Are roles in finance cooked for 2025 graduates with nothing lined up?

Please see my earlier post for full context but here is the summary: West Coast Semi-Target c/o 2025 (Dec 2024 grad) with a summer internship at MS/GS/JPM Asset Management (not NYC), tried to switch to S&T but they did not hire anyone (even the S&T interns) full-time in that office. 

I've spent nine months networking hard with hundreds of requests for chats and ended up chatting with maybe about 30% of these people. They all say the same thing: keep networking, you're doing all the right things. I cringe at that statement. I've submitted hundreds of applications just to make it to the final round of only two interview processes, but was ultimately not selected. It's now the end of April and I am freaking out about not having something to say when people ask what's next for me. Not that many of my friends know what they are doing either, but I've always had the internship I wanted, the dream school I wanted to go to, etc. I'm keeping up with my networking efforts and have widened my scope of roles (was set on S&T but have expanded my efforts to almost anything in finance, even CRE) and cities (wanted to be in NYC, now would consider any large West Coast city, Chicago, Boston, DC, maybe even Philly). What do I do now? Are jobs cooked now with all the market uncertainty and constant policy changes? Strongly considering a Master's in Finance/Financial Engineering on the East Coast after a gap year working and skiing in a mountain town like Vail or Park City.  

14 Comments
 
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sorry to tell you but that is just the market the past two years. sounds like you are a smart, hard-working kid so I assume things will work out but it will be difficult right now.

 

Shit happens even to golden boys, deal with it. I hate to break it to you but you have to keep pushing and just applying. It’s cringe but true. The more you try the luckier you get. 

 

Not trying to say I deserve anything here, or don't know what rejection/uncertainty/working hard feels like. I definitely felt that with internship recruiting and faced plenty of denials. But with internships, I always could say, "Well, if nothing lands this summer, there's always next." Now that there is no next summer, it's a lot more daunting. Genuinely just wondering if I'm doing stuff wrong or maybe don't have the credentials and need to go get that master's degree from a school that is more heavily recruited (Fordham, Rutgers, Villanova, Boston College, BU, Columbia, or USC, UCLA if I stay here out west)

 

The only east coast school you listed that would be a target for S&T is Columbia. Don’t waste your money on a Master’s from one of the others. Would say you’d have a decent shot breaking in with a masters in financial engineering/stats/computational finance from CMU, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, MIT, and maybe even NYU.

 

Yeah Corp Fin and Consulting 

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

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