the first time i heard of Series 7 was when i watched Boiler Room a few years ago. i learned that it was some test that people took in order to become licensed brokers. when i accepted my offer to be an analyst at Lehman Brothers last November, i had no idea that i would be required to take the Series 7. my job (according to descriptions i had read about it) would have little to do with speaking directly with customers or making market transactions. but as part of Capital Markets, i was handed two three-inch binders at the beginning of training and told that this Series 7 test lurked in the near future.

the binders sat in my room untouched for about a month. i had not heard any instructions on studying the material beforehand, and i saw on our schedule that we would have a full week of training devoted to the test. “how hard could it be?” i thought. i remembered the guys in Boiler Room were middle class suburban white boys who went to crappy colleges, and if they could manage to pass this test, i knew i’d be in pretty good shape. except i forgot that Boiler Room is a movie.

panic seized me when i took my first practice exam exactly one week ago. i scored somewhere in the fifties and many of my correct answers came from wild guesses. i had read some of the sections while in the bathroom or on the subway, but some of questions were just too damn specific.

Accrued interest on new municipal bonds is calculated from the:
a. purchased date
b. Settlement date
c. dated date
d. last interest payment

each practice exam was 125 questions. the real test would be 250 questions. there were options, muni bonds, NASD rules, FX, underwriting, interest rates, mutual funds, annuities, REITs, and all other sorts of things under the umbrella of this very basic level of finance. and yet, the details seemed mountainous. some of my peers, most of them who had taken courses or had finance internships before, expressed some anxiety as well. at least i’m not alone, i thought.

statistically, 66% of those who take the test pass. the average score is 73% and you need 70% to pass. we were sternly told by HR that failure to pass the Series 7 in two attempts would lead to termination. yikes. perhaps nothing serious compared to the rumors that Citi and JP Morgan cut some of their i-bankers for crappy test scores during training, but the very possibility of losing my job so early was a bit intimidating. i hadn’t even sat in my cubicle yet!

i couldn’t stay awake in class. we sat in a windowless classroom somewhere near Battery Park every day last week from 9am-4pm. i came to love the Korean-owned deli downstairs and looked forward to the sausage, egg & cheese sandwich each morning. and although we had an excellent instructor who gave us very effective notes and tips, i could not keep myself from burying my head into the desk and passing out. it was as if i was getting rest so i could do serious studying later on (which, thankfully, i did) it also didn’t help that i lost feeling in my right hand on some of the mornings. you ever get that? when you can’t grip a pen for a few hours at a time or your hand starts to tremble? okay, maybe i need to get it checked out.

for the next six days, i found myself after work either at my desk in my room or at butler library taking practice exams and reading sections from the binder. there were moments when i thought about contingency plans – what kind of job i could apply for if this finance thing didn’t pan out, how i would go about making payment on rent, how i could show my face around to my friends and family. it was an uncertain time, and it certainly didn’t help that my scores could not break the magic 70. i tried to type up every single answer from the answer keys to help me memorize some things better. my roommate rich gave me a private lesson on options which helped me a great deal, and i tried to see if certain wall street journal articles made more sense after learning about a few things on a given day.

i broke 70 on saturday, two days before my test. i remember holding my answers in my hand and staring at the handwritten score on top. it was a great feeling, even if it was just a practice test. i treated myself to a shrimp salad at Le Monde while i went over the answers i got wrong. progress, hope, and encouragement – good things.
later that day, i took what is called the “Greenlight Exam.” our instructor told us that the results of the Greenlight Exam would, 94% of the time, reflect the score we would get on the real Series 7, “give or take 5%.” i scored 77% and pumped my fist like Tiger Woods when he wins majors.

on sunday i reviewed my notes and took another practice exam. i scored 66%, but convinced myself that the questions were a lot harder than the ones i had seen. no, the Greenlight was my winning ticket. i caught glimpses of In the Mood for Love on our beautiful big screen as Warren and Jackie watched in the living room. i felt relaxed and even a bit confident. i bounced pep talks in my head – yeah, pete, you worked hard, you’ll get it done, man. com’on, you went to an ivy league school, you can’t let yourself down now! every little thing sometimes helps.

this morning at One Penn Plaza, i saw my peers wearily walking into the building, all wearing looks of fatigue or anxiety. “man, i took the Greenlight this morning and got a 70,” said Gibbons, an analyst in Real Estate and frat bros with Warren at MIT. he looked very tired and talked about having crammed everything into a weekend. Brandon, a friend doing Public Finance, told me about taking six exams all of sunday and another one very early in the morning. the tests were given on computers and there were very strict security provisions. no phones, notepads, or anything was allowed inside the testing rooms. i had to throw out my Starbucks coffee, only a few sips old. i wore a button-down flannel because offices are usually air-conditioned and cold. they told me that if i thought about taking the flannel off during the test, i would have to come out of the room to do so. the office was impersonal and bland, like most other offices of the world. i took a deep breath. i took several deep breaths, and went inside.

you are given a mandatory 30-min break in between the two sections, each containing 130 questions – five of them “experimental.” after the first session, which i finished with more than an hour an a half left, i met up with Matt, a fellow Securtization banker, and walked the streets outside the office to collect our thoughts and to get a breather. we agreed that some of the questions were challenging while some were easier than we had ever seen on our practice exams. Matt complained about the many mutual fund questions he had seen. i told him that mine was loaded with options. the Series 7 drew randomly from a bank of questions, so everyone would be given a uniquely-generated test. we grabbed coffee, had a pastry, and went back inside.

i finished with two hours left in my second section. i went back and reviewed every single question again. i ended up changing a few here and there. as the number closed in on 130 the second time, my heart began to pound. one peer sitting a few seats away, Anand, had completed his test a few minutes before and let deep breaths of relief out as he left the room. he had obviously passed. i looked at my computer screen and wondered if i was ready to press the Exit button, which would go ahead and calculate my score. i felt like the time i was in elementary school and reading my essay in front of parents and teachers at some appreciation event. my principal had to come over and tell me to slow down and take a deep breath because i was so nervous and reading so quickly. damn, how impersonal and cold was this test, just needing a few seconds to spit back at me my fate?

84%. whew.

there is a small affair left. it’s called the Series 63, somethng about state legislation, but i won’t get into it now. it’s on Wednesday and i’ll be studying for it today and tomorrow. but yes, just to go along with the happy mood i currently find myself in, call me an RR, or if you prefer the longer version, a Registered Representative. haha.

it was trying and sometimes unbearable, but you can’t deny the uplifting effect of an adversity story with a happy ending. that is my life, where taking a test about making money qualifies as an adversity.

i finally finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled on Monday – some five weeks after i first started it – and i must say, while the experience was at times trying and even exhausting, i don’t regret having picked up the book in the first place.

i was re-reading Louis Menand‘s review (March 2005) of Ishiguro’s latest book, Never Let Me Go (it was more of an article on the writing style of Ishiguro), and Menand mentions The Unconsoled in passing:

“…the strangeness in Ishiguro’s most imaginative novel, “The Unconsoled,” is ingeniously evoked—by means of literal-minded accounts of things that don’t quite add up—and teasing out the hidden story is the main pleasure of the book. In “The Unconsoled,” the story is never fully sorted out; at the end, we remain in the hall of mirrors.”

in my reading, i was often irritated with dialogues that seemed more like block monologues that went on for pages without any breaks or even paragraph indentations. most of these moments came when various characters expressed their personal greivances or struggles with a detailed and often repetitve account of their life stories. it was frustrating to read about such moments one after another especially when i was clamoring to find out what the point of the entire story was about. a clear, definitive point never seems to be made, and the novel ends in a rather unresolved and abrupt manner.

in retrospect, however, the pleasure of the book is very much in what is hidden behind the tedious dialogue and unceasing attention to seemingly useless details. although you learn a great deal about the mannerisms and likes and dislikes of the protagonist – a world-renowned pianist named Ryder – it is unclear what he seeks to accomplish in visiting a Central European town, where he meets all sorts of characters ranging from the respectable to the pathetic to even the straight-up annoying.

as british as he is, ishiguro seems to mock artistic pretentiousness throughout the novel, never really letting the reader in on the “crisis” that troubles the members of the community but not sparing us the details of their preoccupation and their anxieties concerning an upcoming event that would “decide the fate” of the city. this combination of vagueness and specificity makes the reader care and not care at the same time. by the end, the reader can’t help but to feel annoyance and disgust at these characters who all seem to possess an air of self-importance, whether it is in defense of some personal decision made long ago or their sense of artistic sophistication.

but ishiguro’s point isn’t that these are terrible human beings; it is that human beings, like it or not, are almost always like these characters. and in reading something so literal, often to the point of mundane, ishiguro shows a reflection of human interaction stripped of its romance and drama. the reflection is one that portrays triviality, pettiness, and a preoccupation with the self that makes any attempts at idealism seem pretentious and superficial at best. it is a dark, decidedly post-modern view of human affairs, but it is one that doesn’t jump out at you. you have to really look to find it.