Senior Summer vibes

As I'm writing this post, I'm eating my cold lame self-cooked breakfast of two slices of plain bread and eggs. It's been a few weeks since my internship at a HF begun and it hits me hard after the weekdays that I'm in a non-investment role deep in BO for my final internship before graduating. This is not an unfamiliar feeling to me; the last year has been a never-ending series of me waking up every day, going "fuck me I'm going to be unemployed", then stress applying for 15 roles and reaching out to 10 people across finance online. 

Of course, nothing comes from those applications and chats. Why should it? I'm a digital beggar, asking online for corporate handouts in a roundabout way. I look to my friends but most of them are in the tech sector where hiring timelines are loose and short, and the opportunities to shoot for the stars and land on a cloud are plentiful. Just create a kick-ass project (or contribute to one), apply early and often across private industry, and any job you get will be relatively intellectually challenging and well-paying with good exit ops. Meanwhile, I don't have any skills or experiences that differentiate me - no one entering this industry does. Anyone can highlight a time they pitched a stock, ran a DCF, analyzed some kind of deal such as a merger, or interacted with financial statements/markets in a professional setting. The only differentiator is being mature enough as a freshman to have your priorities straight and dedicate your life for the next few months to being in a high finance pipeline (or just go to a target, I heard that works too). I was a naive kid that played too much League of Legends, so I thought big4 audit was going to be an interesting and high upside path.

I mentally toss and turn thinking about the above for the 50th time this month like a broken record as I fire off more outreach messages and applications, and slot in some time later in the afternoon for more IB-style prep and consulting case rehearsals, because maybe that MBB application I sent in 3 weeks ago will finally turn up. In fact, I haven't been scheduled for an interview since the beginning of Winter, so my preparation only serves as a coping mechanism.

Finally, evening arrives. This is the first time I'm living away from my parents for an extended period of time so the basic motions of the day such as cooking, groceries and laundry have me depleted as I get ready to sleep. I get a tinge of satisfaction as I think about ways I've opened up more opportunities to get "lucky" for fulltime recruiting, smartly increasing the expectations side of [reality - expectations = happiness] to prepare me for another blow next morning.

Anyways, time to get some more reps in of performative finance grinding. I've only got a few months until I graduate and need to find a new way to cope.