Advice for a Liberal Arts student
Hey guys so I'm new to this site and this world of IB, but apparently IB internships for junior fall start 2020 spring and 2020 July for GS and JP morgan (correct me if I'm wroing), so I was wondering if I could get come advice from yall.
I have a good GPA at a top liberal arts school (top 3) but am worried about my extracurriculars/experience. I am currently a sophomore, pursuing a major in computer science and stats alongside many econ courses. I was worried because my school isn't a target, but I know a lot of seniors who spent their summers at GS or whatever so I'm thinking it's not impossible (and so I've been told by them).
Freshman summer, I had no interest in IB (or finance for that matter); my econ professor just reached out to me and told me to do research with her, which I did because I had nothing better to do (topic was on federal credit spending and bank's lending behaviors).
I've been on the board of the campus' Unicef club and we ran a few events and fund-raisers that were pretty cool. And the summer before freshman year of college I traveled abroad 3 weeks on a full scholarship through a program (gave presentations; had a leadership position, too). I am currently thinking of joining a consulting club, for the purpose of earning pre-professional skills and presentation skills, and a game development club, mostly for fun since I just love coding and cs.
What's funny is that an upperclassmen, who spent her summer at GS and who got a full-time offer, told me that I don't necessarily need a finance-related internship this coming summer (although it would obviously be helpful). She also said that joining a pre-professional club (the consulting one) isn't a must and even recommended me not to join it especially if I'm not crazy about it, that it would not be meaningful unless I did some 'real' work (I saw posts on this site that echoed this idea). She made it seem like that this field of IB or at least getting into it isn't as cut-throat as one might think: that they are looking for people with a human-side, someone who is 'fun to talk to' or 'fun to work with'.
Then she went on to say that I should just do whatever I wanted this summer, whether it be research, CS, software engineering, or whatever. She did however focus on:
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networking via Linkedin so that my resume can go through first screening process (or whatever you call it), since there's a good chance that my resume wouldn't get attention since I come from a non-target school.
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Preparing for the interview questions (she sent me pdfs of long lists of questions that seemed pretty helpful).
I trust her somewhat and makes sense, but I just wanted to get some insight from you guys. She also said that coming from a non-target, liberal arts school could be an advantage since we don't take the cookie-cutter steps of taking finance or valuation courses like undergrad-B-school kids would; I wasn't so sure about this, but at least that's what she told me, that she sold herself as a unique liberal arts kid (and apparently it worked out well).
Most importantly, I am continuously looking for finance internships (especially private equity related), but I just want to know if such endeavor is necessary, also because I have been told that IB work isn't that difficult as long as you're good with quantitative skills (hence the non-stem people getting in to IB; again, correct me if I'm wrong). I would also like some advice on extracurriculars. Thanks!
Hi Jason-Kim1234, check out these threads:
Fingers crossed that one of those helps you.
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