Recent grad looking to get into ER seeking advice

Hi all,

I graduated with my masters and bachelors in finance last year with a mediocre GPA and passed the CFA level 1. I had a job working at a large FinTech firm for the past year but recently got laid off. I have always been interested in ER and wanted to break in, but didn't have the grades or experience to do so. Now that I'm looking for a full-time job again, I was looking for some advice on how to land entry level ER roles.

I know a lot of this has been posted, but I wanted to know if applying on online job portals was worth taking the time to do in tandem with networking with people in ER. I also wanted to ask what are some of the places I should be looking at? I have a large list of big firms, but those are probably extremely competitive positions and think I should be applying to more boutique and ER-specific firms. Is my current plan OK? It feels like it might take me forever to land an entry level ER associate position...

I have financial modeling knowledge and am thinking about writing 1-2 ER reports myself so that I can talk about them during interviews and be able to ask the right questions/say the right answers. I guess i'm mainly just extremely anxious after having recently lost a job and am trying to break into an extremely competitive industry. Any tips on how to go about networking and applying to entry level ER roles would be greatly appreciated!

1) should i just go for an accounting role and continue studying for my CFA and hope to eventually break in? 2) should i also take the GMAT so that I have a solid backup for business school in the future? 3) should I just try to break into entry level associate roles now and skip looking for accounting roles to start off at? Even though this may take me significantly more time?

Thank you all for the great advice on this forum. Hope you're all staying safe.

My best.