UBS Is Uber-Huge (and assorted other adventures)

To sum up the UBS building I visited yesterday as part of my job shadowing program into two words, I would have to pick huge and fancy. If I could have a third, I would probably pick high-tech. In fact, it's been so huge and fancy and high-tech that I don't even know where to start, but I'll try.

The building was tall (and huge, although not more so than an ordinary big concrete building can be), concrete and glass, and by the main entrance, there were two fountain-esque features. They weren't exactly fountains, because they were more like several inches of flat water, but they were calming in a strange way. Then inside, they've got this long, long hallway, which leads to an elevator set, and then, going up the elevator, we (the "supervisor" that I was supposed to shadow and I, but most everyone else as well) walk into this huge, huge, huge room that's around three stories tall and with suspended glass offices at the edges (or so I think, anyway), lots of screens with stock indexes and international times posted everywhere. It was a dizzying experience, trying to take all of it in.

My supervisor, whom I shall call Bob for now for ease of referring to him, took me to his desk, and, as he needed to make several business calls (which were all in a foreign language, so I understood nothing), he gave me a huge booklet on the history of the American stock market ever since the pre-(Teddy) Roosevelt era. I tried to follow some of the business-y news, but instead, I found myself attracted to tidbits such as "Johnson stunned Democrats by declaring not to run for office" and that despite what CNN had told me during the 2008 elections (forgive me if I've remembered this wrong), the Bush administration actually oversaw quite a length of economic expansion (granted, the book ended at 2004, so it did not take into account the catastrophe of the later years).

Then Bob showed me to an ETF trader (and if the terminology sounds bizarre, it's because I only remember some of what he does, since he showed me so much stuff). I was there before the markets opened, so he had plenty of time to explain a lot of the things behind what he did. It was all Excel-heavy and he himself said that he had been a computer engineer major, and, during an internship at UBS in IT, fell in love with the excitement on the trading floor. I bet the multiple monitors each person had was a huge plus as well. They've got about three monitors per person, and sometimes even more, and all those screens were filled with charts and tables and other cool things.

After that, I met with several people involved in futures (whatever that means, I still have not found out). All I managed to figure out was that whenever something happened, there was this really cool sound effect that sounded like cars zooming past, and then sometimes a cash register sound, and sometimes a glass object breaking sound. I tried staring at the monitors, figuring out what was causing the sounds, but everything was flashing, and there were so many of them, and so many bright, ever-changing colors. It was exciting, extremely exciting.

Bob led me to the equity traders next, where I learned a short crash-course on inflation and more importantly, that the international equity traders often woke up at ungodly hours (going to work at 5:30am, or, if you were in Hong Kong, apparently going to work at 7am and still working at 11pm) and that they were assigned specific regions, but they were experts in their region, and knew all the news and such.

Then came the analysts, and one of the head analysts had a son who went to Paperclip. He asked me about my math classes and math team, and relayed the rumor/myth/maybe-true tale of how for several years, MIT only accepted one student per year from Paperclip. Well, I hope the spell's been broken, because there are so many people applying to MIT next year, and it would be awful if they only accepted one. Anyway, then we talked about analyses that contained t-tests and regression lines and r-values. It was statistics in real life, and it was amazing.

I went to an options trader later, but she was busy, so then I went to the economists' back row (the entire room's rather organized, and maybe if I feel like it I'll draw a picture later). I got a ten-minute crash-course of the US economy in the past, oh, 100 years or so (crash-courses seem very popular here, or maybe it's just me). The guy who was explaining everything to me then joked that he would be offering a crash-course in physics next.

I had to leave after that, but it was still quite an experience. Sorta left me speechless (except the always present "thank you") for a while. Yeah. Perhaps an analysis of this experience will come later. Maybe.

In GWTW (my abbreviation for the book I'm reading now) news, I'm extremely saddened. And frustrated. Rhett Bulter is, as Scarlett says, "no gentleman at all," but I had not expected him to be so irritating. I never found Catcher in the Rye frustrating, but I am now finding GWTW the most annoying thing I have ever read, and one of the saddest one as well, all at the same time. I can't believe it's not on some English curriculum at our school. It definitely should be—except that it's over 1000 pages long and most people in my English class right now would probably only Sparknote half of it, if that.

As it is, Othello will have to tide me over for now.

MID—
Rhett: 1.5
Scarlett: 2.5