02 / the ledger
A record of audacious spending, professional hardball, and a résumé that occasionally reached beyond the available evidence.
Filed / 01
Abhijeet has always practiced a bold financial philosophy: living large has nothing to do with the funds in your checking account. One night we found ourselves at the VI with a group of random folks, some that are actually at the wedding. As a completely broke college kid, Abhijeet shouted out, “Hey guys, the next round’s on me!” Idk if Abhijeet actually settled the tab or not, but it is the gesture that matters.
Filed / 02
When he visited me in Chicago while completely unemployed, and while I was scraping by on a rock-bottom entry-level salary, we went grocery shopping. Abhijeet spent twenty minutes passionately arguing that buying prime, wildly expensive Atlantic salmon was the only sensible choice for dinner (I give him some credit since he is from Bangladesh and Bangla people love their fish). To answer your question: no, we did not get the salmon.
Filed / 03
When Abhijeet applied to Morningstar, the company I work for, he made it all the way to the final round. His final round case study was on a Wednesday. For some reason, he decided to play high-stakes corporate hardball and told HR that he had a competing offer and needed a final decision by Friday. When he told me what he did, I asked him why on earth he would put a gun to their heads. His completely unbothered response? “Well, I thought it’d be nice to know ASAP.” Guess what? Morningstar rejected him the very next morning. And the best part? There was never a competing offer.
Filed / 04
Abhijeet sent me his resumes and cover letters as he was applying for jobs post-Kenyon. I must say, it was a joy looking at those documents, because if you ever read his resume, you’d think he was running the state of Ohio: • He didn’t just work at the Kenyon Athletic Center; he “commanded an army of 40 desk attendants.” • He didn’t just set up speakers on campus; he oversaw an “$80,000 sound inventory”—while literally applying for high-stakes finance jobs with a cover letter that introduced himself as the “Sound Technician Manage.” Yep, just “Manage.” Not “Manager.” • But my personal favorite was his summer on an Ohio farm, where he bragged on his official CV that he “raised 400 broiler chicks with minimal loss and optimized feed inputs by 20%, leading to a 15% yield improvement.” As far as things go that did not happen, this is right up there. Also, based on Abhijeet’s interest in our shared economics classes, I am sure he thought chicken yields were somehow related to treasury/bond yields.
Filed / 05
Abhijeet cast a wide net applying for jobs: middle school education, data analytics, asset management, investment research. It actually did not matter where he applied because he opened his cover letter with his one secret weapon: “I built an ordinary differential equation model simulating a heroin abuse epidemic.” Nothing makes a school, education NGO, or finance firm want to hire an analyst quite like their extensive collegiate background simulating illicit narcotics.