Part 1 in a series on my 2006 summer associate-ship at Novantas, “a management consulting firm dedicated to helping clients realize shareholder value through customer-centric business strategies”, whatever that means.

Part 1 - The Interview

Part 2 - Orientation

Part 3 - Signage

In the Fall of 2006, I was a junior at Columbia University studying math and economics. A summer earlier, after finishing up sophomore year, I took summer classes in the Computer Science and Statistics departments, and my parents were leaning on me to finally make some money and get a lucrative internship. They genuinely believed in a post Great Depression notion of hard work and had yet to realize, like most of America, how far the finance industry was from the soul-shaping, make-a-man-out-of-you experience of labor they had been taught by their blue-collar Jewish immigrant parents to revere.

By this time in my academic career, I had lost respect even for economics as an academic discipline, but finance seemed particularly vapid. And since Columbia has no undergraduate business major, I had to share classes with most of the students aspiring to careers in finance. I had yet to encounter Silicon Valley, and had cultivated a very negative impression of business-people. But the prospect of earning $1000 per week as a nineteen-year-old was alluring. So with hope for financial independence, a new saxophone, and relief from parental pressure, I applied to summer jobs at banks and consultancies.

Convincing financiers that I had any interest in finance proved difficult. Most interviewers weren’t concerned with intelligence. Some asked riddles.

“Say I have 9 beans of the same weight, and one is heavier than the rest…" "What is the sum of 1-1000?”

Most wanted to know “so it seems like there is a lot of music on your resume, why do you want to work for a bank?” They were right to be skeptical. I had little interest in raising debt for large corporations, and little respect for the people that did this for a living. I had especially little respect for traders, who were compensated handsomely for having slightly faster computers than amateur traders, and for gambling both recklessly and randomly with pension funds and the assets of wealthy clients. For the most part I meekly offered some gibberish about being realistic about the economic climate of being a jazz musician, and looking for a challenging job that could sustain me.

Finally, I had an interview with Novantas, a consulting firm. In their defense, compared to the bankers they were exceedingly thoughtful. Still, in retrospect, the interview was absurd. First, I was contacted by an associate, Michaela. She was nice, if a little robotic, and asked me several childish “math riddles”. She told me a little bit about the company, and how compared to the hedge funds and banks, their industry valued intelligence. As I was committed to work for one of these companies and had been disgusted with my previous interviews, I proved receptive to this spiel and was excited to learn that I had been granted a final-round interview with Managing Director Wade.

This was my first exposure to the stereotypical consulting interview. I knew from the rigorous preparation offered by the Columbia University Career Center to expect “estimation questions” and was not disappointed.

“How many planes do you think are the sky above America right now?”

Wade, as he was eager to share, was equestrian. He was a horse owner / horse investor. And he even slightly resembled a horse, although I didn’t know him for long enough to ascertain the causality of this relationship. He wanted to hear an answer like:

“hmmm, [chin scratch]. The population of America is roughly V. And I think Americans on average fly W times per year. Since the average duration for a local flight could be reasonably guessed to be about X hours, and the average capactiy for a plane is around Y, we can estimate that there are approximately Z planes in the air right now.”

For affect, I added that since the majority of local flights take place during the day, and it was mid-afternoon, we could assume the number was closer to double. He seemed pleased by that answer and informed me that I’d be getting a call within a few days.

I’d like to say that I was disgusted with the whole affair, but the truth is that I was relieved to have summer employment, with enough income to purchase a vintage saxophone and live comfortably senior year. And I thought that I had done well for myself. I had scored a job with a bank internship salary, but work that wouldn’t extinguish my soul.

Names have been fictionalized for publication.