I have decided to post my experience for what it is worth. I do not expect this to follow the standard format of posts in this forum I am merely here to present to all of you a story that could have helped me and given me encouragement in the darkest days of the sales and trading recruitment process.

Since we are slowly migrating from the interview stages to the post offer stage, the threads are starting to move much more towards XYZ vs ABC. I wanted to take time to talk about the "culture" question that keeps coming up. In particular kids asking about the culture of the bank.

My one piece of advice: you should not make a decision based on the perceived culture of the overall bank, culture is very desk specific. The culture of the cash equities desk is going to be different from the delta one desk which is going to be different from the flow equity derivs desk which is going to be different from the exotics desk. Same thing with FICC, the structured credit desk is very different from the flow credit desk.

Why is this so?

Tonight the #5 Blue Devils take on #21 Tar-heels. For the past few years this has been the ultimate series in college sports. The winner of the series has gone on to win the national championship for the past 2 seasons (sorry big east). This has me wondering what is the best rivalry in sports according to WSO?

The sort of rivalries that lead to quotes such as:

‎"The biggest fallacy about this whole Carolina-Duke rivalry is the 8-mile thing, as if proximity somehow indicates similarity. It's like assuming East and West Germany must be comparable since they were close to each other."

"The Cameron Crazies are the Clay Aikens of college sports fans-too loud, too geeky, too cute (debatable), and terminally annoying..."

After SEO and various pro female programs, we now also have LGBT exclusive programs.

I am patiently awaiting the day of "Quant risk management for people who are not good math and do other things bad too", and "sales for autists".

The case for diversity is weak at best, studies in the work place are disagreeing on its impact and use, and the idea of meritocracy(an ideal stated by all banks as a core value) seems to have disappeared long ago.

Thoughts fellow monkeys?(When I say monkeys I include all monkeys, including females, LGBT, black, hispanic, native american and all other nationalities. In case you do not consider yourself human but have adopted an alternative existence as non human being I include you too.)