What is my best course of action to break into investment banking?-A Community College student

Hi everyone, I hope you all are having a great start to your weekend. I am currently a freshman in my second semester attending a community college in California. 

My current GPA is 3.56 and I will be applying to schools for transfer this fall for the start of my junior semester which begins fall of 2024. I have been doing extensive research as I know I am at a disadvantage so I have been vigorously studying financial models using excel, learning lingo, reading financial statements, and coming to my own conclusion regarding what I would do if I was an investment banker.  

From my research, there are not a lot of people like me in the investment banking world. I'm Posting this as a shot in the dark and hoping someone out there who came from a JUCO, transferred to a (non)- target school, and made it in investment banking has some words of advice or direction. I actually love this field and I'm not drawn toward it for the money, I will do whatever is necessary to give myself the best shot possible. Any advice for me would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

4 Comments
 

people went to jucos if you read posts on here. try to get your gpa up to a 3.7 and try to get into any target school. I don't think you need to be doing all that finance stuff right now. just get into a good school and take their finance classes, once you start networking do the technical prep. That is what I would do. you do not need to tell the banks you went to a juco (unless you want to) if you're getting finance degree at a decent/good school

 

I did it and another guy I work with did it as well. You need to network your ass off bc you can’t wait until you’re at your 4 year to get the ball rolling— SA recruiting will already be done. You’re going to have a big question mark hanging over you bc of your nontraditional background. You need to do everything you can to give ppl something they can use to get comfortable with you i.e. a stellar GPA and/or SAT/ACT scores. I had a 4.0 in CC and went to a target where I performed extremely well again, my colleague had the same (we bonded over our CC path).

 

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