Feel like an underdog and can't seem to break into IB
My family grew up relatively poor in the midwest and for the past however many years I've been trying to break into IB and make a better life for me and my siblings. I worked incredibly hard in high school to get into a top school, eventually landed a t10 (not HYPSW), but haven't been able to land any of the opportunities I've wanted in the last 3 years I've been in college.
I was ranked top of my class in HS, scored a 1590 SAT so I know I have the intellectual horsepower to do well in this job. I've stacked legitimate finance internships across buyside/M&A that I've clawed my way to get without any sort of familial connections, or help from pay to win services (I'm Asian-American and first-gen so very much not willing to shell out 50k for OSG). And while my GPA isn't top of the range, it's well within acceptable bounds.
I ended up striking out of the recruiting clubs on campus freshman year, and so I wasn't able to land an SA in IB sophomore year. While I was fortunate enough to have an RO from a semi-adjacent industry in the midwest, the possible paths to where I hope to be for my career are so far off the mark that I feel as if I'm at a dead end and I don't understand where I went wrong. Multiple offers across lower finance (most non-nyc & non-FO which is where I want to be), 100+ chats with good feedback, strong technical ability, an RO to my role this summer in Chicago, and I can't even seem to land the interviews for the roles I'm hoping for even out of a strong target school.
Full-time recruiting is wrapping up soon and I'm starting to feel like I'm going to be stuck here forever, while all my friends are moving to new york to start to their new lives in banking/pe/hf. I know nobody is owed a spot in ib or finance, but it's just so crushing that even after working and grinding to the bone for the past 3 years, making so many sacrifices across so many parts of my life, building on everything i've done throughout high school, that I have nothing to show for it in the end. I've never worked for anything harder than this and I'm just wondering where did I go wrong in all this.
The second you got into a target school the underdog narrative dies. The narrative becomes you failed to leverage the resources and opportunity arounds you to get a decent career. stop feeling bad for yourself. Realize if ib didnt come after this much effort you need to take the resources at your school and use it to build something more of yourself than doing this wso venting or ego stroke shit.
You've built lots of resilience and taken a very proactive path, so you should ask yourself whether you really want to work in a field where all of this might go completely ignored and where everyone is expected to do the same type of work with little room for differentiation. Beucase I believe you're much better prepared to take harder paths (like entrepreneurship) given the conditioning that comes with this underdog mindset and which a guy who followed a smooth academic path through a top school and then straight into banking might lack.
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