Feeling Discouraged From FT IB Recruiting (Need Advice)

I need some advice. I'm a senior from a non-target big state school looking to land a FT IB role. A little bit about myself: 3.75 gpa, have had 2 internships; one with a small consulting firm and another with a large pharma company in a FP&A role. I work during the school year and started my own company with a friend freshman year scaling it up to a couple thousand monthly users as well as producing a podcast alongside it. I received a return offer from the pharma company for their FLDP rotational program in corporate internal audit.

Over the past year and this summer I really pushed myself to utilize the resources on WSO to prepare myself for IB interviews/technicals. I made a spreadsheet to keep track of everywhere I was applying, application status, and contacts I have (not many). All in all I applied to around 50 firms at the end of July/beginning of August. I heard back from a few (most the analyst classes were full), did one on campus interview, and did two hirevues but nothing past that. When preparing for the interviews I created mock interviews and did my research on the firms.

As far as networking goes I'm from the south in a growing city but unfortunately there isn't any investment banks in the area. Most of the people I've connected with are in tech, start ups, or a corporate role, and commercial banking. I've built relationships with them who then introduced me to people in Energy IB (analyst classes full). No connections in NYC unfortunately though. There's not many alumni at all in IB from my school but I did reach out to all there were.

With recruiting starting to get late I'm really starting to stress about not landing a job in IB. I really don't want to work in internal audit at the pharma company. I'm just weighing my options about what to do at this point. I could go into commercial banking but I know that is also tough to transition into IB from. Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated.

 

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