UBS and the British Parliament

For our second-to-last excursion, during our second-to-last week of classes, we again hopped on the morning train south to London. Our first stop was the London office of UBS, a Swiss Financial Management firm, and the second largest bank in Europe. There we met with currency strategist Geoffrey Yu '06. He gave a short presentation consisting of an overview of UBS as well as his particular dealings in the foreign currency markets. The most valuable part of the meeting however was a candid discussion in which Geoffrey shared with us his experiences as a recent Carleton grad, and advice on how to best take advantage of all that Carleton has to offer to prepare us for potential careers in the financial world. Geoffrey was full of extremely useful and interesting information for us and we probably could have sat and talked with him well into the afternoon. Unfortunately, the finance world is a busy place and eventually Mr. Yu had to leave us.
After departing UBS and picking up a quick lunch, the group returned to Westminster for a guided tour of the British Houses of Parliament. It was was quite amazing to walk through a space with such a rich history, to see where the kings, queens and lords went about running the British Empire. We were not allowed to sit, but we even got to stand behind the benches in the House of Commons where we could only imagine the raucus atmosphere that must be present during a session. When we had seen all the guilded ceilings, churchill statues and Henry VIII portraits we could handle, we headed back up to Cambridge for an extravagant dinner at Pavel's house (Domino's Pizza), in honor of our guest, the professor leading the 2009 Cambridge Seminar, Radek Szulga.