Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Graduation: Last Day of Class

Welcome back everyone, and thank you for your patience. I said I’d try to get the final posts for graduation up by June and it is now halfway through August. But a lot has happened over the summer, there were some things I wasn’t ready to write about then that I am now, and the story is the richer for it. Some come join me now for the exciting conclusion (at least it was exciting to me).
A note about navigation before we begin. There will be a total of 10 posts, 9 of them with ‘Graduation’ in the title. The easiest way to read through them all will be to use the Previous Posts section on the right hand side of the blog, below my Profile and the links list. I’ve arranged them in descending order instead of chronological order, so you’ll want to begin with the post at the top (this post) and proceed down the list to the last post called ‘Graduation: Finale’.
Given that it’s August now, I don’t remember the last day of classes very well, but I remember it enough. It was Monday August 30, I had three classes: Chinese, Urban Economics, and Asian Art Humanities. I went to Chinese in the morning for our final oral presentation, which went easily for me since I’d spent a good deal of time memorizing my presentation. Chinese was a funny class in that I never enjoyed it as much as most of the other students in the class did, although I did learn an awful lot, and not just about Chinese. In spite of having a large class, we finished early and our teacher Ma Ningwei (Ni3 hao3 Ma3 Lao3shi1!!) let us go early, which was rare. The feeling that school was truly over began when I walked out the doors of Kent Hall.Urban Economics was very laidback for the last lecture, and again the class let out early. I was pleased that the class applauded our professor, something I think very important and respectful to do. (We applauded Ma Laoshi too, even though this is not something that is commonly done in classes in China. She was a little embarrassed, which was great) And if I remember correctly, the last day of Asian Art Hum I skipped, just because I could. It was a beautiful day outside; they were already beginning to put up the tents and the bleachers for the graduation ceremony, even though grad wouldn’t be for more than two weeks yet. But it was a very good day, and it was the beginning of what I felt then and see now were many good days to come.

Graduation: World Premiere of 'The Crown'

During finals week, the first final I had was for my literature class, which was my favorite class that I took there at Columbia. I’ve talked about them before, but that group of people I became closer to than almost anyone else during my time there. For our final paper in that class, Prof. Muller had encouraged us to do something creative and outside the box if we liked, so I chose to write a play. During this literature class I came in contact with what became my favorite book, Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’. Since I have a whole post about that book, I won’t rehash it again here. I knew I wanted to use that book, and I knew that my other favorite book for that semester had been Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’. My play, ‘The Crown’, is an imaginary conversation between Raskolnikov, the main character of C&P, and King Lear.After reading it, it was Prof. Muller who suggested we get the class together and stage a reading of the play. (When she was talking to the class about the idea, she said after reading the play that it was “damn good”, which is very high praise from someone who is as well read as herself. It also meant a lot to me.) I thought the idea was a little silly at first but to my surprise people were genuinely enthusiastic about it, and we got almost the entire class together.Reading through it as a class, with my classmates and my friends was really graduation for me. We met up over at Talia’s place, which was near the campus, had wine and crackers, and did a reading of the play together. In this picture are (from upper left moving down & around) Justin reading the part of Watchman #1, myself reading Lear, Liz reading Raskolnikov, Prof. Jill Muller reading Razumikhin and who unfortunately is hiding behind Benjamin Muller’s head, who read Svidrigailov (and is no relation to Jill), Talia who hosted us and read Dunya, Aries who narrated for us, and Pi-Ta who I think wasn’t reading. Even though the official ceremonies were 5 more days away, it was after this extraordinary afternoon that I truly felt I’d finished school. My play was the project I’d completed there I felt the most proud of. It was the perfect ending to an amazing class that I won’t ever forget.

“To the players of Room 402. All my best times were spent here.”

Graduation: Sunday, Baccalaureate Service

Hey, what’s going on here, where’s my brother? Graduation at Columbia isn’t really a single event, it’s a string of events culminating in the main campus graduation. The chain of events is started by the Baccalaureate service on Sunday. Originally started in England, it was the tradition for each graduating scholar to deliver a sermon in Latin (since most universities began as religious institutions). So this service/ceremony is specifically for honoring the undergraduates at Columbia. The ceremony was held in the chapel on campus, and has evolved into an interfaith service where a couple of students from the graduating class get up and read from various texts. (If I remember correctly, the four faiths represented at this service were Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism). The great part about this day was that my good friend Emilio. He chose to read from the prologue of John’s Gospel, which is my hands-down favorite section in the entire Bible, and I believe is among the most beautiful sections of writing, in English or any other language. Afterwards everyone piled out and was greeted by the University chaplain and several other professors and faculty, including the Dean of Students and the College Provost. The great part about this was that my brother Mark had already arrived in the city and was able to be there at the service with me (although he wasn’t sitting with me). He managed to mise and sneak in the back in the midst of the confusion. His presence, both there and throughout the week, made that time so much richer for me. I’m grateful that he came.

Graduation: Monday, Class Day

At Columbia (University) there are four different undergraduate colleges: Columbia College (the main one), SEAS (the engineering school), GS (my program, for “non-traditional students), and Barnard (the affiliated women’s college). Each of these four colleges have their own private graduation ceremony, called Class Day, since it is the ceremony for each individual class. This is the ceremony where your name is called and your degree read. You get to walk across the stage and shake each of the dean’s hands, although they don’t give you your degree at that point. I remember the ceremony took a LONG time to organize, even though there were only a few hundred of us. But they got us going eventually, and they had a band playing for us (which you can see here). The speaker was a GS alum whose name escapes me, but she had graduated awhile ago and now worked as an IP lawyer in the Bay area. Her speech was good if not terribly moving (at least to me personally) but it was great to see what sorts of things other GS alums have gone on to. Going up and getting my name read was a bit surreal. I remember standing on the line, waiting for them to call my name, then I heard it and I began walking forward, and it was all kind of a blur for a few seconds. Going up there, I was trying to pay attention to the reading of my name because I wanted to hear them read out my Latin honors which I had worked VERY hard to achieve. But somehow, in the midst of that blur, I missed hearing it one way or the other. But my friends told me they did read it. And seeing my classmates graduate, watching them walk across the stage and hearing their names read was in many ways more gratifying than hearing my own name read. It was extraordinary being able to be a part of their lives and their moments, of being able to share that moment together with them. My brother Mark was already in town, but he’d left earlier in the day to go meet my dad at the airport. I hadn’t expected them to come back in time for the ceremony, but they’d made it back midway through and had a chance to see most of it. After the ceremony was over there was a reception on one of the lawns at the campus and it was a great time to mingle with my teachers, classmates, and family and have some great food & drink. We stayed fairly late talking with people and making introductions, and then my family and I went out to dinner. A great evening.

Graduation: Wednesday, Commencement

Tuesday was a day of lull time, there wasn’t anything happening on that day related to graduation, but that worked out fine since my mom and my girlfriend were flying into town that day; it made for a nice break. But Wednesday was the big show, Commencement of the 253rd Graduating Class of Columbia University in the City of New York. We’d been told ahead of time that the ceremony would draw 40,000 people onto the main Morningside Heights campus, so it came as no surprise that the scene down on the street that morning was crazy. It looked like a Saturday market in some foreign country. I met up with my parents, my brother, and my girlfriend to take them down to the main entrance, and then I had to go to a separate entrance for the graduates, which was temporarily being blocked off by the Barnard girls filing in from the campus across the street. 3,000+ graduates, and they only have a single entrance onto the campus for the grads? Not good planning in my mind. But we finally got in.Once we were on the lawn, we had awhile to wait (we being the GS graduates in my class) and I realized that my classmates had been smarter about it than I had. They’d worn shorts and T-shirts under their graduation robes, where I’d worn slacks & a tie. But in due course of time after much fooling around, we got out onto the main seating area.It was quite a sight. The GS class was seated on bleachers to the left hand side of the center plaza. I was glad that we were seated on bleachers as it gave us a much better view of the proceedings, even though they had screens for the guests. All the graduates from all of the different Columbia programs were there: all four of the undergraduate schools, the business school people, the doctors, all the masters and PhD candidates, everyone. The ceremony progressed by having several people come up and speak, then the President of the University (Lee Bollinger, a great guy) gave out the honorary degrees to a bunch of folks mostly nobody knew. After this was finished, the tradition is that the Dean of each of the different schools comes up, gives a speech for why their program’s graduates are so fantastic, and ‘asks’ the President to confer upon them the degrees they have earned. The speech given by the outgoing Dean of the School of Engineering was hilarious, he called his students “solar powered, alloy outfitted, optimally engineered” and other things like this. His students all had noisemakers with them, so they were the loudest bunch and everyone was laughing with them, particularly at the end when the dean rushed back up to the podium and said, “I love you guys!!”Finally the President gets up and agrees to confer the degrees. There is a mace that is carried out of the library as part of the ceremony that represents the President’s power to confer the degrees; apparently it originally came over from England (since Columbia was originally King’s College and was re-established as Columbia after the Revolutionary War). He didn’t ‘wield’ the mace itself, which I thought was a shame, but everyone gets their degrees, and so it was all good in the end. As the ceremony was dispersing, U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’ was playing over the sound system; I paused and just let it all soak in that I was actually finished. My girlfriend told me later that she could tell I was definitely ‘in the moment’ just then, which was true. There was too much emotion and too many different feelings standing there in the sun with my classmates at the end of this amazing journey to totally sum it all up. But that song, which is one of my favorite, hit it pretty close.It wasn’t until I picked up my actual degree right after the ceremony that it truly sunk in that I was finished. Holding it in my hands, something about having a tangible acknowledgement of all that hard work, almost brought me to tears. “My heart is aglow …”

Interlude: The Brothers K

Wait, I can hear you say, this post isn’t a part of the Graduation series, what’s going on here? Fear not, faithful readers, we will return to our regularly scheduled Graduation series momentarily. But I finished reading Dostoevsky’s ‘Brothers Karamazov’ this summer after I got home, and given that this book was also something of an odyssey for me, felt I had to give it a review. Some context first. As a part of my effort to familiarize myself more with some of the great authors and with classic works of literature, I began reading this book last summer, between my junior & senior years, before I read C&P. I finished about 2/3 of it before fall of my final year began, and then once school got underway, especially with a literature class to read for, I just could not seem to get through it. I came back and picked it up a few times, but couldn’t make any real headway on it. I read C&P during the spring of my senior year, and had gone through enough of Brothers K to know I liked C&P better. But I still wanted to finish the other book. After graduation I returned home to Seattle with plans to look for a job in finance here on the west coast, preferably in the Bay area. During this downtime when I was considering my future direction and interviewing for jobs I finally finished it.I like Crime and Punishment better, for a few reasons. Brothers K is very sprawling, its as if Dostoevsky just gave himself permission to write whatever he felt like writing. D. is an amazing author, but he already tends to ramble just a bit sometimes in fleshing out his characters and dwelling on tertiary scenes. I felt that D’s writing benefited greatly from a slightly more structured format like the one in C&P, which is more focused and feels more planned.The other big strike against Brothers K is that I didn’t fall in love with the characters nearly the same way I did in C&P. D. still did an extraordinary job of fleshing the people in his story out, making them feel real enough to walk right off the page. But I found myself not really caring very much, especially since the book’s ‘big mystery’ of who killed the elder Karamazov is pretty much known to the reader. So it took out some of the tension. The final scene in the book however I found very powerful and very moving. I’m not event totally sure what it meant, but perhaps that mystery was part of the magic.Don’t get me wrong, this is a great book, and D. says some very important things through the mouths of his characters. The book is great if you just read Ivan’s speeches, who is the most philosophical of the three brothers. But if one was going to only read one of D’s books, I’d suggest going with C&P. Besides, it’s shorter.

Graduation: Fireball

As you’ve realized by now in reading along, my graduation from Columbia was finished in the fifth post. But Graduation for me has really been a deeper, more powerful process that began all the way back when I first moved to New York City and really, for me, didn’t conclude until just a few days ago. This post is a part of that process. This post is my goodbye to something else that came to an end over the summer.
How does it happen that someone becomes a part of your life so closely and so powerfully, that they are there with you and there beside you one day, and gone the next?
Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? I believe it is. Is it true that love conquers all? The Bible tells us that it does, in many different ways. But people receive love in different ways, and sometimes we can find ourselves, or another, in a place in their own life currently where they are not yet able to love in the way the other person truly needs.
Is it worth waiting around to find out of they can get there? This is a question each heart can only answer for itself. Is it ‘worth’ it? Ultimately, finally, yes, it is. But there is a cost to waiting.
Someone once said, “The greatest prize in the universe is the affection of man.” I do believe this to be true. Love has both the greatest glory and the greatest weight. But love is always active, always provokes a response. And in some situations a person is not yet prepared to echo back that same response.
Why is it that we often cause the ones we love the most such pain? Pain in this life may be unavoidable, but we can choose the situations that we are more or less likely to encounter it. That choice is also one that only each heart can make.
To my Fireball, who another like her I will never meet
In everything extraordinary that you are
For everything amazing that we shared
Thank you could never be enough
Now be blessed in the hills
And blessed on the plains
Be blessed by the waters
In your lives, in your loves
Burning star, wild and free
May all your roads lead you to the love your strong heart seeks
You are forever burned into my mind, and I will never forget you


Steel Heart, Warrior Princess
1WR
Flash, Haste
When Steel Heart comes into play, it deals 2 damage to target creature or player.
1W: Target creature other than Steel Heart gains Absorb 1
2/2




Comets are fairly rare, and very few are at all predictable. But they say that if you’re watching carefully on a clear night, you might just see one shooting through your sky. I know the one I’ll be watching for is very rare, and in no way predictable.
But I will still be watching …

Graduation: Seattle

OK, I have a confession to make. When I first got back here to Seattle, I didn’t want to stay.
There were a couple of reasons for this. Seattle is known for software and for coffee, not for finance. Given that I wanted to work in the fund world, I didn’t think there would be as many opportunities to do what I really wanted to do here. I figured I’d need to go to San Francisco or LA, or return to NYC. I also felt a good vibe from San Fran in the times I’d visited there for interviews, and I felt I wanted to have some more adventures. Seattle is my hometown, but I’m not ready to settle down quite yet, and there are other places I’d like to live. Seattle felt a bit … small, and slow paced, when I got back here, especially after living in NYC.
However, a strange thing happened as I spent time here at home. I found myself seeing all kinds of things about the city, about the beauty of this town and the area around me, that I’d never really seen before, not in all of the eight years I’d lived here previously. I feel I had to leave in order to be able to truly come back and see it again. I started remembering and seeing again all the things that make Seattle an extraordinary place. The water, the rain, the trees, the natural beauty of the city, the ethos, the pace of life, the tone, perhaps most of all, the people. I felt an increasingly strong sense of reconnection with my brothers too, but that didn’t surprise me, we have always been close. What surprised me was that I began to feel like I wanted to stay, that being in Seattle for the next few years would be great and full of unexpected opportunities. I’d promised myself that once I graduated, whatever city I ended up in, that I would invest myself into that place and those people. And now I felt that I wanted to get to know this city better, to really invest in it, become a part of the life and the culture here, get to know and embrace the city in a way that I hadn’t before. I started to feel that I really did want to stay.
But I still needed a job …

Graduation: Quellos

And so it was to my surprise and extraordinary pleasure that I recently signed my letter of acceptance for a job doing exactly what I wanted to do, right here in Seattle. When I talked to my friends about staying and working here in Seattle, I told them there were only two shops (that I knew of) that I’d really be excited to work for. One of those two is the place that offered me the position I have accepted.
Quellos is a hedge fund in downtown Seattle that has been in operation for more than 10 years and has done well for almost all of those years. It has grown considerably both in head count and in funds under management, and was recently purchased by a well-known asset management firm back in New York City, giving it stronger ties back there.
After a month of interviewing and review on both sides, the offer that Quellos approached me with is an extremely generous one, and one that I am very happy accepting. At this point in my life and career, it is even better than the best possible opportunity I could envision. The only thing I’m even slightly unhappy with is the fact that their building doesn’t have its own parking garage, so I’ll have to bus to work if I don’t want to pay for parking. But considering all the benefits, this really is rather minor.
For this opportunity I find myself both feeling very satisfied and also very thankful. In many ways, it is the just reward for hard work well done, not only the two years finishing school in New York, but also putting myself through community college and all my work at Microsoft, which Quellos told me added value for them. But I realize it is also a gift. It is the good door I have prayed for. And I am going to enjoy walking through it immensely.

Graduation: Finale

And that, my friends, is where this chapter of the story ends. I left Seattle two years ago lonely, often afraid, and feeling very uncertain about the future. I come back two years later knowing to the core that I am not alone, far, FAR less often feeling afraid, and certain that the future looks bright. I gave a good accounting of myself in New York, I return proudly with the degree I worked hard for, and now I get to stay for the next few years in the city I have come to love all over again, near my brothers and my friends here, doing something I have every reason to believe that I will love, and investing myself wholeheartedly into the lives and the community around me.
By no means is this the end. I don’t think that I have quite come home to rest here in Seattle just yet. There are several main cities that finance is practiced in around the world, and I would like to live in several of them before my travels are over. I’d still like to live in the Bay area, and I’d really like to live in Shanghai or Hong Kong as well.
After reflecting about it, I believe that I will continue to blog about my life and adventures, but this blog has served its purpose now. This blog was about my life in New York, and now that chapter is concluded, and it is time to begin a new one.
Once I have the new one started, I will return here and edit this final post with a link to the new blog. Blogger has been good but my friends are pushing me towards Wordpress so I’ll update things once I’ve figured it out.
Thanks everyone who has accompanied me and been with me as a part of this journey. To my friends in New York, I can’t wait for you guys to come and visit me here, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see many of you again more closely a bit further down the road. To my friends here in Seattle, old and new, it is great to see you all, and I can’t wait to reconnect.
This amazing chapter would be incomplete without one final thanks in particular. To my father, who has made all of this possible, from the start to the finish. I could never have done it without you. You are the one who has made me, you are the one who stood by me and never gave up on me. You are the only one who was there in the beginning, and you will be there in the end.
Then David went in and sat back, and he said:

“Who am I that you have brought me so far?”

1:32:10
24:32:38-41



The story continues HERE …