The Winter I Froze and Learned to Work

Notes from my first year on a trading floor

My first job out of college was in Finance. It was a rotational Analyst program in Sales & Trading.

I spent the summer after college graduation at the firm’s headquarters in London, learning about the Yield Curve and Options Pricing and studying for the Series 7 exam after a night at Boujis with my new friends.

When summer ended, our Analyst class came back to New York. On our first day, Occupy Wall Street protests took over Zuccotti Park, right next to our office building. Our firm was the only big bank still left in the financial district; everyone else had moved uptown, to Tribeca or to Times Square. Some days, trudging into the office at 5:30 a.m., tired and anxious, I’d feel like asking the protesters, “Can you go to one of the other banks today instead?” I didn’t, of course—a people-pleaser to the end. I smiled guiltily in the direction of tents as I walked in, willing myself to look noble, or honest, or whatever would make the crowds not hate me.

It’s a funny time in early adulthood, September after graduation. For twenty-two years, we’d all been scaffolded by the same educational infrastructure. Even the most disparate of classmates had something in common, a rhythm to their days provided by school and midterms and teachers and grades. And then… graduation. So many different choices—“figs in a tree,” as my favorite author Sylvia Plath once wrote:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree… From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor…”

Finance was the strongest branch on my tree. Working at a bank felt inescapable to me, not least because it was my dad’s career. In February of my junior year, every major firm sent young alumni and recruiters to the Princeton campus, and 75% of my grade marched through the snow in a suit to the Nassau Inn for a chance to interview. These banks offered a golden opportunity for high-intensity planners like myself: the chance to intern for a summer and lock in a job offer before even starting senior year. I couldn’t resist that kind of security, that kind of achievement—another check off the “five-year-plan” list. I had a lot of insecurities and a lot to prove.

The trading floor was fascinating. I experienced complete culture shock. I wasn’t prepared for how overwhelming it would feel—the sounds, the colors, the pace. The language in particular felt hugely intimidating. During the first week of my internship, my primary responsibility was to take notes in the daily trading meetings, which took place at 6:15 a.m. sharp.

First, I had to navigate the carefully choreographed seating dance: each chair seemed to telegraph seniority in a way no org chart ever could. I stood, back to the wall, petrified to claim even a folding chair until I fully understood the rules.

Next, I had to take notes. People spoke quickly, in shorthand, about subjects I barely understood. More than once, I spent an hour searching for a stock ticker that didn’t exist, only to figure out it was the initials of a senior trader. I looked up almost every word I wrote down on Investopedia or Bloomberg. My first recap email took me hours, by which point the market had opened, the prices had changed, and not a single word I wrote was relevant anymore.

I felt dumb and slow and powerless, but I pressed on. Eventually I realized that it truly was another language. I wouldn’t have called myself dumb for not speaking Italian in a room full of fluent Italian speakers—I just needed to learn it. And this was certainly not a language taught in college. My economics classes had no bearing on what was being said at 6 a.m. at 60 Wall Street. This was work talk. Once I learned the language, it felt natural.

The majority of my colleagues were men, but there were still plenty of women around. There was one woman in particular—tall and pretty, with freshly blow-dried blonde hair at 6 a.m. Her name was Lucy, and she wore pencil-thin heels and cute A-Line skirts and shouted over her monitors across the trading floor. Sometimes she looked openly annoyed, as if the men around her were moving too slowly for her pace. Sometimes she’d arrive late in an enormous, glamorous coat with a fur trim, daring the floor to say something, taking her time. What stood out to me was that she didn’t seem to attract sideways glances. No one ogled her. She just was who she was.

Once, I overheard an analyst telling a friend they’d seen her on a nightclub dance floor the night before—smiling, dancing, happy. It made her feel even more unknowable to me somehow—someone who could exist fully outside of the office and still command total respect inside of it.

I could never tell if she liked me. But I could tell she’d noticed me. Another girly girl. She was a flower poking up through the cracks in the concrete.

For interns and new analysts, there was a shortage of chairs. The idea was that you were supposed to “shadow” people, but to do that required finding a stool, positioning it somewhere that wasn’t in anyone’s way, and keeping still. It was my absolute nightmare—peering over someone’s shoulder, trying not to be in the way, trying to learn at the same time.

The greatest issue, though, was what to do with my coat. There were no other analysts on my desk, so I had no one to follow. The unspoken rule for analysts was “first in, last out,” and I prided myself on my work ethic. I wanted to be seen as smart, confident, and “easy.” And I did not want to be the girl holding up the day because she didn’t know where to put her coat.

I watched Lucy and her big, gorgeous coat. I knew a coat like that wasn’t being draped on the back of a rolling chair or shoved under a desk. She had access to a coat closet. That was seniority I could aspire to.

When winter came, I decided it was better to have no coat or handbag at all. I froze on the way to work. I shoved my wallet and lip gloss in the pocket of my blazer. I did this throughout the cold New York winter. I was there to work. I didn’t even think about it, honestly—I truly felt I would rather be freezing cold on my commute than be seen as difficult.

I thought being good at work meant showing up cold and unburdened. That the best thing I could do was ask for nothing, take up no space, and figure it out quietly. I really believed that being “low-maintenance” was a virtue. I internalized the idea that the best way to succeed was to avoid drawing attention—because visibility felt risky.

Lucy was important to me for many reasons, but most obviously because she was a clearly respected, ambitious, successful woman who had maintained her personhood. That her personhood included the trappings of archetypal femininity that I loved—the heels, the outfits, the makeup, the dancefloor—meant a lot to me. It was possible not to lose myself while I gained professional success.

But I also learned that I didn’t want to exist in a space where my personhood felt out of place. Now I know better. You don’t have to leave your coat at the door to be taken seriously. You just need a hanger with your name on it.