Do you wish you took more time in college?
where are my 5th years at?
benefits/drawbacks?
- you can intern for another summer
- essentially gain another non related degree from finance
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Nothing but drawbacks if you're independent paying for your own education and living expenses. Living off mommy and daddy, full send..be the next Van Wilder (some of you may be too young for that reference)
Agreed. My fin aid package is pretty good, so I pay roughly 15k/year (loans and all fees inclusive), and I couldn't imagine letting myself spend another year putting my net worth in the red. Maybe I'm just too obsessed with money, but this gets worse considering I'd also be giving up (250k?) of income later in my life by just throwing away a year, and I have some fairly urgent needs for money.
If my situation were different, and I had my parents bankrolling my life with their gold amex, living it up at a fun school where I didn't have to try TOO hard (Duke, Brown maybe) sounds pretty amazing. Then again, it'd get boring pretty quick being stuck on campus (especially if it's more rural) while your main group of friends has left and is at leasting seemingly having fun in the city.
Have seen students from my school take an extra semester or 5th year in order to get a better internship or second chance at recruiting. If money wasn't an issue, I'd encourage a lot of students to do the same.
I took a gap year before my sophomore year and worked in private equity. Definitely helped me get my next summer internship in IB then a BB internship junior year - in interviews I could talk about my experience and had a compelling answer for why I wanted to do the job (although I had to spin why IB and not PE). Also, interviewers took it surprisingly easy on me with technical questions, which I assumed was because they assumed I already knew the basics. My interviews were less “walk me through a DCF” and more “tell me about your deal experience.” On another note, working in the industry for a full year is a great test run to decide if it’s really for you. I came out of it knowing that’s what I wanted to do, but the gap year would have been just as useful if I decided I didn’t like the hours, or finance in general, and saved myself from entering a career I would hate - and still had the resume boost I wanted.
I was at one of HYP so that certainly helped getting the BB job, but my GPA wasn’t great, so my PE experience was the differentiator I needed. I can’t stress this enough though, make sure you have a damn good story for why you took the gap year. You don’t want to come off lazy, or even worse raise questions about whether you were suspended for plagiarism or something. Need to have a good story prepared. But if you do that, and you already have a finance opportunity lined up for the year off, it can definitely be advantageous.
>make sure you have a damn good story for why you took the gap year. You don't want to come off lazy, or even worse raise questions about whether you were suspended for plagiarism or something. Need to have a good story prepared
When you say this, what is the story for and who is raising the questions? Curious because I actually took an extra sem during undergrad and the topic has never come up really, beyond just telling my friends I was doing an extra sem for recruiting.
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