Worries about SA 2024 Background Check
Hi all,
I was fortunate enough to get an SA 2024 IB offer at a large NYC bank a few months ago, and have been stressing about my background check that is coming in the next few months due to how I presented my educational path on my resume. Here is the situation:
Last fall, I transferred from a mid-tier private to an Ivy after 2 years at the other school, but due to a good amount of credits not being accepted and pretty intense distribution requirements of my new school, I'll be spending 3 years there, and hence doing 5 total years of undergrad–I didn't purposefully delay my graduation, I just didn't have a choice if I wanted to transfer to this new school, and I was put into the sophomore cohort of transfer students during advising, orientation, etc. despite having done 2 years of college already. On my resume, however, I only put that I "transferred from school X in 2022" as a single line under my education listing, and not the full dates of my enrollment there, so it isn't clear that I'll be spending 5 years in undegrad from my resume. The point was to emphasize my brand as being mostly from the current school I am attending, since it is significantly more prestigious and has a strong IB pipeline. But I am a bit worried that they will see this as being a form of "deliberate misrepresentation" and pull my offer, even though I didn't put anything that was untrue on my resume, as I did transfer into my current school in fall 2022.
Will I be fucked for not making it clear it is taking me 5 years to finish undergrad on my application? I imagine they'll know once I have to send in the transcript from my old school and see I did 2 years there, and have some questions about that. No one in my interviews asked about it, though I did mention it to a few people I networked with when they wanted to know my backstory and experience transferring–during the interviews, they just wanted to know about stuff from my current school during the behaviorals.
For people who transferred schools and did an SA in IB, did they ask for your transcript from your previous school during the background check? If they don't ask for the transcript from my previous school, I assume I would be fine, since my current school only lists the date of transfer into the school, and classes that transferred in.
Yeah, most probably fucked. Did you put any expected month/year for degree completion on resume? If yes then you’ll be fine, but if not you’re royally fucked and best case, offer pulled but not blacklisted from the bank
Fuck. Yea, I put expected grad as May 2025, which is when I'm formally declared to graduate through the university. The date is listed on my unofficial transcript which I can see online as May 2025, but it doesn't show up on my official transcript (I ordered it once just to see how it would look like).
To be clear though, I didn't list my dates of attendance for my previous school as being 2021-2022 or something like that (which would have been a lie), I just put down "transferred from X school in 2022", which is true.
Here’s what I think, it’s going to be fine for you. I skimmed the post and thought you were gonna graduate in 26. They don’t care about you doing 5 years of college as long as you graduate in time for FT employment. Best thing to do in this case is to reach out to HR and clarify any misunderstanding that can come up in the background screening process.
With that, don’t sweat it too much, apologies for the intense response right there. Good luck
No worries, and thanks for the follow-up. Yeah, I realize that I may not have written this the most clearly in the post–I am set to graduate in 2025, even though I am in my 4th year of college. I fit within their desired graduation date for SA 2024 (Dec 2024-May 2025), so would be able to start full-time on schedule if I got a return offer. As I also said, this was brought up during some networking calls, but I have no clue if they ever brought it up to the people who interviewed me.
Should I reach out to HR now to let them know about this in advance? Or should I just wait until they actually do the background check? Also, if you transferred schools, do they even ask for the previous school's transcript?
You haven't lied at all so I don't see how it's an issue. Pretty sure people who are ill etc or have other circumstances commonly take a year out of college so would graduate in 5 so don't think it's an issue.
Just rerecruit for 2025 SA and get a better bank
You are fine, in fact you applied for the program you were supposed to.
Banks and most internship programs in general care about your graduation date, not when you started college. As long as you are still two summers away from graduation, you're in the right class. There's no way they pull an offer completely over this given the amount of headache that causes for a bank to refill that spot.
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