Tips for breaking as a freshman

You can search through lots of other posts on this website throughout the years that will help you out. But here’s what I would focus on as a freshman:

1. Start to understand your schools recruiting landscape. Semi targets dont all have the same opportunities. Does your school have good placements into Boston consulting offices, but strike out in NY finance? Or is the opposite true? What firms interview on campus? This may influence what industry you focus on if you dont have a strong personal preference. 
2. Join the best business clubs you can. This will help with all bullets above and below as well because you will get access to older students who can give you school specific advice. Look for investment teams or consulting clubs that require interviews to get in. These can be a huge huge help.
3. Sort out what you’re going to study. As a freshman you can still switch or add majors without delaying your education. What majors get offers from your school? Maybe its only finance people, or maybe its people with multiple majors / degrees. At a target you can get away with studying anything. This is not true for semi targets in my experience. At my semi target, finance students were the only ‘targets’ for banks (everyone else was essentially a semi or non target), while consulting looked at engineers, business students, and honors students, and seem to have a higher preference for dual-degree students.
4. Find something, anything, for the summer. Freshman summer is weird because no one wants to take a freshman intern, but sophomore internships and onwards like to see that you have some experience as a freshman. I’d try to find something for during the year or during the summer - unpaid, through family connections, BS work, whatever. Just to get something on paper. This isn’t critical but it helps.
5. Fill out your resume. Again, freshman year is a weird time because no one wants to see a resume with blank space, and no one wants to see high school experience on your resume. So if you’re applying to something you need to have a resume filled out, but you haven’t had time to get real experience. Join a couple clubs with light responsibilities just so you can get something down on paper. As you go through college I recommend dropping this approach and focusing on getting seriously involved in 1-2 extra curriculars. But I don’t think that’s the right way to go as a freshman.
6. Don’t start with hard classes. This one is more of a personal recommendation but I find that people who start college with a bad grade or two have a hard time recovering. Getting bad grades later in college doesn’t hurt as much because you may already have a job, or at least experiences that make you stand out beyond your grades. As a freshman you are highly dependent on your GPA so don’t try to prove something to yourself by taking hard classes early on.

Yes, you are okay being at a semi target. Some of what people call ‘semi targets’ are really just targets, but the bar to get interviews is higher and you might not have access to every firm. That’s how my school was. Others may be a more uphill battle, but send a couple people every year to top jobs and a ton of people to jobs right below the top caliber of firms. You’ll get a feel for this as you go on.