It was a Sunday night in September.
The email was waiting for me when I checked my phone, past midnight — close enough to Monday that the city had already stopped pretending to be awake. An acceptance letter. Signed off by the CEO of Heristone Partners. A real estate firm, but who cares? Finance is a language, not a family name. My finance background helps everywhere. Well… I guess.
Casablanca. The economic heart of Morocco. One of Africa’s great finance nerve-centers, where the money talks in French, whispers in Darija, and everyone pretends to be in on the joke. Who could have imagined that a finance bro would struggle for an internship here? Well… I did. I struggled. Lord, how I struggled.
The stakes
Let me make something clear, because unless you understand this, you will never understand the fear. In my world, an internship isn’t a career boost — it’s a lifeline. It’s the box you must tick to fulfill the year, the stamp that lets you into the next chapter of your life. Without it, the whole machine grinds to a halt: no validation, no progress, no future. It’s the difference between the student who moves forward and the one who quietly disappears, too ashamed to say why.
Every month had two faces — a beginning and an end — and both of them stared at me. At the start of each month I’d tell myself: this is it, this is the one. By the end, I’d be drowning in silence, refreshing my inbox like a man checking a mirror that refused to show him anything but time passing.
My journey took five months — from April to that Sunday night in September. Five eternities, I’d say. Stressed at the beginning and end of every month, I was trapped in a loop of desperate, hardworking nothingness.
Have you ever tried to imagine a loop? Not the pathetic while loop running in your terminal — no, this one is external to your deep human experience. A while true that never terminates, that chews you up and spits you back at the start, day after day, with nothing to show but your own exhaustion. Have you ever lived a loop? I did. With Sisyphus.
Since April, we were together in hell, condemned by the gods. Side by side, we hauled that heavy stone up the slope — this hardworking nothingness — watched it roll back down, and hauled it again. He had his boulder; I had my applications. Neither of us was getting anywhere. The only difference was that his mountain was made of rock, and mine was made of inboxes that stayed stubbornly, breathtakingly empty.
Wait. Let’s not lose ourselves in Camus. The absurdist would have probably tried to imagine me happy on that boulder. Dear reader, do not even dare to imagine me happy. I have to focus, and detail everything, so that you grasp the heartbreaking, overwhelming chaos and despair it brought to my soul.
I knew from the very start what was awaiting me. So I threw myself into the CFI program — the Corporate Finance Institute — beginning with the FMVA, the Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst certification. I grinded at it with everything I had, hoping it would open the doors. It hadn’t yet, when I got restless. Optimism, you see, is a headstrong thing.
So I made the first of my pilgrimages. I went to CFC — Casablanca Finance City — determined to apply directly to the companies there, door to door. I must admit: this move was very optimistic. Foolishly optimistic. It’s not that easy. Who does their first internship directly at CFC? People with connections. Good connections. And I had none.
I’d barely just gotten on LinkedIn — no posts, no background, nothing to give, no one to impress. I was a ghost in a city of towers. CFC taught me the brutality of the working market for newbies. I walked those glass corridors and marble lobbies, my shirt sticking to my back, my feet burning on the pavements and asphalt under the Casablanca sun — that merciless sun that doesn’t care about your CV — carrying a folder of certifications I hadn’t even finished yet, and being shown the door by guards and receptionists who’d seen a hundred ghosts exactly like me. The sweat on those walks was hot. The lessons were hotter.
They call it a finance city. To me, in that season, it was a fortress.
I tried another road. A friend studying at EMI in Rabat invited me to the EMI-Enterprises forum. I went with a stack of CVs, hope fattening my folder, telling myself this is it, this is the one. I loved the school. I admired the discipline. I appreciated the forum — the engineers, the companies, the buzz of students who seemed to have it all figured out. But nothing came of it. The train home cost me a hundred dirhams, and I sat on it nursing the sour taste of a day that had eaten my time and my money and returned nothing. What a waste. What a beautiful, heartbreaking waste.
So I went back to the model. I finished the FMVA early — and I remember that exam with a special, almost affectionate dread.
Let me tell you about the exam
I had heat that day. Real heat. I was deep into the 3-statement model I had to build — the sacred trinity: income statement, balance sheet, cash flow — when I hit a wall of circularity. The numbers were wrong. Everything was wrong. And I had so little time left.
The working schedule was unrecognizable. The whole model was pale before my eyes. I looked at the cells — and they looked back at me, empty. Empty of figures, empty of meaning. Just a grid of promises I couldn’t keep. If I failed this, I’d have to wait a full month before I could try again. I didn’t have a month to lose. Time was already tight for me, and it was tightening with every second of those three hours that slipped by.
So I stood up. I walked around the apartment. I wasn’t trying to solve the model anymore — I was just trying to calm down, to find my mind again, to breathe. Then I sat back down.
It was so stupid. So simple, it almost hurt.
I hadn’t activated the circularity.
How could there possibly be coherence between the working capital and the financial statements on a CFI model if the circularity on the first page was off? I still don’t know which devil had turned it off — it’s always ON at the start of the exercise. But there it was.
I breathed out. I fixed it. I passed — with 93%. More fear than harm, in the end. I thought: now. Now the doors open.
They didn’t. I pushed harder, applied more, all through the rest of that season. And by the time the calendar turned to its middle — nothing. The inbox stayed silent.
So I said to myself: Go for the BIDA now. The Business Intelligence & Data Analyst certification. Finish it, and get this internship. You’ll be the golden boy of Casablanca’s young financiers. I had notions in there already, so I finished it early. Surely now.
Nope. BIDA didn’t help at all. The loop tightened.
I said: that’s it. I’m building a website. And I did — I built deyirviel.com. Not a résumé — a home. I started projects and posted them there: a CBIZ analysis, an M&A clean room project, models I’d built with my own two hands when no one was watching. Each one was a message in a bottle, thrown into the corporate ocean, saying I can do this — I can actually do this. And I kept sending connection requests to strangers, posting on LinkedIn, telling anyone who would listen that I existed.
And in between, I allowed myself the mercy of escape — I watched the World Cup and let myself forget, for ninety minutes at a time, that my own trophy was still out there, unclaimed.
Then I went back at it. The loop doesn’t rest, and neither did I.
And then the post. An internship at Heristone Partners. My hand shook when I read it.
I applied. Then, through all of that last month, I pushed. I connected. I asked questions. I asked how I could help. I proposed my services across every platform I had — deyirviel.com, LinkedIn, even Upwork — which is insane, if you think about it. A student with no stage, pitching himself to the open market like a freelancer, competing with the world for scraps of attention. But I did it. Because I actually did the work — real work, unsolicited, ashamed of nothing — to win the recruiter’s sympathy. I did everything I could. I poured every drop of that year, that anger, that hope, into it.
In my lost hours, I abandoned myself to chess
Somewhere along the way, I had to admit it: I had lost hope. I didn’t have the strength to build another model. I didn’t have the words for another blog post. I was exhausted — bone-tired, loop-broken, poured out. So I let the 64 squares hold me. I retreated to chess.com, winning a few games to quench a thirst — because since April, I wasn’t winning anything else. I’d been losing for months in every arena that mattered, so I let the board console me.
That last month became the most prolific of my young amateur career. I lost myself in the Grand Chess Tour — a memorable, borrowed pastime — cheering through the clashes of Praggnanandhaa, Sindarov, Caruana, So, and the giants of the modern game.
Pragg’s victory was deeply satisfying. His journey that year was inspiring beyond the world of chess. He, at least, wasn’t stuck in the hardworking nothingness I was drowning in. He was the victor of the Grand Chess Tour — and I was victor of nothing, just an exhausted student without an internship, in a corner of Casablanca, moving pieces on a screen to feel, for one beautiful, borrowed hour, what winning felt like.
But somewhere between the empty cells of that exam and the empty cells of my inbox, something was shifting. The loop was still there. Sisyphus was still hauling. The rock kept rolling back down. Only — I had started to notice the shadow of the mountain, the feel of the sun, the rhythm of my own breathing.
I had stopped being broken by the repetition. I had started to master it.
Then — that Sunday night in September, past midnight, when the week hadn’t even started yet. My phone buzzed.
The email. Acceptance. Heristone Partners.
I read it three times. Then a fourth, because the first three just felt like the loop’s cruelest joke. But it was real — real the way Casablanca’s heat is real, real the way five months of nothing finally become something.
I don’t know if Nietzsche would smile at me now. He asked us to imagine living our lives over and over, in eternal return, and to will it. For five months, I was living a loop I never wanted to revisit — the eternal return without the ecstasy, just the exhaustion. Sisyphus imagine me happy? No. But maybe that’s the point.
Because here is the truth I learned hauling that stone: the loop never ends. The boulder never stays up. The inbox keeps threatening to go silent. But you are not the rock. You are not the mountain. You are not even the gods. You are the one who chooses, every single morning, to walk back down and reach for it again — chafed hands, soaked shirt, empty cells, warm asphalt, all of it — and still say: one more time.
That Sunday night, the loop finally returned something to me.
Heristone Partners. My name at the bottom.
I am still learning to imagine myself happy. But for the first time in five months, I am not afraid to try.
