Ten months. That's how long it took me to go from my first rejected internship application to a signed offer from HSBC.
I went to Kennesaw State University — not exactly a Wall Street feeder school. No alumni network in finance. No professors with Goldman connections. No recruiting pipeline. And when I started this process, no real professional network to speak of either.
Here's what actually happened, why it took so long, and what I learned that every non-target student needs to hear before they start mass-applying and wondering why nothing lands.
I thought I was just in time. I was completely wrong.
Sophomore year, I took a trip to London. By chance, I ended up connecting with someone who had spent years working on Wall Street before retiring early. We got to talking, and she gave me the most important piece of career advice I've ever received:
If you want to work in investment banking, you need a junior year summer internship. That's the on-ramp. Without it, the door is essentially closed.
I came back fired up. I figured I had plenty of time — junior summer was still a year away. I did my research, built a list of programs, and started applying.
What I didn't know: IB recruiting doesn't happen when applications open. It happens months earlier — through networking, through previous internship experience, through relationships built inside finance clubs and alumni networks. By the time I was "applying," the students who were going to get those spots had already been having conversations with bankers for six months.
I got rejected everywhere. Every single application.
The conversation that changed my approach
After the mass rejection, I went back to my mentor and was honest about where I stood. She said something that reframed everything for me:
Your resume is fine. What moves needles in this world is your network — who you know.
That stung a little. Because I didn't know anyone. But it also clarified exactly what I needed to go build.
She also told me something I wasn't expecting: she had a friend at HSBC. The Head of HR for Global Banking.
That introduction changed everything. Within weeks I was on a call with the summer recruitment head in New York City — two months before summer internship applications had even officially opened. I spent the next two months doing exactly what I should have been doing from the start: having real conversations, learning the firm, building relationships inside HSBC before I was officially a candidate.
When super day came, I was ready. I knew people. I understood the culture. I wasn't a cold applicant — I was someone they'd already talked to.
I got the offer.
What this story is actually about
Here's the part I want you to sit with: I got lucky.
Not because I didn't work hard — I did. But because I happened to meet the right person on a random trip to London who happened to know someone at the exact firm I ended up at. That's not a system. That's a lucky break dressed up as a success story.
Most non-target students don't get that break. And the ones who do land in finance without it aren't doing anything magical — they're manufacturing the luck through volume and intentionality. They're reaching out to bankers directly. They're not waiting to know someone who knows someone.
The lesson from my 10-month process wasn't "get a good mentor." It was: the students who break in are the ones having conversations with the right people. Your job is to create those conversations — as many as possible, as early as possible.
That's what cold email is for.
What the cold outreach process actually looks like (and why most students burn out)
Once I understood that networking was the game, I started doing what everyone says to do: reach out to bankers directly. Find their emails. Send personalized notes. Follow up.
In practice, this meant opening four or five tabs for every single contact. LinkedIn to find the person. An email finder tool to guess their address. ChatGPT to help draft something that didn't sound like a template. Back to my inbox to actually send it. Then a spreadsheet to log the contact so I didn't forget I'd reached out.
By the end of a two-hour session, I'd contacted maybe five people and had no real system for following up. Leads went cold because I lost track of them. I'd reach out to the same person twice without realizing it. I had no visibility into who had responded, who hadn't, and who I needed to follow up with.
This is the process that works — it's just completely broken as a workflow. And it's the reason most students send 20 emails, get discouraged, and stop.
What I'd do differently
Start earlier. Way earlier than feels necessary. Recruiting timelines in IB are front-loaded — the students getting offers in the fall started building relationships in the spring.
Target analysts and associates, not partners or MDs. The senior people don't have time. The analysts just went through the process themselves and remember what it felt like. They're the most likely to respond.
Follow up. Always. One email is not a networking strategy. A thoughtful follow-up two weeks later, referencing something specific about their firm or a recent deal, is what separates a forgotten email from a real conversation.
Fix the workflow. The four-tab, copy-paste-forget process is why most students underinvest in networking. Not because they don't understand it matters — they do — but because the friction is high enough that they stop after a few dozen contacts instead of a few hundred.
Why I built Reach
After going through this process myself, I kept thinking about the students who would go through it without the lucky break I had. The ones who didn't randomly meet a Wall Street mentor on a trip abroad. The ones who needed to manufacture their own luck through sheer volume of outreach — and who were burning hours on a broken process to do it.
Reach is what I built. It's a Chrome extension that sits on top of LinkedIn: find someone you want to contact, click once, and Reach finds their verified email, drafts a personalized outreach message using AI, lets you send it directly from Gmail, and logs the contact automatically to a CRM dashboard.
The four-tab, 35-minute process becomes 90 seconds. And you never forget who you've reached out to.
If you're a non-target student heading into recruiting — especially if you're starting later than you should be — you can add Reach to Chrome for free here.
The conversations are how you get in. Reach just makes it easier to have more of them.
Joe Hall is the founder of Reach and a December 2025 finance graduate of Kennesaw State University. He interned at HSBC in New York.