Attending another school's virtual informational sessions?
I have a lot of friends at a semi-target, and I noticed that one of the BB banks were hosting virtual info sessions for that school. What would happen if I asked one of my friends to register for the session, but then I participated in his place? Would I get outed? Would there even be any benefits to this? It would be a bit awkward to network try and network with the session hosts if I'm not actually from the school I would imagine. Any thoughts?
Summary: You're going to have to be really calculated and clever to pull this off.
If you do this, there's a high risk your friend gets in trouble, and you may end up destroying your own and friend's reputation +chance at interviewing for that bank. You would have to carefully maneuver the conversation so that school name never comes up (which is challenging because school is the typical icebreaker for such sessions). If it's revealed that you don't belong to that school, your friend might be in some trouble by it's school and the bank's HR might not take positively to it, destroying any future you and your friend had with that bank.
Let's say you're able to con your way through the session and get everyone's email, the next risk is if the person remembers how they met you. Most likely, the MD won't remember this if you email him a week later. In your email to the MD, write something like it was great chatting with you online about x,y,z, and don't mention school name at all. This is also contingent on your friend's school, cause if he goes to Harvard and you go to Univ of Phoenix, the MD will be alarmed and might reach out to some people from the school, which will throw your friend and reputation under a bus.
Make sure not to send emails to junior analysts/associates, as well as HR people, because they'll probably remember the details better than the MD. Make sure the group and BB doesn't only recruit from that school, and that the difference between the prestige of your school and your friend's isn't that large, cause this might raise some alarms.
Good luck.
What you should learn from this is that there is a very large downside risk and very little upside reward. It’s not worth it to do something dumb like this, especially if the info session is only available to this school. Why? Because you don’t go to this school, so therefore, it’s dishonest to say you do, and people can take it very negatively.
Maybe consider signing up for it with your personal school email so if you get in, there’s nothing bad they can say to you (I.e. “I signed up with my school email and thought it was ok even though I wasn’t the targeted audience. I just wanted to learn more about the bank.”)
Otherwise, try to network with people by cold-emailing. It’s not impossible to break in from a non-target, just harder. If you send out 50 emails and get 1 person on the phone, you only need 1 person to vouch for you to get a job. Admittedly it’s rough to only have 1 person, but it’s possible, and it’s much easier to do it this way than to burn bridges with banks by doing something that could get your name flagged on their candidate portal.
Bumping to see if anyone currently working at a bank can chime in on this. Would you see this as a negative or would you respect the kids "hustle?"
I went to a semi-targets career fair and some people won't like it and others respect the hustle. Just make sure you have good reasons why you are there (i.e. Go to a school in the area with no OCR) and maybe you networked with the bank before.
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