Welcome to the WSO weekly wrap-up, where I talk with my team about the five most

trending discussions in the Wall Street Oasis community. Enjoy. All right, after long hiatus,

we're back. It is September 7th, 2023. We're going to try to do a quick weekly recap with some of the top threads.

Sorry about the delay.

We've been swamped with WSO Academy interviews.

If you are just in checking it out, go to Wall Streetoacis.com slash academy.

But Matt's going to kick us off with the intro of one of the top trending topics for today. Yeah, thanks for that, Pat. It's been quite some time since we popped on this, but excited to get back into it here. This first trending topic actually had me chuckling. It's something that I remember doing quite often, especially in the first six months of being in investment banking, well, specifically on a sales and training desk here. But the first topic that we have here is my MD had asked me to wait in line at his favorite halal spot for an hour to pick up his

food. I'm not sure if I should stay in the industry after that. So as I mentioned, typically it's pretty

normal practice for juniors to be grabbing food for especially some of the senior members in the firm

there. Something I did for quite some time spent easily an hour or two sometimes at these hot spots that MDs want to be eating that. But what are your thoughts on that? That's something that's always been around. I know you have a lot more years of experience than I do. So it's common practice. It's common practice. I think especially as an intern or a first-year analyst, you're expected to kind of, you know,

shit flows downhill. So you're expected to do all the grunt work. Sometimes you're doing admin work.

Sometimes you're picking up suits. You're dropping off, you know, books at an MD's apartment at 4 a.m.

because they have a flight out the next morning. You're doing all the kind of the grunt work, even sometimes

it means getting lunch for everybody. How about you, Neville? Yeah, yeah, in the early years,

when there's no work, that's usually the work you get, just running around doing stuff. Yeah,

the partner. Yeah, so a couple of the comments here, we're all about, like, you know, the,

how do you go about handling those asks? I guess I'm assuming obviously it's busy, you know, for any junior individual other days and it's hard to kind of spend like an hour or two kind of running errands for senior folks there. Some people's responses were, you know, toughen up a bit. That's just what the role entails. Some people are saying, you know, if this person's asking you to do it often, maybe have a conversation around them. What would be your guys' recommendations here? The way I kind of handled it was just kind of put a smile on and understood this is what just is involved and it's not going to be something that lasts forever. Definitely wasn't in the opinion of wanting to make a conversation out of it with my seniority there. So I just kind and kept doing it. But what are your guys' thoughts on that? Is it something where you just keep a smile on your face, keep doing it? Or is it something where you think it warrants a conversation eventually? I think of it. If it keeps going like past your first year, like full-time experience, I think maybe. But like I wouldn't as a first year, it's kind of a little bit of

like the hazing culture that goes on. And I think it's also sometimes a test of like, you know, somebody were like, oh, you don't have a spine, just tell him to get his own lunch. I'm like, this is an MD, our partner, their time is more valuable than yours realistically. So your whole point is like to save them time so if it means you're the one waiting in line then you know that's how it is

that's how i see it but uh realistically. So your whole point is like to save them time. So if it means you're the one waiting in

line, then, you know, that's how it is. That's how I see it. But if it continued and you were like a critical element to the team and you were already like doing stuff, I think you could be like, hey, I haven't, you know, I'm trying to knock out. There's a fire drill going on. I'm trying to knock this out. So if you're like super busy, then yeah, you could have a conversation to be like,

um, could, then yeah, you could have a conversation to be like, could your admin go get it? Yeah. I guess also it'd be important to know too if it's been like over a year of you doing this and there has been some more junior folks that have come into the team there and they're not really being tasked with that and they're still requiring you do do it. Then I could probably see how a conversation should arise out of that, especially if some more junior ranks have kind of joined the team. But I think if you are at a smaller shop, sometimes hiring is not that frequent and you still may be the most junior individual after a full year or two, especially at some boutiques. And I think that was like my situation there was still well over a year. But I mean, I was still the only junior on the team there. So it's still that responsibility fell on me. The way I like to look at it is I think it's just more so like even just like commodity. Like it's just something that you do like as as a group together. Everyone's been in that position. Even the MDs when they were interns and first years, they probably had it a lot worse than the new first years and

interns have it nowadays, just kind of given that hazing culture and how cultures kind of changed. I'm sure they probably had it worse, you know, 20 or 30 years ago. So I think it's just understanding that everyone's in that position. You got to just put in that sweat now and then that's not going to last forever. And if it does, of course, you know, and like I said, there's some junior resources that have joined, then of course could probably warrant a conversation

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