Post-graduate choices and switching from a protective life to a "normal" one

Hello!

I've been a medium-term lurker (just over 2 years) on WSO and figured I'd make an introduction with some questions tagged in.

I'm Sio (this is a play on my real name) and I'm 26. I'm from a smaller European state and in a year I'll be graduating with an MA in QE (quantitative economics) at latest by June of 2021 (my BA is in Economics and Business Administration). I intend to write my masters on momentum trading and want to accumulate other elements that would support my ability to instantly move to a major Western financial center like New York, London or Frankfurt. Among these other elements are 2 things: 1. Charters/post-graduate qualifications: I have considered a CFA, a FINRA SIE, a CI etc; and 2. Assembling a LO trading book to showcase some of the profitable strategies I have had over the years. I understand that my MA which is 5 years of studies does not garner enough respect from financial institutions for a few reasons: 1. It's not a top 15 school (most rankings have it top 300); 2. My GPA isn't that high - on a 5.0 scale, my BA was a 3.97 and the first year in my MA was a 4.17; and 3. The U.S. is a 4+2 whereas higher ed here is 3+2, meaning a U.S. BA only has 1 year less than me. Obviously it also doesn't help to have close to 0 work experience after I torched 3 years of my life in comp sci.

A bit more about my more personal background: I grew up in a fairly protective non-religious household and that is a core reason why I can count on 1 hand how many friends I have (I think this number is literally 0 if we exclude people I met through my education path). Making friends in of itself isn't difficult for me - I'm a fairly talkative person, but I've never really gotten to test this in a normal social setting like a party or any similar event that may or may not involve alcohol. A part of the puzzle is the fact that I never went out, another part is that I've never drank anything to even hit the "slight buzz" state (I'm not sure I've drank anything non-champagne in my whole life). Naturally I'm not looking to get shitfaced on the daily in my late 20s when I inevitably do move, but I suspect social peer pressure and the need to maintain relationships with coworkers/people in the industry will severely alter the way I will be spending my free time and through that also the person that I am. I'm definitely not looking to protect/maintain this persona of purity that I have right now, but the other extreme sounds a lot worse than the lonely days and nights I have on the regular (and it was this way without corona also).

So I'd turn to the WSO community with a few discussion points: - What do you think would look good on a CV to the point where I can make up for both the fact that I am not attending a known university and the fact that I'm not a 4.0/cum laude student? - How would you ease yourself into the social structure of finance without shifting from one extreme (never going out, never drinking) to the other (always out, always drinking)?

Thanks.