Financial Services

I feel the need to reflect on my second interview and my first, although extremely short-lived job in the financial services industry. I had been living at home, job searching took up hours of the day in between reading, visiting old friends, snowboarding and cross-country skiing in my backyard. Things felt pretty okay for being a college graduate and unemployed. I was filling my days as best I could, but getting anxious to work and make money, and live the life I felt I was promised. I started applying to everything. It seemed Buffalo, NY was in dire need of financial advisers and I figured, why not give it a try? At the worst, I would be turned down, I didn't really want to do that, but I would see what happened.

I was one of twenty in a group interview in a house-turned-office type building that shared its workspace with a dentist office. It was down the road from my house. Sitting next to me was a boy who I knew, he was a few years older than me but didn't know who I was. I knew him to be the son of my fourth grade teacher, brother of a high school friend, and current neighbor. I had to laugh at the coincidence and resolved to introduce myself after the interview. Handing out the applications was a girl who had worked with this company for a year who I had known for years through gymnastics and had seen a few times visiting her college. That's Buffalo. All of these coincidences had to mean something.

As I became distracted and bored during the informational interview I started to picture my closest friends in the interview with me. It allowed me to be myself and took away my nerves. I was offered the job after my individual interview.

Life Lesson: Be true to yourself.

I worked for this company for two weeks. During that time I learned that one of my colleagues had the same birthday as me. My friend's brother was hired a week after I was. We talked about mutual friends, I was becoming more comfortable with the people I was surrounding myself with everyday. At the same time I was becoming conflicted about the work I was doing. The only class I came close to failing in college was financial accounting. This job was not easy for me to come to terms with. After weeks of studying to become licensed as a financial representative, I told my boss I wasn't going to take the exam. This was not for me. In retrospect I should have known myself better than to try that in the first place. But it taught me the value of being authentic. Good people and new friends won't make up for the discontent of faking interest in work I couldn't have cared less about.

On to the next adventure.