Lost.

Hello WSO,

Here is a bit of context behind my post. I am a sophomore at a non-target doing a double major in Finance and Accounting. I first discovered banking at the start of my sophomore year and have since spent countless hours preparing for recruiting/recruiting and have seen almost no progress. Recently, I haven't had the same spark I originally did when discovering banking and am lost on what I should do. I haven't had a ton of time to explore other opportunities (Big 4, CorpFin, Fixed Income Trading, etc) that might interest me. Recruiting has also taken a big toll on my mental health and feels like it is eating away at my college experience.

Here is some context on my recruiting for banking. It feels like I look good on paper for any job except banking. I have a near perfect GPA, am VP of a club (will be President next year), am involved in 3 business/finance related clubs, am a finance tutor and have a CorpFin internship lined up at a major industrial company in my home city. The only problem is my late discovery of banking hasn’t allowed me enough time to gain more relevant experience/exposure to investment banking. Despite this, I feel like I am technically prepared and have had countless conversations with bankers both in person and on the phone. I even flew to NYC for a few days and did some networking. It is important to note that these conversations weren’t just for “checking a box” nor do I think my attitude made it sound that way. I felt like these were genuine conversations were I wanted to get to know about the person/their job, some lasting over an hour.

There are really three options I am considering but any advice or insight would be greatly appreciated.
- Continue my quest to get into banking and networking/recruiting so I can set myself up for success later down the road.
- Try and find a corpfin/corp dev job in my hometown.
- Try for Big 4 recruiting (I know a lot of places are recruiting right now).

My main concern is that if I don’t do banking out of undergrad I am setting myself up for failure long term.

Once again, I appreciate any insight that can be given.