High Schooler Looking for a Head Start...What should I do?
I've been a frequent lurker of WSO for nearly two years now and am finally finishing up my senior year of high school (maybe not, actually) and committed to an HYPSM. Because of COVID-19, my school is shut down and I've got nothing to do. So, ambitious me, has been wondering what I can do to get a leg up on the competition towards working in finance (specifically IB). Aside from staying up to date with general and business news/events, is there any specific skillset that you guys wish you had a deeper knowledge of, specific books you've read that have shaped your thinking, or any other helpful activity that I could use to fill up the next 4 weeks of my life?
And yes, I've seen all of the posts clowning at middle schoolers freaking out about this shit too early, and I laugh at them myself too. But, given the scenario where I have time to burn and essentially zero mobility, I hope I can get some insightful answers. I'm from Anacostia (shithole that earned DC the nickname "murder capital") so I could actually tell some pretty weird stories if anyone wants to hear–I'm bored out of my mind.
Cheers
If your goal is to end up in IB, then make take a an excel modeling class online or something or take one in a classroom somewhere once this whole stupid freakout show is over. In the meantime while you can't do anything, I would read some books. Some good ones are New Market Wizards by Jack Schwager, Monkey Business by John Rolfe and Peter Troob, Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, among many others. There are threads where you can find books to read, just have to do some digging to find them. Also, this may be hard to do because of the whole COVID-19 thing, but I would reach out to all of the shops in your local area to see if they might have need of an intern. It might be a month or two before anything develops, but it can't hurt to reach out now. Try to get experience in the next few months, that will show that you took the initiative to learn something early on.
https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/tag/books
This is wise advise, especially the excel class. It's a very valuable skill that will help you in school, and exponentially on the job. If you can learn to build a 3 statement model that's a good skill to have.
https://www.asimplemodel.com/ or Youtube videos to learn how.
Books are good too. I sometimes wish I was better at accounting - depending on whether you're going to HYPS or W you may or may not take finance/accounting classes, those are also worth picking up an online class or textbook if you're interested.
I'd probably hold off on asking for internships right now with COVID, but make a list of local boutiques for freshman summer (excel spreadsheet of emails and phone numbers is a great time waste/resource to have later on) and start emailing them in 6-8 months
I bet you could find an unpaid internship with a search fund doing database scraping and maybe some other stuff if you try hard enough. By database scraping I mean going through AtoZdatabases filtering by stuff like SIC code, revenue, geography, etc - you can probably get free access to this through your local library. Then you will want to validate the emails that you scrape using something like neverbounce (or mailtester.com for free but would take 2+ hours of labor to do manual checks that you could spend $8 to get done with a paid tool lol). Maybe these databases are getting hit up regularly so another method would be going through LinkedIn Sales Navigator to filter for small business owners and then finding the company's domain and using mailtester.com to guess until you find the person's email. I'd go on LinkedIn and look for these search fund guys who seem to be doing it alone and hit them up.
Catch up on your social life, go try to fuck someone you're interested in and enjoy yourself. You've been busting your ass for years now and anything that you do between now and the end of your freshman year will not matter. You've probably spent a lot of time in your studies and neglected your interpersonal skills. These should be as important to you as GPA. Start now.
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