You've Got Housing!

[jrising]

I'm going to New York!

Granted, I was going before, but now I have a place to go! Columbia provides housing at a discounted rate, if you're willing to take whatever they give you. Fortunately, Flame and I count as partners, since we have a lease and a joint bank account. So we're eligible for couple's housing. And we got it.

'It' is a bizarrely-shaped *one bedroom* apartment on the Upper West Side, for only slightly more than we're paying now for our *studio*. Take a look:





It's right on the edge of Columbia's blocks, a block from a park, a few blocks to the trains, and generally perfect.

I move in the first week of August, when our "Math Camp" starts (a mandatory month of morning classes). Who can come to a housewarming?

Comments

[jrising.livejournal.com]

Cool. What are you going to be doing?

[gaussjordan.livejournal.com]

High frequency trading at a hedge fund. (And no, high frequency trading has not yet been responsible for any financial crises.) I found an apartment in Tribeca just this Monday. I'm quite excited about moving to New York. It should be interesting.

[jrising.livejournal.com]

Oh, no. What made you want to do finance, when you could do anything? I don't want to sound elitist, but doesn't it seem below you?

[gaussjordan.livejournal.com]

I'm not in the least surprised that you'd say that, but I'm not quite sure how to respond to it.

I have a different values system, and don't particularly consider it to be beneath me. I'm still doing math and computer science, just at a hedge fund. I will admit that I might, ideally, have preferred something that had a more tangible product, that was more "creative" in the sense of creating something. That said, I didn't want a straight software job, and this is the job I ended up taking. I'm confident that I can assuage any uncertainties about the tangibleness of work with the amount of money that I'll be making.

I won't be saving the world or anything, but I do believe that the work that I'll be doing will be at least somewhat socially useful. Not all finance is socially useful, of course, but high frequency trading is vaguely so.