Yet another careers entry...doesn't the author have anything else better to blog about?

I know I always inadvertently end up blogging about careers but having spent over 3 years in college waiting to get a real job, it's one of those topics that's always on my mind. Coming on exchange and taking a mountain of debt doesn't exactly ease up any of the pressure, and perhaps having too much time to worry about it gets to me a little.

So anyway, a number of things about careers today - it just happened to be one of those days, I guess, where I'm being reminded that I soon have to decide where I'm going wit my life. Argh.

1. I received a call at about 2pm (US time) from [Unnamed North American Financial Institution]. On a whim, I applied for their Investment Banking Analyst Program. Thus was I awoken from a mid-day slumber (been staying up to prepare for a Spanish paper this morning) and screened via a phone interview for a potential Super Saturday event. Of course, being just awoken, I probably made a fool of myself - for example, I hadn't had the time to really look into this company and couldn't give a list of the company's merits. Thus have I learnt an important lesson - if you sign up with whatever firm, you better bloody read up the moment you've submitted your thing. Then again, working in the USA would have been something of a long shot.

2. I also had the time to chat with a former colleague of mine from my days working at a Who's Who publication in Singapore. This lady of Jap-American descent is currently in Costa Rica doing a publication based on travel, which is as far out as it gets from doing a Who's Who publication in Singapore 2 years ago. Her words to me were "Don't turn into a suit. You've got more brains than that" (or to that effect). I suppose this would have been something one would shrug off, only that later in the evening, I had the opportunity to speak with the speaker of that celestial tongue (hey, don't look at me, she came up with that name). She thinks we're too young to commit ourselves to the rat race, and duly suggested I turn to working in an NGO. I thought it might have been kinda rude to laugh at that point.

3. Kudos to my university, which has had some tremendous success in recent days in bringing in some top-notch financial institutions to present on career opportunities, as well as some career opportunities without presentations. A sample would be as follows:

Barclays Capital
Citigroup
DBS
Deutsche Bank
GE
Goldman Sachs
HSBC
Lehman Brothers
UBS

Today, I noticed on my university's career page that the Boston Consulting Group and Macquarie Bank will be coming to visit to recruit people. This is, of course, wonderful news but it's really irritating to see how all these things start appearing the moment you're away. And I don't even have new episodes of Arrested Development to keep me occupied from these thoughts.