Advice needed: Bachelor's degree and no work experience

Greetings!

I am currently looking for a summer internship and/or an analyst position for next year, and I'd need a bit of advice concerning what to put on my resume and what to expect from my applications.

I will graduate in June 2016 with a B.Sc. in International Business (major in Finance) from a Dutch university after an exchange semester in Seoul, and I am looking to extend my stay in Asia by working there, preferably in Finance or Banking, before continuing with a Master's degree somewhere else.

The problem is that I did not pay much attention to my GPA in the first two years, and I now expect to graduate with a GPA around 3.0/4. Also, because I was born and lived most of my life in France, I made the mistake to think French and completely underestimate the importance of internships (pretty common there). Consequently, I will graduate at the age of 20 with a bachelor's degree and no prior work experience (except a 2 weeks internship when I was in middle school...). However, I believe I do have some valuable knowledge (Excel, VBA, SQL, Web Development, Languages) and soft skills to offer.

How bad is my situation? Should I give up on Finance and look for a job in another field? What would you recommend concerning my job search? How bad is a resume with no work experience listed after a Bachelor's degree?

Thank you.

 
Best Response

In the UK or USA (and probably most places) you have very little chance of getting anything without internships or networking; all of my classmates who will or have gone into financial graduate internships or jobs all did internships during university, some of whom did several (summer internships, spring insight weeks, winter internships/trainings, etc.)

I also grew up in France before going to the UK for university and I did not expect internships to be so important..

 

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