The Circle of Life
Old people are like babies. They:
(1) Need to be fed
(2) Need to be bathed
(3) Need to be rolled around (in a wheelchair vs. a stroller)
(4) Walk slowly
(5) Don’t talk much
(6) Are really cute!
(7) Eat soft foods
(8) Have very short-term memory
(9) Are fragile
(10) Sleep a lot
The Stock Market
The stock market is like a rock. When it goes up, it must come down.
Poker and Recruiting
Playing poker is like finding a job.
First, you are dealt a hand of two cards. This is when you receive a couple of internship offers. In my case, this came down to accounting or financial consulting.
Say the cards are pocket two’s. I have two options: (1) Fold – Accept the accounting internship and be done with recruiting. I would be doing accounting for the next 5 years with a starting salary of $50K. (2) Call the bet – Accept the consulting internship and gamble a bit on getting management consulting or even banking during full-time recruiting
The flop ~ Dropping resumes and cover letters to a bunch of companies and waiting to hear back for interviews
The fourth card ~ First-round Interviews
The fifth card ~ Second-round interviews
Revealing your hand ~ The final offer
Stay tuned for the turnout. Place your bets everyone.
Las Vegas and the ABCs
1) Driving down the Las Vegas Strip in a Taxi : Investment Banking (B)
- You take the traditional route down the strip with the nice views feeling baller all the way
- Cost: $30, but you’re loaded
2) Driving to a Las Vegas Casino a Taxi using the back roads : Accounting (A)
- Don’t get the nice views, but you end up in the same place as the banker in the end — faster and by saving more money.
- Cost: $25, you’re on a budget
3) Driving down the Las Vegas Strip in a Limo : Management Consulting (C)
- Comfortable and glamorous, you are the envy of all those around you
- Reputation, work-life balance, and a good salary all-in-one
- Cost: $50, but don’t worry, it’s on the company tab
Hello world!
So the title of this post was the default when starting this blog, and I decided to make an analogy out of it. Accounting is like Computer Science. They:
(1) are the languages of their fields. Accounting is the language of business while Computer Science is the language of engineering.
(2) require some time-consuming, tedious work. If the numbers don’t balance, you need to spend hours figuring out why. If a code has errors, you spend hours debugging.
(3) are practical subjects that you can apply right away.
(4) have lots of nit-picky rules that must be followed.
(5) have a “most elegant” way of being presented.
(6) entail several parts worked on by many people combined into the finished product.
(7) require “posting” journal entries and “committing” code.
I just found out that at my school, undergraduates are allowed to be UGSIs (Undergraduate Graduate Student Instructors) for both of these fields, which is the only subject in the department that allows it. That means in all of Engineering, only Computer Science hires undergrads to be UGSIs, and in all of Business, only Accounting allows undergrads to be UGSIs. Maybe they’re basically about following rules, so you don’t really need a graduate degree to teach it.
