My Journey Into Equity Research.....

Here is my current journey and how I am trying to get into equity research. This is my story, and I hope to give peace of mind to others. We are all going through the same thing and ultimately may be an outlet to share your stories as well.

My College/Internship Experience
So let's begin... I did not go to a target school and found myself at Ohio University, triple majoring in Finance, Business Analytics, and MIS because of my lackluster grades in High School. Freshman year hit, and I wanted to join one of our investing groups on campus and apparently interviewed the best of anyone. Still, because I mentioned I met the VP at one of the bars, it didn't matter what I said or did they thought it was an unprofessional, dumb mistake. But, hey, I was a freshman. I wasn't going to let it stop me, so I applied to 50+ banks and got nothing. Then Covid came around, and my school was online my sophomore year, so I didn't consider joining a group, but this time applied for almost 100 different roles; still, nothing worth noting; none were local. I was trying to shoot for Wall St being naive at the time. Then Junior year, we are back on campus. What do you know? No group wants to let Juniors in because if you don't get placed into a bank, it reflects on their numbers, LOL. During this time, I got very big into NFT Trading/Research well before the herd. While doing some DD, I stumbled upon a small project called Bored Ape Yacht Club. While quite small, I took a chance at it. It really did become the next big thing.
Through this, I grew a decent Twitter presence with around 6K followers, and I was fed up with the whole process of applying for internships and just sent out a tweet saying I was looking for an internship and was wondering if any Apes had any jobs in IB, Trading, etc. The tweet blew up, and I secured my first internship as a Analytics Engineer at a small PE/VC principals firm. Work wasn't finance-related, and they needed help creating some sheets for their diligence process. The internship lasted until I finished the project because they weren't up and running yet. My second experience was at a small Asset Management firm where I got my first hand in Research and was hired as a Crypto Currency Researcher. The internship went well, and I ended up getting a full-time offer. Senior year rolled around, we were acquired, and they let me go before it even started.

The Mistake
I always had a love for trading, and after being let go, I kind of evaluated what I could do with the majors and the things I studied in college, and overall, I thought Quant Trading was the place to be. To be brief, I interviewed at prominent places like Optiver and Akuna getting quite far, but I needed to be faster, or my stats skills needed to be better. (Never took a stats class in my life). Then I started to re-evaluate the other options in the field, and in short, I don't love calculus like that.

The Current
I've fallen back to research, hoping to push my way through, but only a few people are hiring, and getting a LinkedIn interview is almost impossible. At this point, I've put out Hundreds of applications on LinkedIn and gotten about 1 interview. Overall, online applications kind of seem like a waste of time because it's rather time-consuming, and I don't even get a rejection letter, So I've resorted to the old way of cold calling. Im not restricting myself to work in just Chicago, or New York I will work anywhere. Cold calling has worked in my favor in getting me to talk to people, but many places aren't hiring or looking for entry-level, or if they are looking for entry-level, they magically want two years of experience. I've really tasked myself to up my experience and have been covering and modeling every AI stock.

The Future of This Post
I plan to give frequent updates and post changes as time goes on. Stay tuned would love to hear anyone else's struggles. Tip's, Advice, Etc.
Also, feel free to add me on LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-a-baker/