I'm sure there's been a thousand of these posts, but I'm a college student looking for some advice, any tips are appreciated

So I'm currently a junior undergrad at a non-target school, with an average GPA, 3.5+ and I have a lot of decent extracurriculars, but no internships that would knock your socks off while giving my resume a 10-second scan. (I'll be working at an M&A advisory boutique this summer) I was fortunate enough to go to a pretty decent private high school, so I have a fairly broad network that I've been utilizing over the past few of months to really start pushing hard at the networking piece and I've had a few great informational interviews, but none that have never really turned into any form of long-term relationship outside of a few conversations. By and large the feedback has been that I am going about things "the right way", however for me it feels a little unsatisfactory. At this point I'm kind of at a crossroads; I feel that continuing my current path will continue to yield unsatisfactory results, but I'm unsure where to turn to diversify and distinguish my resume from the pack. So my question is this; as I look forward, my goals are eventually to make it to IB and I feel that at this point, my current situation isn't going to get me there in the cut-throat application environment I'll be facing shortly. I'm wondering what might be some activities would be relevant to my career goals to help me distinguish myself and what might those look like in practice? As one example, I spoke with a small portfolio manager in the town just outside of my college campus and his biggest stressor was on "research" -- I assumed he meant equity research of some kind, and if that were the case, how would I begin.