What is the most precious thing in the world?
Is it power? Or is it fame? Or is it money?
Neither.
The most important thing in the world is one simple thing that we all know but can’t see and ain't aware of its implications — Time.
Time is your life. On average human live only for 27375 days. You are essentially trading your life everyday. And as opposed to anything, time is the only one thing that can’t be turned back.
There’s no “in search of time lost”. What is gone is gone, just like your failing recruitment season this year.
We all know one internship leads to another.
While you are targeting at IB front office positions, if you screwed the internship interviews before that...
It's not like you can remedy the situation by just doing one more internship. The more deviated you are from the path, the more work it takes to fix your case.
The earlier you start, the higher chance you have.
There was a student who we think can land BB IBD offers but he chose to "try it out himself".
By the time he joined us, he at most could only end up in BO, but another one who joined us at year 2 with a similar profile successfully landed a BB IBD offer.
This is a common lower-self doubt, because it sounds so rational.
And when you failed to obtain your return offer (if you are good enough to secure a summer offer now), you can still come to us but your opportunities are far less and you have lost 1 year from the starting line (consider you peers are kickstarting their Analyst position when you are doing your second penultimate-year summer internship because you failed to land a return offer…)
But if you are serious about achieving what you want...