In desperate need of Career advice. PLEASE!!
Hello everyone, I have been reading WSO forums for about a year and they have been very helpful. This is my first post and I hope to get a response. I am currently a Junior at Baruch college in NYC. I have not been able to secure an IB internship for the summer. I am starting to freak out because on this site it gives the general feel of "SA internship in junior year or your shit". Why have I failed to secure an internship? It is most likely my shitty gpa.
Background info: I am the son of two immigrant parents who could not afford to send me to college. Fortunately, I received a sports scholarship to a no name school in Vermont. I attended that school for two years before realizing I would need to transfer if I wanted to pursue IB. So I transferred to baruch(low tuition). I basically screwed up my first year at this school because my head wasn't right( parents divorced, best friend since 8yo died).. I am not looking for pity, just explaining my situation. Anyway now in my Junior year, my cum gpa is a mere 2.7 but my Business school/major gpa should be a 3.7 after this semester. I had an internship at a real estate firm last summer(minimal finance experience) but besides that I do not have any internships/experience. I have been reaching out to alum on Linkedin and trying my best to network. I have applied to every online app through "career center, craigslist, indeed, etc". I am also starting to cold email boutique banks. My questions are: Is it too late? Am I being too hopeful/ naive thinking I will get a summer internship by cold emailing? What are my options? Should I forget about IB, if so, what direction should I pursue in my situation? Do I still have a chance in the finance world? I want to be able to secure a job with the opportunities and pay similar to IB. Once again, I am not looking for pity and I am deff not looking to be trolled because of my grammar/spelling lol. I wrote this on the way to class.
Please I am looking for any genuine advice Thanks so much
You took extremely long to figure out that you were screwing up and as a result a lot of the damage will be very hard to undo.
My advice would be to start from the ground up, try as hard as possible for boutique IB via cold calling.
But it might be smart to pick the low hanging fruit and start out in PWM as most do and spin your experience from there.
Aside from that Big 4 and boutique accounting firms both tend to recruit undergrads with less finance experience than banks do, the absolute best case scenario would be to join a valuations or consulting team at any accounting firm you can possibly get into and grind upwards and on wards from there.
Possible progressions could look like this:
Good luck, you're going to need to grind hard, but you can still salvage the situation with some luck and a good work ethic.
Thank you so much, this was exactly the advice I was looking for. I really appreciate you creating the possible progression outlines. I am going to continue cold emailing boutiques. How should I go about applying for consulting or valuations in the big 4?
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