Cornered - What to do?
Occasional lurker looking for some honest advice. I'm a senior student at a non-target California state school with no work experience of any kind, and no internships. I'm a first gen college student from a very impoverished family for what its worth. My GPA is currently in the 3.5 - 3.7 range. I have no idea what to do, and to be quite honest my school doesn't offer anything of value in regards to career counseling.
My goal was to graduate, become an equity research analyst, work work work, and hopefully one day become a portfolio manager. I realized that I am way behind the competition at this point and I'm just wondering if it's too late to proceed with a career in finance. I don't have a resume due to the fact that I have nothing relevant to put on it whatsoever. All these issues are heavily weighing on my mental and it leads to daily anxiety.
Any advice would greatly be appreciated, thanks for your time.
Realistically speaking, at this point I think you should either set your sights a bit lower or consider going for a Msc, although I suspect this isn't viable due to your financial situation. Equity research is currently being screwed by MiFID so vacancies will be more sparse and analyst/intern spots will be much more difficult to get into. I would suggest that you start networking extremely hard and try to get an internship or entry level gig in a BO/MO department at a bank and also try the Big 4 firms or credit rating agencies.
These may not be your dream jobs but if you can manage to snag one, you will have a living wage that you can use to support yourself and you can start building up your resume. Then after 1-2 years you can try moving over to a more desirable role directly or see if you can get into a good MBA program.
There's a lot of advice that could be given to you and I'm sure that others here will do that. But, whatever you do, change this first: your attitude.
Your attitude towards the whole situation just plain stinks. You are only "behind" or "cornered" :eyeroll: if you see yourself as being behind. Don't be a malcontent - there's probably plenty of good things around you, you're just choosing to not see them. There is no way this attitude will help you in any job search, in finance or otherwise.
If you don't have work experience, try to spin some of your more relevant projects, group exercises, etc. from school and use that to fill out your resume. Also this is why I mentioned the networking aspect. If you can get in front of some people and explain to them that you're coming from a rough situation and maybe this has prevented you from getting the standard amount of experience under your belt, then you stand a better chance of landing an internship or FT role.
I guarantee your school's career center has some type of financial job/internship you can get and grind into something meaningful
No one is going to give you anything, you need to "work work work" as you put it. Working doesn't start once you have a job