Initially there was some resistance when I said I was leaving. I was told that because I had a contract, I had to stay in North Carolina for at least a year. I told them, "I've lost all motivation to work for you.

They were pretty flexible. After a successful year I spent time working in asset management, they needed some help in acquisitions so they asked if I could spend the balance of my year in acquisitions because I had completed almost all of my goals for the year ahead of time.

I did go through HR. Of course, once you get to that point, naturally, they take a defensive role. Immediately it was taken as a racial issue. But I didn't say it was a racial issue. I didn't bring in race at all.

Part of my responsibility was to hire people to manage some of our assets, so I would get bids from various companies. However, the division manager wanted to get involved in the process and to give business to some of his associates and friends.

It was expected for me to do some recruiting for MBAs of color. Early on I got credit for doing it and I put it on my evaluation. It was something that I enjoyed doing, so I never bothered to try to explain that I was really working on some of these things.

The company did have a mentorship program. I met up with someone and had lunch a couple of times and it was somewhat helpful. It wasn't really a genuine mentorship; it was just something the company put together and people were just going through the motions.

I try to stay away from the office politics, but you need to promote yourself internally. Not just to your boss, but to your boss's boss. I was disadvantaged because I come from a military background, where you never really try to interact with senior personnel because you don't want to do or say anything that might cut your boss.

I was pretty involved in recruiting and I would spend some time with senior people and hear their thoughts about recruits; it was fascinating to me. A lot of the time performance or background was never an issue.

I had made a huge sacrifice. They were looking for someone to relocate from New York to North Carolina. I volunteered to do that and was told that I could be compensated accordingly. But not only was

When I told my boss that I was upset with my bonus, he said, "This year I wasn't involved in the bonus process. Some of the senior people decided that they were going to give out bonuses based on thei