Cold Email Alumni for Summer 2024 or Something Else?

Hi all, 

I'm a sophomore at a top target (HYP) with a strong GPA (3.9+) in economics and a STEM field. I don't have any background in finance. I'm also not a diversity candidate. Until recently, I'd been planning on doing academic/research work this summer, but as so many of my peers began recruiting IB around me, I figured I should maybe give it a try too. Obviously, this renders me quite far behind (but hopefully, from what I've seen on WSO, not insurmountably so). My current plan is to simultaneously try the following:

1.) Obtain a summer internship for 2024. Like I said, I had been planning on doing research work. I still could certainly do this if nothing pans out. However, it seems quite important for the 2025 SA cycle to have some sort of finance experience, and so I am hoping to get a boutique IB/PE internship to at least list on my resume. I could use some guidance on the best way to go about this. Naturally, my school has a pretty extensive alumni network, so my current plan is to create a list of boutique IB/PE firms that past freshmen/sophomores have interned at (none of the BB/EB/MM ones obviously) and cold-email alumni that I find on LinkedIn to ask directly for an internship. But is this really the best strategy? Despite what a lot of people seem to think, our campus career center is not very helpful and there are really no active 2024 postings on our school portal. Is there another way to go about this? I'm also open to recommendations of firms that you think are suitable given my profile.

2.) Obtain a summer internship for 2025. The idea is to quickly secure the 2024 internship (by mid-late February) to include on my 2025 SA application. In the meantime, I will attend info sessions (lots of them happening in coming weeks), reach out to alumni at banks and ask to chat, and study technicals (from scratch essentially). All said and done, hopefully I can be ready to submit and complete HireVues by early March at the latest, when I believe most banks should still be hiring. I will then do further technical/behavioral prep conditional on any interviews I do or do not receive.

Obviously, I am very new to this whole process. I just want to get an idea of whether this makes sense before I spend hours on it each day. For what it's worth, I will probably try to recruit consulting and potentially quant depending how this all goes and my course load next year. I appreciate any advice or feedback (feel free to roast me if any of this is delusional or overly optimistic). Cheers and best of luck to you all.