Graduating late for IB

Hey everyone, I have a question regarding graduating late.

Some background: I am a junior at a semi-target expected to graduate in May 2017 pursuing a career in IB. I have solid internship experience and currently have a ~3.6 GPA. However, I have not gotten an IB SA offer yet. This is because I had a bad GPA during the fall when nearly all IB firms came to campus for interviews. I decided not to apply to any of them in order to not ding myself for FT recruiting. Instead, I retook a class I did poorly in, got all As, and took on a PE internship. Now I am trying to apply to boutiques, but many places are full and its not looking great.

I was considering graduating one semester late in order to extend my recruiting timeline. I would complete a Finance minor during this semester.

Would BBs and EBs view this negatively? I transferred and switched my major, if that helps at all.

Thanks in advance.

14 Comments
 
Best Response

This is a pretty controversial debate on WSO, but I delayed my graduation for IB and now have my second IB SA gig coming up this summer. I would recommend it if you're willing to network like hell.

 

Well, I'm a non target so I didn't have the luxury of OCR. Networking should still be a top priority for you. Just because you don't want to delay your graduation and end up with no internship.

 

As far as I know this is a non-issue because they have no way of knowing how many years it took you to finish. I believe all they care about is your graduation date (ie. if you graduate Dec. '17 or May '18 you do your SA summer '17).

 

I don't believe so, but I don't want to promise anything. As for the transcripts, that will be after the offer is made and they won't take away the offer because you delayed a semester.

If it does come up, though, it is very easy to say that when you transferred and switched majors it caused you to lose some of the progress you made at the previous university.

 

Just to clarify, the reason that I would delay my graduation one semester would be in order to have one extra SA summer. So I would intern this summer (2016) somewhere then apply for SA positions again next fall for summer 2017.

I am class of 2017. If I graduate in December, I will still be class of 2017. I need to be class of 2018 or graduating in December 2017 in order to be a summer analyst summer 2017.

 

Regarding transcripts, it's pretty standard for OCR applications to include transcript (and I am pretty sure online ones too) so it's definitely something that people can look at when they screen resumes for interview. TBH, I don't think anyone look into them with any great details (or look into them at all) so I wouldn't worry about it, but there's definitely a way for banks to know you will be graduating late if they look hard enough.

 

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