Considering Quitting IB SA Recruiting Process & Switching to Starting a Marketing Agency

Hi Everyone, 

I am a sophomore non-target in the SA recruiting process for Summer 2024. I am just in need of a bit of advice. Back in high school, I was interested in entrepreneurship, so much so that I started a small company and had some success with it after a few months before closing it down, I had two $3k monthly retainers and one $1k for a few months in a row. At a point, I even considered not attending college and pursuing entrepreneurship full-time. However, I finally decided to go to college and told myself if I was going to go, I would do it the right way and get a great GPA and get the best business job I can out of college to set up my career, which in my eyes was IB. 

These past two years I've found some success. I have a 3.82 GPA, had a search fund internship last summer, and have an incoming boutique IB internship for this incoming summer lined up. But after going through the networking process and learning the technicals, I recognize how dissatisfied I am with finance and IB in particular. I caught myself after every networking call saying to myself "that guy sounds exhausted, I just don't know if this type of work will be worth it for me no matter how much I'm paid, I hate this". I always felt like my friends also recruiting for IB were at least somewhat passionate about it, maybe they really enjoyed day trading or were very interested in the valuation side of things, but for me, there's no passion. I just can't see my life going down this path, I feel like the type of work I'm doing is very important to me, and if I'm just blindly doing pitch books and staring at excel all day to later get into private equity, what's the point no matter the money I'm paid. I feel as though I am just pursuing what I thought would get me approval or what I thought society would deem successful, but it's just making me very dissatisfied. 

Very important note: I will say for the junior recruiting process, in particular, I've struggled in certain senses. I'm continuing to grind hard, but I found I memorized a bit too much for technicals and have a true lack of understanding, which has cost me with the initial 3 first round interviewers I've had thus far, 2 going just okay, and my first going pretty poorly. I hope I'm not trying to quit the whole IB process the minute things don't go my way out of almost a fear of failure mechanism. But maybe having this realization that I shouldn't run away from my problems means that this isn't the case, I genuinely cannot tell at the moment. 

I understand I'm speaking to risk-averse people that may not want to pursue entrepreneurship for themselves, but I'm wondering what I should do. In an ideal world, I would love to be able to just go all in on starting a marketing agency online while finishing my degree and have that be my full-time gig out of college, and just this whole recruiting process end entirely. But I understand the recruiting process ends towards the end of summer, and it may be silly for me to stop all this work over the past 2 years and see where this goes through the summer. I just don't want to keep studying technicals or going on another interview any longer, it's just making me miserable, there's zero excitement I had for my future that I used to have with entrepreneurship.

Thank you for everyone's time.