Don’t worry, I’m not gonna do what you all think I’m gonna do, which is, you know, FLIP OUT!

That Tom Cruise quote from Jerry Maguire is a perfect example of how not to separate yourself from an employer. The time to flip out is while you still work there and can affect a change, not on your way out the door. My resignation from State Street, on the other hand, was quite professional and I left on very good terms with everyone at the office.

I’m not going to get into the reasons I just resigned from a Fortune 500 company in the middle of a recession with no guarantee of job but will say it was time to move on and pursue other opportunities.

It might seem crazy to resign from a decent paying job while the economy sputters, but I’ve done a very, very good job over the past two and a half years of paying off my debts and saving up enough money to sustain myself for at least the next 6 months.

Overall, I enjoyed my time at State Street and learned a good deal about the corporate world but it was time for me to move on.

I’ve got a few plans for the coming months and my now abundance of “free” time but will tackle that topic in another post.

To all the people I’ve met over the past two and a half years at State Street, thank you for the memories and good luck to all of you!

For those who don’t know, State Street is a global custodial bank for institutional investors. In other words, a bank for super-rich groups and people. The confidentially agreement prevents me from citing specific clients, but think hedge funds, government organizations, pensions, endowments, mutual funds, non-profit organizations, other banks, and very, very rich individuals, to name a few. State Street clients are mostly groups (and super-rich individuals) with a lot of financial assets; in other words, not exactly the type of entities who would participate in facebook polls.

It’s safe to assume State Street’s clients and State Street itself has access to and already performs much more detailed and accurate market research than a facebook poll. With all the buzz lately [see the below video about facebook and the Central Intelligence Agency] about how much information facebook captures and stores, I thought it was funny that they didn’t filter out companies who obviously would not benefit from a facebook poll.

Sure, facebook polls could be used for recruiting and public relations information, but it’s hard to imagine the State Street’s super-wealthy institutional clients valuing the financial advice of facebook’s core users. Nothing against facebook or its community, but the majority of its users simply do not have millions upon millions of dollars or experience dealing with such large sums of money.

Do you see any merit in facebook polls for the State Street corporation or its institutional client base? Considering the points made in the embedded video about facebook’s connections to the C.I.A., are facebook polls actually extremely valuable to super wealthy institutional investors?

My personal portfolio does contain State Street Corporation holdings. In no way does any of the above text represent financial advice, nor am I responsible for any actions you take as a result of the above text. Further, the above text does not represent an official statement by State Street Corporation nor any of its subsidiaries.

We also recently [two weeks ago] completed the the purchase of our Boston-based rival, Investors Financial Services Corp. [a.k.a. IBT]. What does Ron, Chief Executive Officer of State Street, Logue have to say about IBT?

The results of Investors Financial in the second quarter were strong, like State Street’s, and so we are revising our financial goals for 2007: We now expect that revenue growth will be between 20 percent and 22 percent; up from 16 percent to 18 percent we forecast in February when we announced the deal.

Wall Street obviously enjoyed all of this news, as trading on State Street stock ended up 2.1% at 71.87 per share. To prevent “doocing”, I will limit my words to the above, but want to send a question out to our rival, the world’s biggest custodial bank, Bank of New York Mellon.

How do you like them apples?

My personal portfolio does contain State Street corporation holdings. In no way does any of the above text represent financial advice, nor am I responsible for any actions you take as a result of the above text. Further, the above text does not represent an official statement by State Street Corporation nor any of its subsidiaries, except the one quote by Ron Logue.

Although I had an amazing time at USC, I decided to transfer to a more competitive business school, and enrolled the next year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I performed poorly there in a few classes outside the business major (due to poor attendance more than anything else) and was thus denied admission the the Kenan-Flagler business school, even though I performed extremely well in my business classes (usually in the top 2-3 of the class). Due to the Kenan-Flagler’s inflexibility and personal issues I was struggling with at the time, I decided to withdraw from UNC-Chapel Hill in the middle of Spring 2005 semester and move back home to Boston.

I then worked some odd jobs, such as loading trucks in a Home Depot warehouse and valeting at the Boston Harbor Hotel (a very nice hotel in Boston, highly recommenced for anyone with the money to splurge) before landing a job temping at the State Street Corporation (here’s the wiki on SSC) in Quincy, MA (my second stint at State Street, I also worked for them for a very short time as a high school intern many years ago) in October 2005. SSC is a global custodian (basically a bank for mutual funds and other institutional investors) with nearly $11 trillion assets under custody and $1.5 trillion assets under management. I came into SSC to assist in finalizing the integration of Deutsche Bank’s custodial business onto State Street’s books, which was acquired in March of 2003. Being an accounting and finance geek, I was very happy to be working on such a high-profile project.

Having stabilized my professional life and found a job I enjoyed, I decided it was a good time to go back to school part-time and enrolled in two online classes at UNC-Chapel Hill, Management Accounting and a Communications class. I was considering, at the time of re-enrolling at UNC-Chapel Hill as I wanted to prove to the school, myself, and friends and family that I could earn a degree from their Kenan-Flagler school.

After doing a lot of thinking, I decided it was impractical to go back to UNC-Chapel Hill as it would add to my massive debt (whereas if I stayed at SSC, they would cover the cost of tuition) and add a lot of stress to my life as I had a multitude of problems with UNC-CH’s administration. I stayed un-enrolled until SSC’s tuition benefits would kick in, 6 months after my hire date. On April, 10, 2006 I became a full-fledged State Street employee and would become eligible for tuition benefits in 6 months.

I then took two classes at Northeastern University in Boston, Financial Reporting & Analysis and Business Law in the second half of the Fall 2006 semester (both courses were 6 week intensive courses). I originally wanted to take classes at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but my tuition reimbursement eligibility did not kick until after the Umass-Amherst classes already started for the Fall ’06 semester.

Finally, I come to my point for this post; I’m currently enrolled in the online Bachelor’s degree of Business Administration, with a focus on Management, at Umass-Amherst. Due to my extensive experience with college coursework at multiple institutions, I can be a great evuluator of the effectiveness of the online program at Umass-Amherst (although admittedly biased). My thesis is that the educational value of my Umass coursework will at least match the value I received from USC, UNC-Chapel Hill and Northeastern.

I’ll be posting essays, solutions and other classwork from my previous and current classes in the Education section. I’ll also periodically comment on my progress in posts. I welcome any comments on the coursework I post in the Education section and will eventually formulate a conclusion. If I find that the value of the online program is lacking, I will let everyone know, but so far after completing one course and currently taking two courses, the evidence is supporting my thesis. In fact, the Principles of Management course I already completed was one of the most educational classes I’ve ever taken!

• Started a company with three of my really good friends. We’re having our first meeting tomorrow with all four of us at once, I’m pumped!
• Received an Outstanding Performance Award from State Street (check out the plaque…shiny!)

• Went on Spring Break! I stayed in Boston but the five days off from work and school was great!
• Scored a 54/54 on my FINOPMGT 250 – Quantitative Tools for Management (aka Stats 2) mid-term!
• Was promoted to a Senior Tax Administrator!
• Began learning CSS and re-learning HTML
• Started this blog!

This is the second blog I’ve written. My first one was a great success in that I received a lot of visitors (relatively) and was able to get a lot off my chest (not relatively); too much, in fact, and I’ve since deleted nearly all remnants of that blog (damn you Google cache). I intend for this blog to be a permanent place for my digital ramblings and creations so I’ll be here awhile!
Short and sweet for my first post…see you all soon!