Learning Upto Sixteen Hours a Day

Sixteen hours a day! That is a ridiculous amount of time, don’t you think? What are those lecturers going to talk about for such a long time? Well I thought the same.

Whenever I combined the words “learning” and “sixteen hours” it would give me the creeps. I couldn’t even stand four hours at my uni without losing focus at times. How was I supposed to survive upto 16 hours attending classes, studying cases, preparing interviews and presentations, and doing homeworks?

For several years I had tried everything to land a job on Wall Street. Everything. Nothing had worked. I had even landed a few interviews and then proceeded to bomb them. I had to try something different. The program seemed interesting.

On the first day I received a ton of information and handouts. I seated myself into one of those rather comfy seats. It was going to be a long day, I thought. I was expecting to hear things and data I already knew from university finance courses.

The instructor was nothing like my university professor. Don't get me wrong - I like most of my university professors - I have learned a lot from them. But they are a bit different. The Swiss Finance Academy instructor was a Wall Street veteran who had driven through scores of countries to do investments research, kicking tires in all sorts of countries. Yes, driven, because that way you learn more -- through war zones, natural disasters, crime riddled areas and countries with bad roads -- examining countries to invest in, capital markets to trade in and M&A deals to explore -- capitalizing upon prior experience doing billion dollar deals for two bulge bracket investment banks.

Lectures were incredibly interesting. In many ways, they were transformational. I learned the relationship between capital markets and common sense, between mergers and models. I acquired know- how, which the instructors had gained during many years on Wall Street, doing some of the most complex and largest deals ever done.

My classmates were from all sorts of backgrounds, but none short of ambition. They were planning to start their own investment boutiques, hedge funds and start-ups. Some already had family businesses.

The time flew. I learned so much that it landed me a job on Wall Street. I felt so connected to my classmates and the Academy during the program that the last day of the program was deeply emotional for everyone. I will never forget it.

You can see my and my classmates' profiles at http://www.swissfinance.com/testimonials.php.