Yes, you should make a casual request at the end for a referral, recommendation, or resume endorsement (or email them afterward to follow up and ask). If you are staying in school for an extra year, then you should be applying for junior-year internships next year instead (you apply ~1 year +/- a few months in advance of the summer internship that leads to full-time offers).

I am a transfer sophomore student at a target school right now and looking forward to going into IB. I had some coffee chat with bankers, but never got them to say they would refer me or pass my resume, I wonder if I should explicitly point out to them if they could pass my resume or something. Another question is that I plan to spend an extra year in college and do you think I could apply for sophomore internships or summer internships next year as a junior again since I am staying for an extra year? Will appreciate for any insights you could provide.

Ideally 2 solid internships or 1 solid internship + 1 good leadership experience. These internship(s) can be at boutique firms or in areas outside of IB/PE/VC etc.; they just need to look related to finance in some way.

OK, so the biggest problem you face is that recruiting for 2023 internships will start several months into 2022, which means you don’t have much time to network and prepare. The consulting internship will help, and since you go to a target school, you might be able to get in anyway despite a lack of finance internships. Your options are:

1) Spend the next 2-3 months networking like crazy and giving yourself a crash course in accounting and corporate finance so that you can apply to banks as soon as their summer internship applications open.

2) Or if you don’t want to do that, take a slower approach, do the above more gradually, and aim for roles like Big 4 valuation, corporate banking, etc., win a full-time offer in one of those, and eventually move into IB from there.

Big thanks to you for writing this guide. Like other commenters, I was hoping you would not mind giving me some advice on how to get into IB from my specific position. I would be very grateful. I will try to keep my inquiry as brief as I can.

I, fortunately, do go to a target school, but I am currently a sophomore who originally intended to major in a field other than economics. So, the classes I took during my freshman year and first semester of this year were not geared at all toward anything in financial industries (they were a mix of life sciences and social sciences), save for a course on macroeconomics. Next semester, my classes will of course be more pointed, but regardless, it will not be until my junior year that I will be able to take any classes related to finance.

The one thing I do have going for me though is that I managed to land a role this semester in a consulting group at my school. So, next semester, I will be doing consulting for local organizations.

I also have a fairly high GPA (about a 3.6), and a myriad of hobbies/volunteer activities.

It was through this group that I realized IB may be a career I am greatly interested in. So, as of now, I am wondering what I should do in terms of summer opportunities, and also how I may want to proceed after college if I should not start immediately looking for IB options?

No one is looking that closely. A senior banker is not going to review every detail of your transcript, they have better things to be doing. They mostly care about school quality/reputation and overall GPA.

What if those 12 credits come from only 3 classes, all of which are 4 credits? I’m just concerned employers might frown upon my “gaming of the system” when reviewing my transcript.

No.