Back in the land of chocolate, watches, and the alps

I made it back to Switzerland! I had a really good time back in the US, and am now back here and ready to study.

The past few days have been quite hectic. I left Plymouth at 9 AM on Tuesday, and the plane departed around 11:30, I think. It's all sort of blurred together. The layover in Atlanta went by quickly, but I was somewhat annoyed that the free internet wasn't working. I was planning on sending Mom an email update that I was in Atlanta and everything was going just fine, but was unable to. Oh well. I arrived in Zürich at about 8 AM on Wednesday morning, and zipped back to St. Gallen with the train. Two trains every hour, and just about an hour long train ride from the airport to St. Gallen makes for pretty flexible transportation options.

Once back home, I managed to unpack and tidy up my room a bit, and then headed back to the airport to catch my 3:55 PM flight to London. SwissAir is a great airline, especially if a company is paying for your flight. London City Airport is also highly recommended, provided, as I discovered, there's no threat of any weather. There was one other guy flying up to London from St. Gallen, Nick from Bulgaria. It was nice having someone else around who I sort of knew.

After arriving in London, we made our way to Canary Wharf with the DLR (light rail), and eventually found our way to our hotel. After checking in, Nick went out to meet a friend of his, and I got dinner and proceeded to fall asleep in my room. It was fairly dark out in London, even at 5 PM, so I didn't think too much about wandering around and snapping pictures.

The next day, all 32 of the interview candidates met up downstairs in the hotel. A few of the candidates were British, but a lot of us were international. I was the only American, but there was a Canadian who was flown over, as well as a Canadian buddy of mine who's also studying in St. Gallen. Other than that, there were a few continental Europeans. We started out with a nice little breakfast, and then got to work on a case study. After the case study, we had individual interviews. I had 3 interviews with different groups. Some of the people who go to Oxford or Cambridge or the London School of Economics had up to 7 interviews.

This whole phenomenon about schools on your resume has gotten me thinking more about where I might want to do an exchange in the next year or two. Oxford and Cambridge were described to me as the Yale and Harvard of England (and Europe, maybe). St. Gallen has some decent exchange programs (with places like Columbia, Cornell, University of Chicago, NYU, even the U of M in the US, and a load of other schools throughout the world), and you can also arrange your own semester abroad. I've been thinking a bit about where I'd perhaps like to go, and how to even go about arranging my own exchange program. Here, there's sort of a toss up of whether or not to try to do an exchange semester at a prestigious US university, a UK / European one, or an Asian one. Lots to think about.

Anyway! Back to the interviews.

I met a bunch of interesting people, Michael from the Netherlands, Antonio from Portugal (but studying in the Netherlands), Tobias from Germany (but studying at Oxford), and some others. It'll be neat to see if I run in to any of them this summer.

So at the end of the day, after our interviews had wrapped up, a few of us were planning on going out to get a bite to eat (as it was dinner time) when Nick got a text message telling him that our flight had been cancelled. Antonio's flight was also cancelled, and there was a lot of confusion in the next 10 - 15 minutes as everyone started making phone calls, and I borrowed a Brit's iPhone to check out flight schedules online. After getting our bearings on the situation, we headed over to the London City Airport.

Upon arrival, we found out that all flights to Switzerland had been cancelled, and we'd have to wait until morning. We never were told the precise reason why the flights were cancelled, but I assume that it had to do with the fact that there could have been bad weather. Since flights arriving at London City Airport were cancelled, the first few flights the next morning were cancelled as well. They found flights from Heathrow at 6 AM and 8:15 AM, and we opted for the 6 AM one.

SwissAir put us up and got us a dinner buffet at a (not so great, but good enough) hotel for the night. Early Friday morning, we got on the bus for a 15 minute ride to Heathrow airport. It was probably my best experience ever at Heathrow, but I'm sure that's due to the fact that it was 5 AM and not much was really going on.

The flight back was pretty uneventful. SwissAir has nice seats on their planes, and everything was pretty hospitable. We even got some Swiss chocolate. I think the high-point of the flight was when they started playing 1946 Tom&Jerry cartoons.

I ended up getting an offer from Barclays in the "Loan Capital Markets" division - basically, they figure out ways to give companies loans of billions of euros. Since just one bank apparently can't afford to do that, they have to band together. I was somewhat worried that I wouldn't get an offer originally, since I interviewed with the German Mergers & Acquisitions team, and this team, both of which were looking for native German speakers. Now, I'm confident in my German abilities, but I was afraid that I'd be overshadowed by the 3 native Germans who were also interviewing. It looks like those fears were somewhat unfounded, as I ended up with an offer.

I have to look at the timing (among other things) and figure out whether this Barclays offer or the Nomura offer in Capital Markets is a better fit for me. I'm leaning towards the Barclays offer, but need to look over the fine details.

Mom - you also may be happy to know that I wore one of my new shirts and ties for the interview.

So, after a long few days of business, I made it back to my apartment in St. Gallen, and now have to begin studying for my finals. For those who don't know, the system here at St. Gallen is quite different from the US. We have our semester from September to December, and then we have our finals at the end of January and beginning of February. The next semester starts at the end of February, and goes until the end of May, with finals at the end of June and beginning of July. The precise timing of my finals plays somewhat of a role in figuring out when I could start an internship, etc.

Anyway, I'm going to try to head to sleep soon and combat jet-lag. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but London was dark and I didn't have a ton of free time to roam around the city.