How do you deal with feeling ashamed?

I'm a junior now, and I've given up on recruiting. I haven't sent an application for an internship in months, and haven't had a coffee chat in weeks. I'm completely exhausted at this point and I've fully accepted that I'm just not good enough.

I'll admit that 99 percent of my failure is on me. I didn't know about the IB or S&T until my sophomore spring, didn't know what or how to network, have no connections and didn't really know what I wanted to do post-grad. I have a 3.9 GPA but at my school it's incredibly easy to attain that GPA. I go to an extreme non-target(Outside of the top 400 in rankings that matter) and I just never really felt close to getting in.

I lowered my standards time and time again, from pursuing S&T, to appling to PWM, then to Operations, then Accounting, Corp Fin, Corp Dev, Business Dev, Operations, even searchfunds and unpaid internships. Never got anything except an auto-generated rejection email or ghosted. I feel hestiant for applying to MSF because  full time recruiting is even more brutal than undergrad. 

I feel incredibly ashamed. I wish I had given up on my dreams earlier and switched to nursing or pa school. 

18 Comments
 

Shame is something that is learned behaviour. Very common if you come from striver communities like myself.

You have to unlearn the behaviours. It has nothing to do with your current situation. I felt like this despite maybe having better stats and getting a FT offer, there probably some bozo with thats a VP in PE still feeling like this its all relative.

Realise you are a literal bug in this world, it doesn't matter.  Its all in your head and once you learn how to manage your mind you will be much happier. (Maybe read the Chimp Paradox by Steven Peters). Learn to be happy with yourself and then strive coming from a place of strength and hunger not insecurity.

Some favourite quotes:

“I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. That’s how I handle stress.” - Trump

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun." -Alan Watts

 
Most Helpful

If you give up and start moping about how sorry you feel for yourself, then you’re totally fucked and no one can help you. But if instead you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and go 100x harder, then you can do anything you set your mind to. It’s all in your head and it’s all about how bad you want something / how hard you’re willing to work There are no rules in this world and there are no single paths, despite what people might erroneously tell you on this forum. I’ve seen very curvy non traditional paths for guys who ended up as IB MDs at GS. I’ve seen 40yr olds go to community college and then transfer to top universities and land top jobs, transforming their lives. It’s never too late. If you’re feeling burnt out then rest. The path is hard no matter where you go to university, so I would also recommend making it easier for yourself: apply to a masters program at a target university and then recruit once you’re enrolled. If you have a great GPA, that will be helpful, but you’ll probably also need a great GRE or GMAT, so focus on making that happen. In the meantime, think hard about what you want to do, make a plan for how you’re going to do it, and learn everything you can about your field of interest in your spare time. There’s no shortage of how to guides online. You can absolutely do it if it’s truly what you want.

 

nursing? come on. that is fear talking, not logic.
​you didn't fail because you are broken. you failed because you spiraled.
when you lowered your standards to "anything", you started smelling like desperation. the market hates desperation. it ignores it.
​shame is a waste of capital. burn it.
​take the msf. treat it as a hard reset.
but this time, do not beg for scraps. aim high.
confidence is currency. desperation is repellent.
​get back in the fight

 

Throwaway account so ignore title.

Man up if you are smart and capable there are tier 1 jobs available out there. Work hard send some display of it out there through warm or cold connects. If the work is value add you can get interviews anywhere and I really mean everywhere. Multiple cold email value added work I’ve done and sent to 100m+ net worth individuals and gotten interviews/jobs/internships. It’s all possible but definitely not for someone like you who is busy complaining and acting entitled instead of just being useful to someone.

 

Speaking from personal experience, I didn’t start recruiting until junior year and didn’t get my SA offer until April, a little more than month before my internship began. You gotta be able to keep your head up and not feel sorry for yourself. Getting in that headspace will leave you in the same position you are already in.

 

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