Employers cut 49,000 jobs in May and your worried about not finding an internship in your sophomore year at a target school?? Wow, is this what Gen. Y has come to??

Stop being a pussy. I'm in exactly the same boat. I'm taking a fucking lame-ass Spanish class right now and then I'm moving back home to breakup concrete with a sledgehammer for 6 weeks. Yeah I guess I'm a little worried for recruiting next year, but I'm gonna bust my ass in school and hope for the best. You make your own luck.

If you take a class at college you'll have a lot of free time. Hell, you could take a couple college courses specifically to boost your GPA for next year. Read some books outside class and actually improve yourself. Not everything you do has to go down on a resume. You said you got some interviews, so you should be able to do the same next year.

learn chinese

If it is not too late look into studying abroad. Makes for some good stories and great conversation in interviews.

study abroad is definitely a good way to go. Lots of top schools have short summer programs that you can apply to fairly late and from what I've seen, as long as you can pay you are admitted. LSE has a lot of options, I would look into that.

If you don't have any experience whatsoever, I would just take what you can get. Honestly, if you don't have any financial experience, how do you know you want to be a banker? Just make the most out of any internship you get, and network your ass off.

I'm not sure how serious meyouzick was, but getting a good start in learning another language is a very worthwhile activity for a summer. Look into full-immersion language camps at home or abroad. If it's Chinese you choose all the better. 祝你好运!

Read as many non-fiction books as you can - especially ones that will make you more knowledgable about the markets and how they work. If I could go back and do things over again I would have definitely read more while I still had free time to pick up a book.

traderpimp111:

I know this year is not as important as next year but I now have nothing on my resume that sets me apart. mediocre GPA, mediocre target school, no internships at all, etc. I personally know a ton of kids at my school who have better resumes than me and considering the school I go to there will only be a few interview spots

please help.

Personally I don't think GPAs are the end all be all, but they are significant and everyone on this forum will tell you just how important they are as they are the mechanism that gets recruiters to look at you. If you can honestly say that you "have nothing" on your resume, have a "mediocre GPA", go to a "mediocre target school" and have "no internships" why would someone look at you? There are far too many 3.7+ GPAs from Ivies and Targets for them to want to mess with a possibility from a "lesser" school. Honestly, if you asked someone on here to post a list of things not to do in order to be competitive it would look as follows:

Don't get a mediocre GPA Don't go to a mediocre school Don't have zero internships on your resume

You could do thousands of things that would differentiate you from the other students at your school, the bad part is, virtually none of those things can make-up for the three things you list as not having.

Your best bet is to bust your ass and bring your GPA up as much as possible, maybe you could list your most recent semester's GPA instead of your overall and can hopefully explain yourself to a recruiter/interviewer.

Good luck to you.

study abroad is not happening. I am broke and its too late. School and GPA are by no means dealbreakers. both are about average for the forum/ibanking

I guess I am looking for things I could do that are tangentially relevant. starting an internet business sounds interesting.

the key is to do something such that it doesn't immediately communicate to them that you were trying for banking and failed. ie - (obviously not relevant to you) working at an accounting firm or going to one of those stupid swiss finance academies sends a clear signal that you settled for something less. ibanking interviews are SO much about how you frame things. so, instead of doing a stupid mediocre internship - do something like volunteering for a presidential election or studying abroad (which you say isnt' possible). that way when you're in the ibanking interviews next year you can say that you had the opportunity to do something finance-y but that you chose to work for a presidential campaign instead because you didnt' know when else in your life you'd be able to work in such a momentous occasion. if you have an interesting experience or can tell a cool story or two on yoru resume about your summer - you may even end up being better off than your competition who all did exactly the same thing. esp if you frame it well on your cover letter. campaign finance wouldn't be a bad place to work if possible.

if you have a quant-y major, you can also always spin your experience by saying that you knew you were solid on the quant stuff but wanted a chance to really develop your "softer skills" since you wanted to be strong in both aspects.

Just walk in and ask for interviews (well-dressed), instead of shooting resumes as attachments in emails. At the end of the day, it has to be connections and your enthusiasm trandferred into productivity!

ps - do not work retail all summer (what's your argument going to be? if you needed money ... a finance internship would have paid too...thus it's obvious you couldn't get anything better). when making your summer decisions - use as your criteria:

1) why am i doing this? ie - you are working retail to make money and have something to do. caveat - i guess you could say you were working retail to get exposure in the consumer space because you wanted to do consumer/healthcare/retail banking but this argument is just stupid. don't be an idiot - your arg has to hold water.

2) could i have satisfied that criteria with a finance internship had i gotten one? - ie - you could have made money doing a finance internship.

3) if so they will assume you couldn't get one. if not, you can make the arg that you had the opportunity to do finance, but opted for this life changing experience as well.

if you want to be superman, work for a campaign m-f and take an investment banking class online. your story becomes - i really wanted to pursue the opportunity to work on a presidential campaign, but i didn't want to be less competitive than my fellow applicants - so i took an online course to "catch up"/put myself at the same level i would have been had i taken advantage of my opportunity to work in finance (you don't have to be specific, you can just allude). this story makes a hell of a lot better of a pitch than - i took an investment banking class online because i couldnt' get a job.

I'd do volunteer firefighter. Try to risk your life and and save a few people and itemize on them your resume.

I'm not actually joking in case you're wondering, I think this would be a tremendous resume-booster experience(assuming) your actually did clean out a few fires and risked your life at some point.

Risk/reward rite?

yea I really like the idea of volunteer firefighter or even EMT.

I also play lacrosse so something like firefighting is consistent. also once in a life time chance to do this which as you guys suggested can explain not doing finance. I mean this is something I would actually enjoy doing and they apparently love military people so why not firefighters. this is also for S&T so it sort of fits the atmosphere i guess.

thanks for the help guys i really appreciate it

You want to do S&T right? I'm a sophomore but I have an internship with a BB in S&T, and this is exactly what I did;

1) My school has an endowment fund that operates like a hedge fund. I tried really hard but managed to get in with them and do research, etc. for the whole year. Brilliant resume builder!! I know a guy who leveraged this into an internship with goldman. Your school has the same, so try and get into that. This will be a year long thing.

2) Get in touch with professors and network your ass off. They have connections you can't imagine. Mediocre schools have some great professors albeit fewer than the ivies.

3) There must be a Merrill Lynch brokerage office or regional office in your area. Go in and try to talk with them. I'm sure that will help your case. Tell them you're willing to do voluntary work or whatever. Put that on your resume and it should really help. Even if that doesn't work, go work at scottrade or etrade or one of those other firms. Anything will help your cause.

4) For next year, start applying for internships in like september and october. Apply to as many firms as you can. One of them is bound to come through.

5) Network, network and network!!! The only difference between people who go to targets and people who don't when it comes to recruiting is that targets can get their resumes to the right people. If you can do this from a non target then you are in pretty much the same position as the person from the target. Join doostang and find out who from your school is in wall street and try and get in touch with them. This should be done as soon as the summer ends.

P.S. Calling yourself mediocre and your school mediocre is something recruiters don't want to see I'm sure. They want to see an optimist who can make the best out of his situation. As my interviewer said, if you can sell yourself, then you can pretty much sell anything else in the world including your school.

where do you go to school?

.

Tom2000,

LMAO

Best, SoulSearching

Don't listen to the kid who said don't take an internship in accounting because it will say "I failed to get a better internship." That's one of the dumber things I have heard on this topic. In fact, I would encourage you to get an internship in accounting. First off, they usually pay well. Second, it will build skills in terms of reading and knowing financial statements (you learn a lot better that way than through a textbook, trust me).

Third, bankers LOVE people with an accounting background. I was an econ major but took a year of accounting and every BB I talked with said how they really liked that I took the initiative to learn about accounting. If finance is an art, accounting is the language in which it is spoken. NOBODY will think "What a dumbass! This kid couldn't even get an IB internship as a sophomore! DING!!"

The reality is that the vast majority of college kids as sophomores are working as caddies, lifeguards, or construction workers. Nobody is going to ding you because of a sophomore accounting internship. In fact it shows an early interest in the monetary world, and you can explain that while it was enlightening and you learned a lot about accounting, you want to get into more of an analysis role.

Working on a presidential campaign would also be a cool thing to do, although I doubt they pay (you said you were broke, right?). However there will probably be people in finance you'll meet while campaigning that you can network with and perhaps even get a fall or spring internship at a financial gig and make up for the lack of finance internship this summer. My sophomore/junior/senior year I made sure that at least one semester that year I had an internship. Not always finance; I had one in marketing, one in management, and then one finally at an IB boutique. They were a great way to learn what I did/didn't like, and it shows a broad range of knowledge to bankers, which you can use to explain you know more than just numbers, but you WANT to do finance.

As others have said, this is a brutal time. People don't want to pay for an intern right now because it's just dead weight on their books. Anything you can find would be a plus, and if the best you can do is a 25 hr a week unpaid accounting internship, take it and work another 20 hours at some retail place to make the rest of your cash. Showing you can handle multiple things on your plate at once (like two jobs) will only serve to show you are responsible, able to manage your life, and take on challenges.

Good luck.

Funny gomes. I was just going to post that I thought the point about being able to say you wanted to do X instead of I am doing X becasue I couldnt get a finance gig made a ton of sense. Maybe it makes more sense for juniors though since there's a hard core expectation that juniors who want to go into finance have SA jobs after junior year but I guess thats not true for sophmores.

Read Kurt Vonnegut and you'll realize the insignificance of finance...