College freshman at a non target majoring in engineering looking for advice

I’ll start off by providing some context it may be long but it’s needed. Life threw me some shitty cards the first like 17 years of my life and I’m behind where I need to be. I was incredibly sick in growing up and was in and out of the hospital due to chronic migraines and headaches which caused by hs gpa and test scores to suffer. I fully recovered by my senior year, I got to be one of the first under 18 to take a monthly injectable medication that thankfully worked.(ty LLY)

I’m a college freshman studying systems and industrial engineering with a concentration in financial engineering at a non target. I thought I wanted to go into engineering for a long time and systems always felt best due to the versatility so that was my primary major and really only applied to schools with that degree. I have family and friends parents in finance(I grew up in a mid sized financial hub, mostly real estate) but I always found what they did boring. Pretty much right as I submitted all my college applications I realized I actually did enjoy parts of finance just not the jobs of my family or friends parents, I loved economics my whole life and economics was my second major for a lot of my applications. I started getting interested in fintech, financial products, options, futures, etc. and had already been investing and dabbling in trading since before Covid. When I was younger I just liked felt like trading was gambling because that’s pretty much what I was doing until I really developed my own swing trading strategies when I got older, learned some financial analysis from a gfs dad who’s an MD in PE, read a book he suggested, started to make good enough money swing trading, realized I actually enjoyed learning about certain parts finance to really realize that I wanted something related to capital markets or like portfolio management as a career rather than engineering.

So it took until I had already took me way too long to discover all the sides of finance just due to being so apathetic towards it really until fall of my senior year. What sucked was most of the schools I got into didn’t have what I want or would’ve costed upwards up 250k which I just couldn’t stomach doing at the time. I was also incredibly debt adverse at the time because I saw how my family was impacted with my medical expenses and chose not to go to the most prestigious school I got in to due to cost.(I received acceptances from two semi targets that have a damn good amount of alumini and recruiting from what I hear from friends)

I’ve realized this semester that my program has very very few students that are able to break into high finance and a majority of graduates end up in government contracting or consulting roles at Deloitte or Freddie mac. The program is just not focused enough on finance after learning more to actually secure a job in high finance there’s going to have to be self studying all the way through and I heard a lot of selling people on what exactly you did during your undergrad as most people don’t understand it. But I think it’s incredibly versatile and the program almost starts as a undergrad meant to study anything that leans quantitative, there’s tons of different concentrations but my financial engineering one definitely spells out success in a quant finance or applied econometrics ms. I’ve noticed that there is always a couple that end up at top targets for a ms in finance, quant finance, or mba right after college. I’m in a finance/stock club(secured an officer position in it) and have met a lot of upper class men through it and through a stock pitch that I did. We have a couple juniors/seniors I know that were able to land internships at MS, GS, JPM but none were IB, PE, S&T or HF which is what I’m looking more for. One CS senior Ik did however land a PE role.

I’m thinking about transferring. Hell I want to transfer. My school just doesn’t have the on campus recruiting and because it’s a younger school it doesn’t have too strong of an alumini network. It is kind of a commuter school and the social life is pretty rough. The school itself pretty much lets anyone in and has close to a 90% acceptance rate so most of my friends aren’t really as driven and I like to be around driven, smart and competitive people. It’s a top 100 school according to WSJ though. My program is not a bad program there though it’s definitely one of their top 3 most prestigious and is nationally known, just not for their financial engineering concentration. I know I will not struggle getting a job out of college though I do know the odds of breaking into a good finance job is quite low.

I didn’t do great on my act and got a 30, was sick and missed both times I signed up for sat. My hs gpa because of how much I missed wasn’t great, with a 3.91 weighted(no idea what it was unweighted likely something like a 3.1-3.4, I took mostly honors and AP every year).

I wonder should I try to transfer to a top school or a semi target and probably have to take on debt? I’d likely just do a finance major if I transfer though I’m also thinking about transferring to a school I got into that has my program that’s more prestigious and has a much larger alumini network, it’s just expensive. Should I stick it out and hope I can go to a top grad school if it doesn’t work out? I don’t know if my odds are that great for transferring I did get a 4.0 this first semester but it’s not like my schools that hard it feels like a CC sometimes. I’m really just scared shitless about internships and post grad job prospects because they don’t look great from what I’ve seen.