I just joined the 'Oxford Mathematicians in the City' alumni network, and had a brief email exchange with the administrator in which I gently alluded to a (completely non-existent) personal committment to the Finance industry. A little compromise of the truth in exchange for a networking opportunity is always a worthwhile trade in my eyes.
Qualities of a good journo:
Networking Skills - tick
Ethics - hmmmm
Monday 7 December 2009
Bad Idea
Bad idea = telling your new colleague that you have a blog, if it's not one you want them to read.
Wednesday 2 December 2009
Know Yourself
Earlier this year I had a little bout of Myers-Briggs fever after a friend sent me the link to this test. I rarely take personality tests seriously (hard to when they're telling you which SATC character you are), but my Myers-Briggs profile was so accurate that I felt the author must have somehow hacked into my brain and stolen all my thoughts and beliefs in order to have written it. Sufficiently impressed and intrigued, I decided to read up a little more on the test and my type, and then the types of all my friends.
And there is a wealth of information out there - much of it based on academic research (of varying quality of course). It would be very easy to get caught up in it all, to allow it to influence your life, to let your personality profile be an excuse for your shortcomings, justification of your bad decisions, or a false validation of your strengths; or to forget that you are an individual and at times you will deviate from the stereotype. At the height of my own fever I was even attempting to understand actual relationships in my life by reading an MBTI forum.
Fortunately I'm no stranger to the dangers of models: intransparency, probabilistic assumptions, testing contraints and, most notably, the blind trust & reliance they can encourage. In fact no one could survive my career path so far without developing a severe distrust of all models. I studied Maths and then went to work in Finance just as the industry was entering a crisis, which means that I went from being enveloped in a world of perfection where anything, even the square root of -1, is possible, to a world of constraints - a world where things break so frequently that we need reporting, analysis, even entire divisions of staff to work on the breakages. The contrast would have been drastic enough without the fact that it was all observed at a time when companies literally rose and fell on the strength of their risk models.
But models exist for a reason - to simplify the complexities of this world, so that we may analyse them despite our limitations and contraints. And what could be more complex than the human mind? Heaven knows I have enough trouble understanding my own thoughts (that's my F talking). A little help is not necessarily a bad thing. The corporate world, ever obsessed with efficiency, knows this; the same test link is on the intranet page of my new company. It also features in most Management and MBA courses.
In my case, the timing was also fortunate. The test and my subsequent fever arrived shortly after I'd had a few realisations - that I wanted to quit my job, that I was more interested in journalism and development than in banking, etc. so what I ultimately got out of all this self-discovery was affirmation. My type, 'The Champion' or 'ENFP' takes naturally to journalism for example. We ENFPs can be good at Maths, we like the bigger picture, we're not so good at legwork, we LOVE people, we're good communicators, we're terribly emotional, we don't need too much structure and we like our freedom. Oh and we're idealists - definitely didn't need to be told about that one.
So at a time when I have a lot of thinking to do about my personal qualities, and how they're going to drive my career, I have a handy little tool to help me. Guessing other people's types is also quite fun, especially if you do it with a group of friends, and it does provide an easy and widely accepted categorisation. I now frequently refer to people's characteristics using the relevant letter(s) in their MB type ("that's such an NT thing to do!").
I'd recommend that anyone take the test, accompanied by the advisory pinch of salt, and enjoy whatever they get out of it - be it a little affirmation, a few home truths, a better understanding of themselves, an affinity with a celebrity of the same type, or just a bit of fun.
And there is a wealth of information out there - much of it based on academic research (of varying quality of course). It would be very easy to get caught up in it all, to allow it to influence your life, to let your personality profile be an excuse for your shortcomings, justification of your bad decisions, or a false validation of your strengths; or to forget that you are an individual and at times you will deviate from the stereotype. At the height of my own fever I was even attempting to understand actual relationships in my life by reading an MBTI forum.
Fortunately I'm no stranger to the dangers of models: intransparency, probabilistic assumptions, testing contraints and, most notably, the blind trust & reliance they can encourage. In fact no one could survive my career path so far without developing a severe distrust of all models. I studied Maths and then went to work in Finance just as the industry was entering a crisis, which means that I went from being enveloped in a world of perfection where anything, even the square root of -1, is possible, to a world of constraints - a world where things break so frequently that we need reporting, analysis, even entire divisions of staff to work on the breakages. The contrast would have been drastic enough without the fact that it was all observed at a time when companies literally rose and fell on the strength of their risk models.
But models exist for a reason - to simplify the complexities of this world, so that we may analyse them despite our limitations and contraints. And what could be more complex than the human mind? Heaven knows I have enough trouble understanding my own thoughts (that's my F talking). A little help is not necessarily a bad thing. The corporate world, ever obsessed with efficiency, knows this; the same test link is on the intranet page of my new company. It also features in most Management and MBA courses.
In my case, the timing was also fortunate. The test and my subsequent fever arrived shortly after I'd had a few realisations - that I wanted to quit my job, that I was more interested in journalism and development than in banking, etc. so what I ultimately got out of all this self-discovery was affirmation. My type, 'The Champion' or 'ENFP' takes naturally to journalism for example. We ENFPs can be good at Maths, we like the bigger picture, we're not so good at legwork, we LOVE people, we're good communicators, we're terribly emotional, we don't need too much structure and we like our freedom. Oh and we're idealists - definitely didn't need to be told about that one.
So at a time when I have a lot of thinking to do about my personal qualities, and how they're going to drive my career, I have a handy little tool to help me. Guessing other people's types is also quite fun, especially if you do it with a group of friends, and it does provide an easy and widely accepted categorisation. I now frequently refer to people's characteristics using the relevant letter(s) in their MB type ("that's such an NT thing to do!").
I'd recommend that anyone take the test, accompanied by the advisory pinch of salt, and enjoy whatever they get out of it - be it a little affirmation, a few home truths, a better understanding of themselves, an affinity with a celebrity of the same type, or just a bit of fun.
Tuesday 1 December 2009
Dropping In
It's been so long since I posted that I could only just about remember my password.
I've been pretty busy holding myself to my own promises from last post...mostly finding a job, and now I am blogging from the office which feels pretty good.
So I'm dropping back in to the corporate world. Part of the reason I chose this blog name was because I was worried about getting caught up in some temp job and forgetting about all the things I really wanted to do. But so far I don't think there's a huge danger of that.
There are some things I like about this lifestyle - money, human interaction, the ease with which you can look after your health when you have a routine, fighting (in a professional sense...I love a good battle at work), company events, training courses, motivational speakers, freebies, decent coffee, etc. - and I am embracing those. I work in a beautiful location on the river. People seem nice enough. The work seems as though it will be fairly stimulating. I am happy to be here for now.
And honestly after a month off it's a slight relief to have some organisation and structure imposed on me. Still have a lot of work to do there.
Why am I so sure I'm only dropping in?
Because today I read a 45 page document about a Value-at-Risk model - the kind of document I'll be expected to produce myself in this role, followed by an article by my favourite journalist, Gideon Rachman, and I knew which one I would have wanted to put my name to. Ok, so most people would make the same choice, but the point is that I thought about it immediately on reading the article, as though being the Chief Foreign Affairs columnist for the Financial Times (or similar) were somehow a possibility for me (a foolishly optimistic thought I'm sure). At least for now, I still read the interesting stuff and feel that burning desire to be a part of it, and everything else just serves as a contrast.
I've been pretty busy holding myself to my own promises from last post...mostly finding a job, and now I am blogging from the office which feels pretty good.
So I'm dropping back in to the corporate world. Part of the reason I chose this blog name was because I was worried about getting caught up in some temp job and forgetting about all the things I really wanted to do. But so far I don't think there's a huge danger of that.
There are some things I like about this lifestyle - money, human interaction, the ease with which you can look after your health when you have a routine, fighting (in a professional sense...I love a good battle at work), company events, training courses, motivational speakers, freebies, decent coffee, etc. - and I am embracing those. I work in a beautiful location on the river. People seem nice enough. The work seems as though it will be fairly stimulating. I am happy to be here for now.
And honestly after a month off it's a slight relief to have some organisation and structure imposed on me. Still have a lot of work to do there.
Why am I so sure I'm only dropping in?
Because today I read a 45 page document about a Value-at-Risk model - the kind of document I'll be expected to produce myself in this role, followed by an article by my favourite journalist, Gideon Rachman, and I knew which one I would have wanted to put my name to. Ok, so most people would make the same choice, but the point is that I thought about it immediately on reading the article, as though being the Chief Foreign Affairs columnist for the Financial Times (or similar) were somehow a possibility for me (a foolishly optimistic thought I'm sure). At least for now, I still read the interesting stuff and feel that burning desire to be a part of it, and everything else just serves as a contrast.
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