Closing Time

My internship ended last week, marking the conclusion of an incredible 8 weeks in Japan. There is so much praise and thanks that absolutely must be dished out to a plethora of parties: The Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, Intrax, and most importantly to the incredible people that I was privileged to spend this summer with.

My last official weekend affiliated with BTMU and Intrax was perfect in my opinion. I was able to spend time with my friends, host family, and do some pretty epic cultural activities.

I will briefly just touch on our last division, Global Markets Unit. GMU deals a lot with analyzing market trends and buying different types of securities. Almost every employee has at least 6 computers at their desk so that they can effectively watch the market. This was a high-security division, and we got special passes for our time there. We needed a fingerprint identification pass to be able to move throughout the department. So that was really cool. We made a presentation to associates and managers of GMU on Friday, and that marked our last division visit. The only thing left was our final presentation to the higher-ups of the Global Planning Division (aka our bosses and the ones who set up this summer internship). However, that was not until Thursday, and there was a whole weekend to get to first.

Saturday marked the annual fireworks festival at Asakusa, a major tourist area in the Tokyo area. I had heard so much about this fireworks festival: that it was really fun and a great cultural event, but that it is always also so crowded you cannot believe it. After having gone to the festival, I can safely conclude that was a spot-on accurate description. Once the fireworks got going we walked to a main street and just stood in the middle of it, along with thousands of other people, and watched the fireworks. It was a great display and I was very impressed.