Internship Advice Please!!!

Starting off by saying my situation's a bit of a shitshow - I'm a current economics major junior at a top 20 school with pretty solid GPA (3.65) and extracurriculars as fraternity president. I've always known I've wanted to go into finance somewhere but have never been exactly sure where, yet saw an interest in commercial real estate as dealing with a physical asset class. However, I got drawn to to the alure of investment banking sophomore year and ended up working as an unpaid intern at small boutique IB firm (downstream energy) that summer, where I got minimal modeling experience and really just helped putting together CIMs.

Fast forward to now and I still have no internship lined up for this summer as I struck out with IB firms earlier this year thanks to a late start/negligence on the networking side. Since then, and starting to realize IB probably wasn't my cup of tea in the first place, I've been looking into commercial real estate in earnest now but am still somewhat lost as to where to start. I've always been more intersted in the analytical and market research side of things instead of brokerage, and in the long term I could maybe see myself working at a REIT or RE PE firm. Yet I know it's extremely easy to get pigeonholed in real estate and I expect that can start with even internships.

My question to y'all is what would you do in my situation? Give me as much shit as you like for my lack of networking and how close it is to the summer but I already know I'm a dumbass.

2 Comments
 

You have plenty of time to figure your shit out as a second semester Junior. I'd recommend finding a solid finance-related internship with a reputable name for this summer as a talking point. Then in the fall of 2019 get to school with a focused mindset of finding a role at one of the top IS firms (given you don't want to go into IB) - a lot of the REITS/top REPE firms don't recruit out of college but a role in IS will set you up nicely.

 

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