Institutional Sales to Investment Banking?

Hi everyone, 

Hope everyone's having a great time. I've been feeling extremely lost with my career and would like some helpful advice. I've recently accepted a summer analyst role with a huge firm (Top 10 AUM in the world) on their institutional sales team. Although its a great firm and its a decent gig, I still do not feel as satisfied and happy since I was gunning for IB. Obviously I was too late in the game but ended up getting superdays at UBS, Jeff, FT Partners and got boned by them since I was extremely underprepared. Ended up getting interviews at other firms, got rejected, got offers and ended up taking the institutional sales one. 

A bit of background on me: Non target / semi - target studying finance & real estate. 3.6 GPA, decent involvement in campus. International student too with previous internships at hedge funds, PE fund of fund groups, and a tech VC firm. I was initially aiming for an internship in REPE, got final round interviews but either did terribly on them or the firm does not sponsor international students. 

I'm considering the following options: 

- Do the MSF at Vanderbilt and hope like hell I make it to IB from there. Odds are definitely better but still not great. Potential to have a chance for summer analyst roles if I time things right but the odds of that too are slim to none

- Recruit / network for full time IB analyst roles with terrible odds; pump up GPA, network extensively etc etc 

What do you guys think I should do? My school rn is decent but not the best and banks dont come for OCR. (maybe keybank, stifel and ive seen citi but that's pretty much it and all dont sponsor intl students). I haven't this lost in a long time and would appreciate any help. Any other routes would be sincerely appreciated as well (just not limited to the 2 mentioned above). I was considering taking the SIE exams that do not need sponsorship so that it looks decent on my resume and I'm focused on IB

ANY HELP WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED!!! THANK YOU

1 Comments
 

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