Offer Letter and PC System Building

Two awesome things happened today. The first and most important one is that I got an offer letter for a Financial Analyst position at the NPO that I talked about a few days ago. The offer looks good and while there is a part of me that wants to negotiate on the salary or the benefits, the overall package is probably 25%-30% better than I was expecting to make as a 24-year-old MBA holder in summer 2008. I will take it and be generally delighted.

This also furthers my career goals toward corporate financial analysis. While it takes me further from the equity research side, that doesn’t bother me all that much. For 99.9% of people, there is a threshold of wealth that they will never pass over without sacrificing their happiness and personal life. The other 0.1% are the empire builders who also have/had fantastic luck; who have had the opportunities and the personal drive to make it to the top of the pyramid and who have enjoyed the process. I may make this happen at some point, but in the meantime I’ll be pretty happy to simply do budgeting and financial analysis for non-profit organizations like hospitals, colleges, etc. that have missions that I can believe in. I’ll make enough money to be happy and prudently invest a portion of my earnings so I can build a safety cushion, and maybe one day I’ll call up some of the badasses I’ve met over the years to start a new company.

The other cool thing that happened is that I finally bought a new PC – or rather, the components which I will use to build a new PC. I used Newegg for most of the parts (about $750 worth, basically everything except for the CPU, the case and the monitor) and Micro Center for the rest of it (about $500 worth). After I get all the mail-in rebates fulfilled it should come to about $1250.

Here’s the build:

BLU-RAY ROM LITE-ON|DH-4O1S-08 4X R – Blu-Ray and DVD drive at $139.99
SPK LOGITECH|S-220 2.1 980-000023 – 2.1 Speaker System at $20.99
CPU COOLER|ARCTIC P4|ACFZ7-PRO R – CPU Fan at $31.99
HD 640G|WD 7K 16M WD6400AAKS – Western Digital 3.0GB/sec 7200 RPM HD, 640 GB at $89.99
MB ASUS P5Q PRO 775 P45 RT – Motherboard, 2x PCIe 2.0 and 2 PCI slots, socket 775 at $149.99
VGA XFX PVT98FYDF9 GF9800GTX 512M R – Video Card at $189.99
CARD READER ROSEWILL|RCR-102 RTL – flash memory card reader, internal (3.5″ drive) at $14.99
MEM 2Gx2|GSK F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ R – 4 GB of G.Skill DDR2 at 800 MHz at $79.99
IPSG Intel® Boxed Core 2 Duo Processor E8400 – CPU at $159.99
Acer America Corporation AL2216Wbd 22″ Widescreen Digital/Analog LCD at $239.99
Thermaltake USA Inc M9 ATX Gaming Mid Tower at $79.99
Antec Truepower 650W ATX Power Supply at $60 (from a friend)

I’m not exactly an enthusiast – these parts are chosen mainly because they uniformly have good ratings and are top sellers, and I’ve done the research to make sure there aren’t any reported compatibility issues. Their comment history in Newegg (which is a great example of a Sales 2.0 business model) is almost uniformly good, with negative comments generally attributable to things like overclocking performance or just a rare bad part. I have no plans to OC anything; just being able to play Blu-Ray movies as well current and future games at medium settings will be delightful after making do with a laptop with a 14″ screen and integrated graphics for two years.

So there it is – a new job and my present to myself.