How I got into investment banking at JP Morgan from a non-traditional path

It was really hard for me to get a job in investment banking as a senior in college who was pre-med and had no idea what she was doing. But I eventually landed at JP Morgan and I realized I never shared the story of how I did it. For some context, the best way to get into investment banking is to do an internship the summer between junior and senior year, do really well, get a return offer for full time, and then just coast senior year. And I went to NYU which has a business school and a lot of my peers followed this exact path. But I was not in the business school because I was pre-med, so instead of accounting and finance courses, I was taking organic chemistry and physics. And that summer where my peers were interning in investment banking, I was working and studying for the MCAT. Now it's senior year, I've changed my mind, I don't want to go to med school and I want to do investment banking and everyone thinks I'm crazy. The most obvious first step was to apply on my university's career platform and there were probably a handful of positions left, but those jobs went to people who had done the internships and just wanted to switch banks. Honestly most people laughed at me like good luck. But I did have a couple supportive friends who told me about the Mergers and Inquisitions guide. And being pre-med, I knew how to study, so I immediately started to learn the accounting and finance questions. I also realized that on campus recruiting wasn't going to work for me, so I changed my approach to sending out cold emails and hard networking. I got into a regular cadence of sending cold emails pretty much every day and I was probably going uptown from campus to meet with the bankers in person as often as I could, which was probably like 2 or 3x week for months. Eventually I got some phone interviews with a bank I was really excited about and then got to a super day, which is a day where they bring you into their office and you meet multiple people back to back and it's the final big interview. Go to part 2.