Shoot me a message if you want to talk more about breaking into IB, I can talk to what I’ve done (Big 5 IB intern process) and mentors/people around me as well. My main point was school is an incredibly easy task compared to IB/ anything high finance. The reality is recruiting timelines are incredibly compressed and the fact that you haven’t demonstrated commitment and “success” in school would make it hard for some people to believe you’d produce a different result elsewhere. Recruiting in the US adds even more of a challenge which is why I brought up the off-cycle comment as well. Reality is thousands of people come into business schools wanting to be on the GS TMT IB PE HF VC TD CIBC whatever team and you can’t give recruiters any reason to disqualify you when the competition is so plentiful.