Why An Interview With Goldman Sachs Made Me Start Blogging

I’ve always wanted to have a blog or run my own website, but I’d never truly gotten around to it until today. It was just too much effort…mental effort that is (it literally takes 85 seconds to make an account on Medium and start writing).

I had started my own website in the past, but it was short-lived (but awesome), for two reasons:

1. Due to my ignorance of the free domain given to you by BYU (so I deleted the site that I had paid for and tried to make a site through BYU)
2. Due to my ignorance that although you cancel a subscription to host a site, you still have to wait a full year to be able to use your preferred name again (so this effectively killed my drive to blog back in November of 2020)

So here I am, sitting in my always slightly-too-cold apartment in a Burnley sweater (#goclarets) writing out this post.

So what’s up with Goldman Sachs?

Despite having never taken a finance class since my sophomore year of high school (shoutout to Mr. Belford, great man), I had my final round of interviews with Goldman Sachs this morning at 7:00 am. The “preppage” that has been put in to prepare for this interview cannot be overstated ~ ask me to walk me through my resume and you will hear the most polished, yet natural 90-second narrative that you have ever heard in your life… only took me like 20 hours to get to that point. I learned more about finance this summer than most finance majors know after two years in the program (okay probably a bit of an overstatment here but seriously for most careers what you major in really doesn’t matter for your job, study what you like. I still have respect for you finance majors out there).

This morning’s superday (term for final round of interviews) consisted of three 20 minutes meetings with associates and VPs back to back, it’s called a superday. While there are some guidlines for these interviews, when you hop in these zoom rooms anything can happen. If I’ve learned anything from interviewing, it all depends on the interviewer and sometimes, by the time you’ve figured them out, it’s too late.

The interviews went about as well as they could have. Interviewer number one decided to toss me a curveball and dig deep into the specificities of CAP M and the Perpetual Growth Model. I had the equations down pat but struggled a bit in the application…I’d consider it a 2 strike foul tip that the catcher likely caught.

Connected really well to a guy in interview number 2, soft technical questions and standard behavioral. Thought I killed it. He liked my joke about Lululemon pants.

No hiccups on the third interview, but the interviewer was pretty hard to read. (If somehow aspiring IBD summer analysts are reading this, feel free to reach out and I’ll give you my questions.)

So why am I blogging?

Well…I’m sitting here hecka nervous about whether or not I will get an offer. I had a superday at Morgan Stanley (no offer), first rounds at PJT (didn’t make it to the superday), and didn’t make it through JP Morgan’s Hirevue’s algorithm. So, if I don’t get this I’ll have nothing (not really because there are lots of options out there but for IB probably).

I’m not a guy that is usually anxious ~I try to be a man of action and get things done ~ but in this situation, I’ve been feeling a little frozen by anxiety, and I’m looking for projects to take my mind off things. There’s also an awesome girl that I’ve taken on a few dates that I should totally reach out to but I still feel frozen.

So why am I writing this blog post? Well I like writing, I’ve always wanted to do it, anddddddddd I feel a little overwhelmed by the anxiety I feel of not knowing whether or not the hours upon hours I’ve put in will result in an offer and now that interviews are over I have a been looking forward to and feeling stressed about (it’s a mix of both, I kinda live for the pressure moments) for months are over I have more free time but because I love working on projects and more so because I can’t find the guts to call an amazing girl whom I’m interested in, so I needed to find something that felt productive and could also quell my decision freezing anxiety and so I stumbled along the idea to write a blog post.

Now how’s that for a narrative.