This economy is really hard and difficult, I'm realizing as I get older. I'm lucky to have any job at all, let alone a job that's even tangentially related to my interests. Although I wish I was making twice as much money as I make, I've gotta realize, certainly, that I'm lucky to make above 50k. I'm well on the path, I realize, to make more--I just need to be patient and recognize that it does not happen immediately. While I wait to have a little more clarity about what job I want to do, I have no problem taking time to be a little more observant and humbly grateful for the privileges that are all around me.

Six months from now, it's going to be starting to get cold again. Although I look forward to summer, I'm going to be quietly focused, during these summer months, on shoring up and saving so that the winter does not have to be quite so hard. And then this winter I'll be planning for 2019's warmer months. I feel like 2019 and 2020 are when my life will really start to pick up. 

When I got my Bloomberg terminal certification at the Georgetown on-campus residency a few months ago, I thought it opened up a window of opportunity that would let me be considered for jobs that I wouldn't otherwise be considered for. It did, and I've had a couple of good job interviews over the course of the winter. It's almost six months later though, and I feel like that window of opportunity may be closing, and I need to find a new door to open. 

I'm thinking about the experiences of some of my peers and friends among Georgetown alumni and the experiences they've described to me about their own career search and lives during and post-Georgetown. I have some friends who left conventional corporate/government job life and became entrepreneurs. Some used their degree to leverage an advancement track within their own companies, and some used their degree to transition companies and industries. That's basically all the options I know of. I suppose another option in there is to pursue academia. I really wonder which option among those paths is the right thing for me to do. 

Georgetown has definitely passed from one initial stage, where the subject matter was more subjective, to a new stage, where the subject matter is increasingly quantitative and impartial. It's funny to say that, because I mean the whole program is about numbers, right? But when I reflect on my experience of taking Georgetown tests, I see a lot of verbal reasoning, a lot of hunching over a paper trying to think logically and formulate verbal explanations for phenomena in capital markets, in the market for derivatives, and in corporate finance. This econometrics class is the first class where I really feel like we are switching to pure quantitative reasoning and using the other side of the brain. There is one right answer and there are many possible wrong answers based on the correct or incorrect application of mathematical formulas.

Completing the past year of working hard, studying, and entering the finance world from my humanities background has so far been a fascinating and challenging experience. It's opened the door of the finance world and given me an opportunity to begin to shop myself around to different potential jobs and industries. Nothing so far has been the right fit. At least, I view each rejection as a sign that I'm not quite meant for that field of work. I'm someone who believes quite strongly in destiny, fate, and in the possibility of life revealing itself to me and revealing myself to myself. I really couldn't tell you right now what outcome I see for myself at the end of graduate school or what field of work I feel the most aptitude for.

I'm definitely entering a new stage of life with regards to health, which was the main reason I originally started this blog. Mentally, I've developed a very strong sense of self. I know who I am, and I've learned to balance feelings of charity with feelings of self-interest. Physically, I've just lost so much friggin fat over the past two years. I feel and see my abs, I have strong biceps, triceps and legs, and I'm overall just a lot stronger.

What I guess I'm inching toward is that for the first time in months, I don't feel a compelling sense of certain knowledge about exctly what it is I want to do in life. I don't quite see myself becoming like the older adults around me. I feel like I'm different from them: in the way I think, in the way I act, in the things I read--generally, in who I am. Although I have a safe, comfortable path to paying for and completing graduate school by staying with Wells Fargo, I don't particularly feel inspired by the job position that I'm in or the kinds of promotions that decision-makers seem to believe that people in my position are qualified for. I don't particularly care about customer serivce, and I don't see much value in listening to people complain to me about their banking problems all day. I want to do something else in life. I feel underutilized and misutilized in my current role.

I think there's a lot of shame I feel about saying that, but it feels good to finally express the words. If there's anything I've learned so far in graduate school, it's that there's a whole wide world out there and that I can do just about anything I want to do by setting my mind to it. Here's to keeping my head down, passing thorugh the world in a peaceful manner, and building up some savings during 2018. I don't know that there's very much I'm going to be able to do this year besides preserve the momentum of the path I'm already on. Hopefully I can use this time wisely, though, because next year will be a time of a lot of ambition and change. I don't want to live a wasted life. Just because Park City is the first place I've ended up in after college doesn't mean that this is where I'm meant to be for the rest of my life.

​So I want to make good decisions that will let me go from point A to point B and end up somewhere that I'll be happy and fulfilled. My path isn't as simple as other people's with simpler lives, but I ought to live it and enjoy the experience of being who I am. It's unfortunate that I have to potentially spend one or two more years doing work that 'm not necessarily a good fit for, but it's even more unfortunate that there are people out there who don't even have jobs at all. I ought to learn how to deal with a work life that is practical but is not perfectly ideal. This is, believe it or not, a very important lesson of adulthood, and my experience in that respect is not too different from that of many of my peers and mentors.

Monday was the last day of Corporate Finance, a class that I've spent the past two months pouring my heart out for, giving my all. I've been taking the last few days to get my life together and to pick back up those things that have fallen to the wayside. I anticipate the next class, Econometrics, being a lot easier. Advanced Corporate Valuation and Modeling, the final class of the semester and of my first year of graduate school, may be a lot harder again, picking up some of the same themes that made Corporate Finance difficult. It would be nice to get a head start on that and take advantage of the slower pace of econometrics by reading the McKinsey valuation book, over the course of March. That's a good goal, and I think reading the Corp Fin book early was something that helped me do better in the course. It's my priority, first, though, to read Zola and to read about stock options.

I had so many big plans for these first two months of the year. I have to come to terms with the fact that most of them probably are not happening anymore, or not happening right now. French certification, June CFA, and the Yosemite half marathon stand out as some of the big ones. A big theme for the year so far, throughout, has been flexibility, and as long as I continue to be flexible, I should be well-off.

Career-wise, I'll need to sit down at some point and really evaluate some of the options that are available to me. On the one hand, I just learned that I've received some restricted stock units that will vest in February 2020. It would be interesting to stay with the company for two more years and receive my shares and also receive another year of tuition reimbursement. I would not want to stay in Wells Fargo as a personal banker though. I need to make some decisive and effective transitions within the company over the next two years, or else I may be stuck in retail banking for the rest of my life. On the other hand, maybe the right thing to do is to leave Wells Fargo. Spring 2019, which suddenly feels really close, will be a really poignant window of opportunity in my life where I might be able to get a lot of really special job offers. It's hard for me to really wrap my head around that path. I've learned a lot, over the past six months, about the internal job search process at Wells Fargo. I don't know as much about the job search and the job options that are available outside of this company. Hopefully during the second quarter I'll learn more about my options and get some clarity about the right path to take going forward, as I prepare for graduation.

My time in Park City may or may not be fated to end. I'm settling into a point of comfort where I feel like I really belong here and it feels like home. I certainly value the friendships I've made here and the people I've met. Something I've learned over the winter is that I do have a purpose and a destiny and that it takes a little patience to let life's events unfold, so that destiny can reveal itself. I don't know exactly where I'm meant to be in life, but God knows, and it's exciting to know that one day soon-ish, I will know too.

This is sort of a cool, special time for me. It was about one year ago that I realized I was going to get into Georgetown and that, therefore, I started working a second job to save for tuition. The income that I'll record on my taxes for FY2017 basically matches the reported typical salary that a BYU business school undergraduate is offered straight out of graduation. As someone who graduated about 2 years ago, that's not too bad of a job.

I worked a bit in reservations for a company that did shuttles back and forth between my town and the Salt Lake City airport. That was a seasonal job that ended in March, and then I switched over to Ralph Lauren, where I've been for the majority of the past 12 months. It's an interesting feeling to realize that it's been almost a full year since I met most of these people and that we're coming almost to the point where we can say, "Remember this time last year, when..."

​Sometime in the next few months to a year, I'm going to transition to a new job, the firstfruits of all the hard work and effort I've put in over the past year to get to this point. That's something that will play its course; I need not rush it. For now, I am just so proud of myself for all the progress I've made in the past twelve months. Going to Georgetown and paying for Georgetown were mature decisions that required a lot of discipline, courage, and sacrifices.

One year later, I'm still feeling confident that I made the right choice, selecting this program over other schools. I looked very closely at the Master of Science in Finance programs at Hopkins, Utah, Vanderbilt, MIT, and Princeton. There were parts of each program that were a good fit for me, but this is the program that was, overall, most appropriate for me at the time. The people, in particular, are one of Georgetown's greatest strengths. I appreciate both the classmates and the professors and staff that I have met.

What I hope I can know and appreciate is that I have so much to be proud of in terms of how I have grown and developed over the past year. I'm well on track toward those goals I have set about getting my life together and being a Wall Street banker in New York by age 30. I hope to keep up the good work.