Romancing the Wall Street?

Right when you are sure about what you are going to do in your future, new possibilities open up and you are walking on a road that is totally new for you. It’s the thrill you get from exploring new options, new challenges that takes you places.

Back in my high school days I was an avid chess player. I was very serious about the game – so serious in fact that I wanted to make my career in it. By a quirk of fate, I was introduced to computers and I was hooked. Back in those days, the internet was a novelty and computers were rare, I launched my fansite called “The Ash World” devoted to none other than Aishwarya Rai (well, she was a novelty too in those days) and spent a considerable amount of time designing and developing it.  The upshot of all this was that I was completely taken by computers and soon enough found myself doing my undergraduate degree in computers.

What with all the IT boom and all that, I soon found a job (actually two) in a software firm and was earning much more than me and my girlfriend could spend (touchwood). The excess money I had again started to turn some wheels in my head and it was impossible to ignore newspaper reports about the Indian stock market. Well, you can put two and two together and I was very soon trading heavily in smaller amounts on Dalal Street (that’s the Indian stock market, for the uninitiated). Some more exploration got me hooked into Technical Analysis (fundamental analysis seemed to be out of scope) and I was devouring articles about stocks and all that. One Warren Buffet quote caught my attention though – “Learn as much accounting as you can”. I soon forgot about it.

Months passed by and I shifted base to Cornell University (still studying computer science, mind you). Proximity to New York City meant that the ‘financial atmospheric pressure’ was high here. With great enthusiasm I enrolled in a course called “Financial Accounting” only because I recalled that Buffet-speak. I stuck on to this really difficult course (made doubly difficult because of its 8:40AM start time) just because the professor was a good guy and made this subject so very interesting. At the end of the semester, I knew that this was the best course I had taken at Cornell. Finance, suddenly was ‘in’ for me – it gave me a better ‘high’ than computers.

So, I followed it up this semester by a course called “Managerial Finance”, and also applied to some finance companies for jobs. And guess what (no, don’t go far) I’ve got a first round interview scheduled in a little over a week for a career in finance!

Life’s interesting, isn’t it?