Is it worth doing a summer school at a top uni if I have no experience to apply for SA positions

Hi, I’m a 1st Year Student studying Finance at a semi target university in the UK. I have a triple A is my A levels and I am on track for a first through my first year exams. I’m a part of my university Trading society but I’m not in a position of leadership.
 

I didn’t apply to any Spring Weeks mainly because (I know this a stupid reason) but because I didn’t have any relevant experience and the competitiveness of it sort of put me off. Also to be honest I wasn’t really sure whether the field of IB was something I was really quite interested in. I strongly regret this because I do now want to try and gain some experience in the financial field and this was a big opportunity I stupidly decided to pass up on. Therefore I find myself at a big disadvantage compared to my peers and especially people at target unis. So now I want to try and gain something to put on my CV for next September when Summer Analyst positions open up. I found a course for summer school at a very highly ranked university which I am genuinely interested in but it is slightly expensive but affordable. So I’m wondering is it worth doing that due to my lack of experience to try to pad up my CV a little bit and what other actions could I take. For example would cold emailing people work etc.

Thanks.

6 Comments
 

Continue with your extracurriculars, do a summer job this summer wherever you can, pick up some transferrable skills, then apply for SA in the autumn.

Note: I didn't have SW when I secured my SA, but I did have a lot of extracurriculars.

 

What sort of summer job did you have, was it related to finance or was it just a regular one? I have had regular non finance related jobs but find it basically impossible to try and relate to finance and try to make it even compete compared to other applicants who have finance related experience, so how would I go about doing that? Also what sort of extracurriculars did you have if I may ask?

 

I worked in retail, but by the time I applied to my successful SA I had removed it bcos I supplemented it with more relevant on-campus extracurricular involvement in consulting and society leadership positions. But before I removed it I still got to final rounds (and got first rounds) at BB banks and other strong banks.

 

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