As summer rolls around, many folks leave the office a little earlier on Thursday or Friday nights to make it out for a cocktail event or weekend away from town. There will be a solid amount of extra-industry networking going on, to say the least. And by that I mean sloppy cocktail parties.

But here arises the often-asked question: How do I keep the conversation rolling with someone not in finance? Here are 5 tips to keep the conversation flowing and you not sounding like a prick, just a guy with swagger and the personality to make that bank account look even more becoming.

1) Hate to do it, but I’ll just re-iterate what every successful person already knows here when it comes to networking: Keep the focus of the conversation on the other party.

”Look man, remember when there were no seatbelts? What happened then when you crashed?”

“My point is, life is like that car! Sometimes it throws you through the windshield, cracks your skull wide open, even breaks your heart! But you can’t let that stop you from getting back in there! Ride, Billy. RIDE!”

There are 10 days remaining until the conference (June 29th) and each day we'll be listing off another reason for why you should join us at the conference.

Reason #10: Meet Patrick, the founder and Chief Monkey of WSO. He'll be busy of course but would love to shake the hand of everyone that attends. If you see him around make sure to say hi!

See inside for more reasons...

A first-year analyst at BofA is pulling an all-nighter. He's on his second Snickers bar and his third Monster Lo-Carb when he notices his VP's computer turning on. Which is strange, because his VP shut it down hours ago when he left for the night. So he strolls around the office for a few minutes and catches another offline computer booting up. This is weird. He goes back to his desk and the blood drains from his face when he sees the comps he's spent hours spreading have disappeared from his screen and been replaced by what appears to be Chinese characters. Then his screen goes blank. Chaos erupts among the analysts as all their screens go blank at the same moment.

On another floor, an overnight trader notices a huge spike in the Yen and a collapse in the Euro and dollar before his screen goes blank. He panics, knowing that he must be tripping stops right and left. He tries to reboot to no avail. His phone starts ringing, and it's his MD who clearly just woke up. "WTF is going on down there?" his MD screams, but the trader has no answers. His computer comes back online for a moment, but only long enough for him to see his P&L hemorrhaging red. Then everything goes blank.

If this sounds like something out of a spy novel, you'd better get ready to see it in real life. Because it's happening on June 28. Dubbed Quantum Dawn 2, Wall Street is going to come under simulated cyber attack to test the system readiness and response time in the event of a massive worldwide hacker attack. By scheduling it for June 28, they're hoping to take advantage of what should be a quiet summer Friday where (hopefully) it won't cause any real chaos.

For many of us in United States, the TI-83 Plus is the quintessential (pre-college) calculator. It was required for many classes (e.g. AP Calculus) and the $100+ price tag 10+ years ago did not do wonders for the wallet. Still, the multi-line interface, matrix operation capabilities and games such as snake made it a versatile instrument pre-iphone. 

Yet, as an electronic system in a highly competitive field, why is the same TI-83 Plus still almost as pricey as a decade ago?? Keep in mind that with the same money, one can buy a 4th gen ipod touch with a Color screen, gigabytes of ram and streaming video+wifi and that the same smartphones a year from now are probably worth far less (try selling the older motorola razr's now). This extends beyond phones to vcrs (remember those?), stereos etc.

Background
I randomly discovered WSO nearly seven years ago just weeks after I secured a FT MM IB position. The website was extremely nascent at the time with only a few thousand registered users. The majority of the users were college students with only a handful of people actually working in investment banking. Like many new users today, I became engrossed in learning as much as I could about banking and spent a tremendous time reading everything on the site.

Throughout my two banking years, I did my best to share my experiences with the community. As one of the most senior members on the site (as an analyst, no less), there were relatively few people who could answer my questions about PE or assist me in building my career. At the time, I felt as though I wasn't getting anything out of the site despite putting a lot of effort in.

Fast forward to my first PE job and I was finally in a position to really mentor people looking to break into banking and PE. I started getting a lot of inquiries from not only college kids, but bankers as well. Luckily PE isn't as taxing hours-wise and I had the time to email/talk/meet with folks and do my best to help them out. I still hadn't seen any tangible benefit from my now 1,000+ hours on WSO, but at least I was having fun.

Here you go: