My Experience Working on Wall Street from 2007

After I graduated high school, I started interning on Wall Street during the Summer of 2007.
Every time I look back at the Great Recession to study market trends, I always find myself back at this starting point.
The Fall of 2007 was probably peak stock market euphoria. I didn't know much about investing yet and had just opened a Scottrade account. Most of my investment knowledge came from studying finance & economics. I had zero real-world experience.
The only reason I even interned for ~$7/hour was because investment banks were making serious profits. My only job was to take notes, grab coffee and make cold calls. Zero investing experience. But I did gain confidence in the market by working alongside traders and bankers.
During any other period, I don't think it would be possible for banks to hire interns without experience. This would only happen during a bull run.
Since I was working with stocks, I had no idea how the mortgage markets were performing. Especially the subprime assets, when New Century Financial filed bankruptcy. By Sept 2007, I think the Federal Reserve cuts the federal funds rate for the first time since 2003. This was one full year ahead of the Lehman collapse.
I worked for six months with zero indication that the market was collapsing. Since internships were important my freshmen year, I contacted dozens of people for more opportunities. Not a single person had any idea of what would happen in 2008.
By March 2008, I remember sitting in class and reading about the Bear Stearns liquidity crisis. At this moment, I was actively swing trading stocks and options, so I had alerts set for market changes.
I vividly remember walking out of class to buy stocks when Bear Stearns' stock was dropping in price. The Bear Stearns crisis happened over the weekend of March 15-16th, 2008. I only knew the details of their problem because I had an allocation for the Visa IPO.
Again, the stock market was at peak euphoria and even Visa's management team, bankers and investors were buying. Visa went on to IPO at $44 per share on March 18th, 2008. This was at the exact moment that that Bear Stearns collapsed and J.P. Morgan made a bid to acquire them. Nothing stopped the momentum of the IPO markets.
Eventually my search for new internships paid off and I worked at Merrill Lynch over the Summer of 2008. Again, everything looked fine and no financial advisors mentioned the possibility of a recession. Even when a few savings and loans banks collapsed and levered mortgage hedge funds were closing shop.
It wasn't until September 2008 did the markets fear a recession because of the Lehman bankruptcy. Then the U.S. government had to bail out American International Group (AIG). Stocks started selling off but the government was backstopping all liquidity problems. It looked like investors were going to ride out the volatility.
I had no clue how bad the capital markets were and continued to invest with my tiny account. Stocks continued to sell off from Sept 2008 to March 2009. The S&P bottomed out at $666 in March 2009. The entire liquidity crisis took 18-24 months to unfold. I had zero idea of the details but I watched closely from the bench.
Of course, 2008 and 2009 were much worse if you worked as a professional. But I always think back of this time period because of how long and short bull vs bear markets tend to be. The tops and bottoms tend to last ~18 months, and are over before you know it.