Your Story Before You Have One: Building a CV From Second Year

Here is a secret from the screening side: nobody expects a 19-year-old to have deal experience. When I screened first-year and second-year CVs for spring weeks and early programmes, I was not looking for banking. I was looking for evidence of choices: that you had started moving toward this industry on purpose, with whatever was within reach. The candidates who understood that built CVs from nothing in three or four terms. This is the build plan.

What a screener actually expects, by stage

First year: direction. One finance-adjacent commitment, decent grades, signs of life outside the library. Second year: momentum. A role with responsibility, a first brush with the industry, numbers appearing on the page. Penultimate year: readiness. By then the page competes with people who hold internships and the Starting Late article covers what to do if you arrive there empty. The point of years one and two is to make sure you do not.

The four assets to acquire

• 1 · A society role with a number attached. Not membership: a job. Treasurer, sponsorship lead, events head. The title matters less than the number it generates: a budget managed, sponsors signed, attendance grown. One committee role properly worked produces 2-3 CV bullets; five memberships produce none. The Three CVs Rewritten article shows exactly what those bullets become.
• 2 · One competition or student fund. A stock pitch competition, a case competition, an M&A simulation, a student-managed investment fund. These are the closest a student gets to producing banking-shaped work, they come with ranks and cohort sizes built in and they give you something real to discuss in first-round interviews.
• 3 · One structured brush with a bank. Insight days, first-year programmes and spring weeks exist precisely for CVs at this stage and in London the spring week is the single highest-leverage line a first-year can add, because it converts into summer seats. The spring weeks article explains that machine in full.
• 4 · Any job, reframed for numbers. Tutoring, retail, hospitality, a family business. Screeners respect paid work; what they penalise is paid work described without scale or outcome. Money handled, customers served, shifts run, problems fixed: count something, then write the count.

The term-by-term plan

Term one: join two societies maximum, target one committee path, keep grades safe. Term two: enter one competition, apply to insight days, take any paid work without guilt. Summer one: spring week applications open around now for the following spring; prepare and submit early. Terms three and four: hold one society office, land the spring week or a first small internship, start learning your target market's calendar. That is the whole plan. Its power is that almost nobody follows one.

What not to waste time on

Certificate collecting is the big one. Six online course badges on a CV signal browsing, not depth; one serious Excel or modelling course, finished and usable, is plenty as a signal and genuinely useful later. Similarly, do not chase a dozen society memberships, a personal 'investment portfolio' of US$200, or LinkedIn content production. The screen gives no marks for activity that produced no number, no rank and no responsibility.

Start the network before you need it

The least visible asset on a second-year CV is the one that pays most at application time: people who already know your name. Networking begun in first year, with no ask attached, compounds in a way no late outreach can match, because by the time applications open you are a familiar name rather than a request. Alumni first, always; they reply at multiples of cold rates. The complete system, from the first email to the follow-up cadence, is in the free Networking Playbook at rtmentoring.com/#guide and it is written for exactly this stage.

Build the four assets, start the conversations and by penultimate year your CV will not need rescuing. It will need editing, which is a much better problem.

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Raphael Tressieres

Former Executive Director in TMT Investment Banking at Nomura and M&A banker at BNP Paribas. Top-rated mentor with 300+ sessions. About