You're a finance associate at a firm where finance is a support function.

The deals originate somewhere else — in the corporate group, in the energy practice, in another office entirely — and your team gets pulled in to paper the debt once the real decisions are made. You're drafting credit agreements and turning intercreditor docs, but you're not in the room when the capital structure gets built. You're executing financings, not architecting them.

Houston is where finance and energy actually run together. Reserve-based lending. Project financings for infrastructure that takes years to build. Acquisition and leveraged financings tied to sponsor deals that originate down the hall. Private credit and data center financing moving faster than almost any other segment of the market right now. This is a market where the finance practice isn't downstream of the deal flow — it is the deal flow.

And that's the difference. At you...