What was the earliest that recruiters/banks started reaching out to you?

Bloomberg reached out to us about a story:

We're working on a story about how the recruitment timeline for entry-level analysts and interns at Wall Street banks are accelerating -- we've heard that college students are getting offers to intern as early as freshman year and first-year analysts may be getting propositioned before their senior year.

For internships, did anyone have banks/recruiters reach out to you Freshman year?

When did you start getting contacted analyst positions?

Thank you!

3 Comments
 

RBC Capital Markets is the earliest sophomore summer analyst of the bunch - deadline was early June so people must have got it in the spring. MS/BofA take place in June. Top asset managers have structured freshman and sophomore internships, like Sixth Street, which probably recruits first-years in the fall for freshman summer and late spring/summer for a sophomore summer. Some PE megafunds have unstructured sophomore internships which may recruit late freshman year. Most common are freshman insight programs that feed into a sophomore summer internship.

 
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I’m in the class of 2023, and I got to a well known semi-target state school. Admittedly, I was a bit of a hardo and started going to recruiting events fall of my freshman year (fall 2019). Several BBs has sessions that fall for summer 2020, so I got the impression recruiting took place fall of junior year. 
 

When Covid hit in March 2020, recruiting for summer 2022 was totally done at my school. By July, recruiting started for summer 2021 and even a tiny bit for summer 2022, so things were already moving faster by then. The fall of my sophomore year (fall 2020), no banks came on campus as everything was virtual. There were events that fall, that were advertised for both summer 2021 and summer 2022. That was a huge surprise to me given that the previous year, there weren’t recruiting two years in advance. 
 

By the time March/April/May hit, recruiting was in full swing and many banks straight up started ignoring they timelines the originally told us. For example, BofA told is that our Handshake apps would open July 1st, 2021, but instead they randomly announced in May 2021 that they were interviewing for our school then. This was because so many places were in full swing. I think the only major banks that kept true to their original timelines at my school were Goldman and Wells Fargo. 
 

I ended up accepting an offer in May 2021. A friend of mine who was an upperclassman when I came to this school haven’t even began interviewing until the June after his sophomore year (and he networked very hard). I, on the other hand, had interviewed and many places and accepted an offer in May of sophomore year - over a year before my summer analyst position actually started. 

 

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