How realistic is full-time IB recruiting senior year after sophomore summer outside IB?

Hey everyone, looking for honest advice from people who have seen this path before.

I’m a sophomore at a semi-target, roughly Emory / Notre Dame / WashU / Vanderbilt tier, and I came up short in banking recruiting this cycle. I had superdays at Leerink and Allen & Co., plus first rounds with Jefferies, BofA IB, Evercore, and Houlihan Lokey. I walked away feeling pretty good about a lot of those processes, so I’m trying to figure out whether I missed on interview execution, positioning, or if NYC was just that competitive this year.

I’ll be at Bank of America S&T in NYC during my junior year. I’m grateful for it and I know it is still a strong seat, but long term I know I would rather be in a deal-oriented role, ideally something like TMT or M&A rather than ECM or other capital markets paths. I also do not really feel like doing the whole MBA route later, so I’m trying to understand what the most realistic path looks like from here if I want to end up in banking.

A few things I’d really like input on:

How realistic is senior-year re-recruiting for full-time IB from this position?

Is it even worth trying at all, or is the odds-adjusted path just too weak compared with other options?

Am I basically dead on arrival compared with people coming off junior summer IB internships, or does this happen more often than people think?

If you were in my shoes, how would you spend the next 12 months to maximize my chances?

How would you position the BofA experience when networking for IB later, especially if my end goal is more TMT / M&A oriented?

Does anyone know much about lateraling into banking after graduation, and when that usually happens if that ends up being the path?

Is there any real value in keeping the Economics/Math + CS story, or by senior year does that not move the needle much?

Would I be better off simplifying the story and just going down to economics?

For context, all of my recruiting was for NYC. I’m from Westchester and have a pretty solid NYC network already, so networking access is not the main concern. The bigger question is whether this path is actually realistic and worth pursuing, or whether I should be thinking about a different route entirely.

Also, if anyone has seen people make this move successfully, I’d be very interested in hearing what their strategy was, whether that meant senior-year re-recruiting, lateraling after graduation, or something else entirely.

Would appreciate blunt advice.