Countdown to Your Finance Career: Sophomore Year
Here are some areas to focus on during your sophomore year of college as you begin to consider your finance career path.
- Continue building on your Freshman year efforts.
- Take substantive electives that reflect your interests and passions and that will help you to develop skills. Electives are a great way to test your career interests and see if certain subjects really resonate with you.
- Do an internship or work in a full-time summer job in the finance industry. These experiences are important in building your resume and providing valuable data about how your interests fit with your career aspirations. Check our Job Bank for opportunities.
- Begin building your network. Reach out to faculty, alumni, family, and friends and begin to have conversations about your career interests. Your school’s alumni center can be a great resource. As you reach out to contacts, ask to be connected to other people in their network who work in your fields of interest.
- In addition to reading the local newspaper, read business oriented and finance oriented papers such as Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Barron’s and The Economist.
- Continue attending workshops offered by your career services office and events hosted by student organizations and visiting companies.
- Conduct informational interviews with professionals in your field/industry of choice. An informational interview is a fact-gathering session—an opportunity for you to meet with a professional in a field of interest and ask questions about their daily routine/responsibilities, how their career developed, etc. Your career services office will help you to get in touch with alumni who are happy to help students in their quest. Meet with faculty on campus in these particular areas as well. Tap into your parents’ network to learn about the professional journeys of their peers.
- Network, network, network.