a lucky lady

i feel incredibly grateful for everything i have right now. i am so lucky. very very lucky.

i finished the second day of my internship a few hours ago, and it was as great as the first day. i really like all the people i have met so far. they have such interesting stories and they are really smart and great people. i'm learning so much. just in the first two days, i feel like i am so much more knowledgeable than when i started. in addition, it's unbelievably cool to see what you learn in the classroom actually used in real life.

for example, i was reading over a document on asset allocations and the current capital market assumptions. and what i wanted to do was apply some of the methodologies we learned in class to see if i could recreate the efficient frontiers that were included in this document, and if not, why. even though the grad school education is very different from the undergrad style of learning, it is really awesome when you can take what you've learned in school and directly apply it in work in situations that actually affect people. i sure as hell couldn't do that with my thesis about the agricultural surplus extraction mechanism during the japanese-nationalist transition in taiwan.

and today i got to go to lunch with a team member to hear a fund of funds pitch their product to our company. coincidentally, i had heard a woman who heads up their international equity team speak to my class about quant strategies. how cool is it to listen to this firm present both in an academic setting and in a sales setting? obviously what was emphasized was much different, but during the sales meeting, i kept being reminded of how another prof interrogated us during our stock pitches. and the more i become familiar with the capital markets, the more questions i have myself. it was really awesome that my manager even thought of having me go to the lunch--and another reason why the internship has been so cool! (by the way, the food was pretty good: field greens with shaved parm, grilled hanger steak (med rare!) with fingerling potatoes, onions, arugula, asparagus and mushrooms, and molten chocolate cake with candied almonds and a dollop of cream. AMAZING!)

here's a (bad) picture of the lobby of the floor where my office is:

and one taken from within a conference room:


the food never ceases to amaze me here. i made some pretty nice dishes over the last few days, but i'll post that to the recipe blog because it includes this relatively simply beet salad that i made over the weekend. i was trying to recreate the beet salad i had at bouley market and this time, i was actually kind of successful! love california--i don't want to leave you!