Interesting suggestion. I read the OP's article a few years ago and it totally resonated with me. And I'm glad to have seen it here again, and wrote out my own

Interesting suggestion. I read the OP's article a few years ago and it totally resonated with me. And I'm glad to have seen it here again, and wrote out my own experience above. Maybe one day I'll publish a longer version of it somewhere. The thing with the wall street interview that you mentioned was just how diametrically opposite it felt compared to my life as a grad student. And I wanted to point this out. I was working in a basement lab, doing long hours often by myself, in a dark drab dreary dungeon of sorts, feeling cut off from the world. And then for the interview I walk onto a trading floor in a skyscraper in NYC with hundreds of people shouting into telephones or at colleagues across the way, TV's broadcasting news scattered around the floor. Most traders with crazy screen setups (eg 2 rows of 4 screens) full of blinking charts and tables of numbers updating in real time. Wide windows surround the floor with amazing views across Manhattan and beyond. I was put into a little windowed office for the interviews. In the first day of interviews, the window offered a great view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. And I thought back to my great great grandparents who came to this country through Ellis Island for opportunity, and now I was given an opportunity and I hoped not to blow it. And then into the second day the window faced uptown, showing an endless expanse of skyscrapers. I started questioning myself, feeling like a fish out of water, totally outside my element. The summer internship itself was great, finance was nothing at all what I thought it was. There are all sorts of risk and pricing models, and it was full of people like myself who grew disillusioned with a career in academia but were still able to apply math/coding/modelling/analytical skills to something interesting and exciting.