Day: October 15, 2025

• Wilma Ramony de Souza went from working at a JPMorgan Brazil office to a New York City location.
• Some of the biggest cultural shifts included schedule, clothing, and even lunch habits.
• de Souza said the expectations were higher at the 383 Madison Avenue office.

Neutrals instead of colors. An earlier alarm in the morning. A new coffee habit.

Wilma Ramony de Souza spent 14 years at JPMorgan and switched from the São Paulo branch to a New York City office in 2019 as a vice president. Though de Souza, 37, would often travel to New York during her years working in Brazil, she said the differences in office culture at 383 Madison Avenue still hit her hard when she arrived.

“How do you behave? How do you take calls? How do you talk to people? How do you go to meetings?” de Souza said, remembering how she would observe New York City employees.

She rose through the ranks of the bank during her time there, becoming an executive director by her 30s and eventually relocating to the London office, before deciding to quit last August. Business Insider has verified her employment and roles within the company. JPMorgan declined to comment.

Get in early

During her years in São Paulo, de Souza said she would arrive at the office around 9 am and leave around 6 pm, except on days when she’d be closing deals until the early morning hours. In New York, traders would usually arrive at the office by 7 am, and others would trickle in between 8 and 8:30.

Dress up

Both offices had dress codes, but whenever de Souza traveled to New York, she said her boss would advise her to ditch the usual color for black or gray dresses and slick her hair back in a ponytail.

“Formally dressed every day: trench coat, nice shoes, you always had to dress up,” de Souza said.

de Souza said she remembered wearing an off-white suit one October, only to have someone say there was an unofficial rule not to wear the color after Labor Day — to this day, she’s not sure whether they meant a fashion rule or an office rule, but stopped opting for all white.

New York-style clothing seeped into de Souza’s life before the move, though. She said she bought a Burberry trench coat while she was still an associate in Brazil with her own money, and loved wearing it on trips to the bank’s headquarters.

Lunch isn’t social

In Brazil, everyone took an hourlong break for lunch, de Souza said, but New York employees ate at their desks. They’d get a salad or a sandwich and bring it back to their monitors, eating as they worked.

“I remember my first week in New York, it was around noon, and I was like, ‘Who is going to invite me to lunch?” she said. “After a year or so, I was soaked in and I kind of embraced it, but at first I felt so lonely and thought nobody was going to eat.”

Food itself became another point of contrast — de Souza said people would sometimes be surprised when she brought rice and beans into the office, not knowing the dish is typical of Brazil. When she did buy lunch from the office cafeteria in New York, she said she opted for pre-set salads during her first months in the city because she worried about taking too long to place her order.

de Souza said she started drinking coffee after the move, and lattes in particular, partly because of all the coffee chats.

Time is money

New York felt like “the eye of the storm,” and de Souza said people worked nonstop, had higher standards, and expected more preparation.

“I felt like the intern always spoke five languages and went to an Ivy League school,” de Souza said. “It was like ‘Oh my God, if I breathe too slow I’m losing time.”

Have an executive presence

Beyond dressing and eating differently, de Souza said she also learned to alter her corporate presence, partly because there was a culture of total excellence in New York. With so many talented people in the room, she said she had to figure out how to be even better at her job. She also enrolled in — and appreciated — training courses about everything from her accent to doing business in English throughout her career.

“You learn a lot from being in that environment,” de Souza said of her time in New York. “My boss was like, ‘You need to speak slower, look at people, eye contact, no hand gestures.'”

• After years of club soccer, the pace had worn us all down.
• It had never crossed my mind that we could set limits on what the club asked of us.
• One hard conversation taught us that we still had agency as parents.

At the end of the last soccer season, something had to give. After years of pouring out time and resources into supporting our middle son’s love of soccer, my husband and I decided it was time to quit club sports. We were too tired to keep going with the demanding schedule.

Yet, how would I say goodbye to parents who were now lifelong friends? My 10-year-old also had formed deep bonds with other players, and the idea of starting over at another club was daunting. We’d traveled together, endured games in freezing rain and blazing hot summers. It was a heartwrenching decision, and we agonized over it for months, but what else could we do?

We were surprised by the response my son’s coach gave us

When we approached my son’s coach at the end of last season to say we couldn’t keep up with three weekly practices and a busy tournament schedule, despite our love for his coaching, the club, and the team. He asked us why. I blurted out, “Honestly? We just need more nights free for homework and…life.”

What surprised me most was his response. Instead of a dismissal or saying, “It was nice knowing you,” he said, “Okay, I can work with that. We want your son on our team. Let’s figure out something that works for all of us.”

“Oh,” I said, stunned and expecting some caveats. But there were none. He wanted our child to continue, even if we could only make it to two out of three mandatory practices a week. In that moment, all the stress I’d built up evaporated.

In a world where people always seem to want more than I can give, our coach’s response was life-giving. It reminded me that I still had agency as a parent — something I’d started to forfeit with the ever-increasing pull on my time and energy.

Would another coach have agreed? Maybe not. However, because we were honest about our situation and the pressures on our family, he was willing to meet us halfway.

I got my agency back as a parent

It occurred to me afterward that my husband and I had more control over our family life than we’d realized. It may sound silly — we, after all, are the parents. Yet, in an effort to give our kids everything we think they want, we’d lost sight of what we, as a family, actually needed.

It often can feel like being involved in the culture of youth sports demands your life, your liberty, and, at the very least, all of your free time as a family. I’m not judging families who choose that pace. For some kids, an every-night schedule and constant tournaments are a perfect fit. But until that chat last season, we hadn’t taken a family pulse and asked what we wanted our lives to look like—time-wise. When we did, it made all the difference.

We discovered that despite the pull of school, homework, sports, and music lessons, we could take control of our story. We could choose how we wanted this chapter in our lives to play out.

Because of one conversation, our family is happier

Now, two months into the season, my child isn’t dreading practice — he’s excited to go, and so am I. He also has time to play the piano, eat dinner with us a few nights a week, and run around in the backyard with his siblings — the way I did when I was a kid.

My guess is that most coaches want what’s best for families. Ours certainly did. But we wouldn’t have discovered that had we not simply asked. And by skipping a practice, we got back something even better — not only time with our son, but also our agency as parents.