When Daniel Khani was a freshman, he watched older classmates interview for investment banking internships a year before their start dates.
Now Khani is a senior, and he’s already seeing freshmen prepare for those interviews. His experience is part of a broader shift: finance recruiting now starts earlier than ever, the pressure reaches into freshman year, and the jobs they’re competing for are shrinking as banks turn to artificial intelligence.
Khani interned at Goldman Sachs over the Summer and received a return offer for a full-time analyst role after he graduates in May. He earned the internship his sophomore Spring, and his interview season ran from January through March, which included an online Hirevue interview, first-round interviews over Zoom and a final-round "Super Day” with multiple interviews across different Goldman Sachs teams.
This is the pipeline many UF students work toward.
The early clock means the work starts before the interviews do. Khani decided to specialize in investment banking in March of his freshman year and began reaching out to bankers to network that May.
"I started networking pretty early, because I realized that obviously UF is a non-target school, so you kind of have to prepare yourself," Khani said.
Non-target schools are universities that lack established pipelines to Wall Street. Schools like the University of Pennsylvania-Wharton and the University of Virginia-McIntire have on-campus recruiting: banks send teams to campus to conduct information sessions, take resumes directly through the schools' career offices and lean on deep alumni networks inside the firms, so students there can land first-round interviews without the months of outreach UF students describe.
By the Fall of his sophomore year, the process had taken over his schedule. Khani was hopping on multiple networking calls a day with current bankers.
Landing an interview at a top firm from a non-target school often requires a senior banker's referral, Khani said, which makes networking with bankers just as important as technical preparation.
"Getting the interview is the hardest part," he said. "There's a million kids with analyst referrals."
His advice for students entering increasingly competitive application cycles: "You got to start as early as possible."
The early application process has become a defining feature of finance recruiting, according to Max Dolinsky, the director of UF's Finance Professional Development program. The goal of the program is to put UF students in front of firms sooner than competing schools, he said.
Post-junior-year Summer internships are the traditional entry into a finance career, he said, but student interviews are more frequently conducted sophomore year Fall, sometimes before a student has even taken a finance class.
Dolinsky said the problem isn't that banks want to recruit students early in their college careers — it's that the jobs start over a year later.
"Contact the sophomores, but then offer them to come work for you this Summer," he suggested to recruiters.
Instead, he said, banks recruit sophomores for internships a year and a half in advance to evaluate their progress in school. Their performance in the internship will then help the firms decide if they want to hire them full-time. Companies are gauging from the start whether the students are worth hiring, he said.
"They're like, ‘OK, let's lock you in,’" Dolinsky said.
But the early timeline isn’t the only way in, Dolinsky said. He watched a graduating senior get her dream role the week before commencement after she turned down earlier offers hoping she’d get the role she wanted, he said.
"Don't change your discipline because you missed the first round," he said. "There's going to be more."
Reena Aggarwal, a finance professor at Georgetown University and director of its Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, said the pressure to get an internship starts almost as soon as students arrive on campus.
"Even though the recruiting might be happening very early in the sophomore year, the interviews, in order to prepare for that, you have to start thinking of it as a freshman," Aggarwal said. "I've only seen freshman year as a time to just get used to campus life and explore. But for so many students, it's like they're caught up in this rat race, implicitly."
Aggarwal warned students not to get too caught up in the pressure. She emphasized breadth over speed, she said, advising students to pursue a minor outside finance because the technical skills looked for in early recruitment are increasingly done by AI.
"A lot of the modeling and stuff — those skills won't be needed," she said. "But the human skills, the analytical skills, people skills — those will always be needed."
A nationwide phenomenon
The timeline isn't unique to UF. More than half of the 180 banks with 2027 summer internship programs posted openings by June 2026. Some elite firms listed positions a year and a half before the internship start date.
Even the executives in charge of the firms have said recruiting has gotten too extreme. The scramble for industry positions continues past college, with companies offering future-dated offers to first-year analysts at competing firms.
In an onstage interview Aggarwal facilitated at Georgetown in 2024, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon called it "unethical" for first-year employees at his company to accept offers from competing private equity firms, even when start dates are up to two years in the future.
JPMorgan tried to curb the early recruiting practice last year with a memo warning incoming analysts they'd be fired for accepting a job elsewhere — regardless of how far ahead the start date — during their first 18 months with the company.
The crackdown was aimed at slowing the race for early offers, and it set an example. Private equity firms Apollo Global Management and General Atlantic paused early recruiting of first-year bankers.
Goldman Sachs adopted a softer version of the policy, requiring junior bankers to periodically disclose future-dated offers. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon acknowledged the system wasn't one he'd design "with students' best interests in mind.”
However, Aggarwal said the companies haven’t really changed the system.
"Jamie Dimon was like, 'You know, this is just unethical, and we're going to put a stop to it,'" she said. "JPMorgan did put a stop to it, and so did Goldman ... But I have a sense that it's creeping back again, at least at some firms."
Are other job markets impacted?
The early clock is no longer just an investment banking phenomenon.
Claire Acosta, a 20-year-old UF accounting junior, is in the Fisher School of Accounting’s 3/2 program, a five-year track that allows students to jointly obtain bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She is currently looking for positions at the Big Four, the largest accounting and auditing firms in the world.
Her parents, both accountants, didn’t start preparing for interviews until their senior years, she said. But Acosta’s recruiting began in October of her sophomore year.
"I think it's kind of, across all majors, definitely gotten earlier," she said.
Despite the stress, Acosta said early recruitment has an upside: time to network and prepare for the role.
“I have a plan, and I know what I'm working towards,” she said. "Now that I have kind of done it for a little bit, I really do like it."
Bella Tanner, a 20-year-old UF economics junior with a wealth management minor, aspires to work for large banks. She reported feeling similar pressure.
She saw banks open applications in January 2026 for jobs that didn’t start until the Summer 2027.
Program alumni told her they hadn't applied until August of their junior years, about 10 months before their internships began — a stark difference from the 18-month timeline Tanner now faces. But it’s a welcome change, she said.
"I don't like being rushed," Tanner said. "I like that it's spread out."
She pointed to retention for driving the earlier recruiting push. Banks recruit early because "they want you to stay in their system," she said.
Still, she said, the timing asks a lot of students who just arrived at UF.
"I think there's a lot of pressure to know what you want to do going into college," she said, calling it "an unrealistic expectation to put on an 18-year-old."
The race is also colliding with a harder truth about what's waiting at the finish line: Banks are planning to shrink the entry-level positions students are competing to fill. Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser said some jobs at the bank "will no longer be required" as AI takes hold of simpler tasks, according to Fortune.
A partner at McKinsey & Company told Fortune junior analyst classes might only be a third of their current size, yet about 62% of the employees banks put into AI jobs started in those same entry-level classes.
Not every firm is downsizing jobs, though. Bank of America told Fortune it planned to bring on about 2,000 Summer interns in 2026. But with most major banks planning cuts, more students are competing for a shrinking number of total internships, and graduates are competing for fewer entry-level jobs.
For Tanner, the message UF drilled into her is the one that holds for the students behind her.
"They were very clear, like, ‘You need to get on the ball,’" she said. “‘I is sooner than you think.’"
Contact Jessie Yang at jyang@alligator.org. Follow her on X @jessie_yang_22.
Jessie Yang is a sophomore studying statistics. She's interested in business, technology, and finance, and is a member of the Caimanes Student-Managed Hedge Fund, where she researches companies and develops investment theses. She's currently exploring a career in investment banking. Outside of The Alligator, she enjoys playing tennis, golfing, and pretending not to struggle on hikes in pretty places.
