London Calling

After arriving Saturday night to my apartment (a glorified dorm room) in Old Street, London, I have officially begun my new life as a self-sufficient adult. Except for the part where I'm not self-sufficient at all, and am actually completely failing on my own. With no credit card to speak of (long story), I have 30 pounds to last me through the next 3 days, which is how long it will take my parents to wire me money. And considering the fact that the average lunch costs 8 pounds and I still have yet to buy things like a phone or a hair dryer (absolutely necessary in the working world), my survival here seems unlikely.

Today was my first day at the office of Euromoney Magazine, which is, for you Americans who don't know, like the WSJ or Economist of England, but a monthly. It's a publication about finance and everything that goes along with it (politics), and you can check it out at euromoney.com if you really want to. Even though the magazine is about finance, working here is not like working at a bank. No, people here aren't staring for hours at computer screens in cubicles. No, they're not walking like zombies around the office in perfectly pressed suits. Here, the boss wears jeans and is sitting next to you at the same desk, asking you every so often what you think about this and that world crisis. The office is one giant thinktank, loud and lewd, and people are yelling things to each other like "Are you working on the article about how #$%&ed France is?!" and "This $#&@ must have some epic @!%* on Gordon Brown." And yet, despite all the cussing (yes, they say that here), everyone is a million times smarter than you.

I learned the hard way that everything we learn in Wharton is utterly useless. Now, before everyone attacks me, let me explain. We learn stuff at Wharton. A lot of stuff. More stuff than at most schools, in fact. And while everything we learn is applicable to the real world, it's not enough. It's not enough to know the IS-LM curve like the back of your hand, you also have to get what's going on in Greece and Turkey and Brazil and everywhere else in the world. Needless to say, I don't. I don't know what a credit default swap is. Or a rollover. Or the difference between a SD rating or a D rating by private credit ranking agency. (FYI it's selective default and default). Over the course of 8 hours, Investopedia has become my new best friend, with Finance for Dummies a close second. Never once was I forced to remember something I learned in Finance 101. To my great disappointment, not one newspaper mentioned IS-LM.