Curious- why did you post asking for advice? If you’ve already done everything you’ve stated you’ve done, and you STILL have a few more years of HS to go- you clearly don’t need help from a bunch of strangers on the internet!
FYI- you’ve got experienced leaders in the Financial sector reading and responding to your posts- if you weren’t so quick to type “Not sure what more to say” you could learn something helpful here.
Me? I’ve just seen finance wannabees crash and burn with an overly optimistic application list when they learn the hard way that Harvard is NOT “summer camp for kids who want to work at Jane Street” and that Wharton is NOT “the place you go before you land at Citadel”.
At a certain point, the pre-professional EC’s and the amount of money a HS kid has made trading derivatives becomes a negative to an Adcom at Harvard, Penn and the like. I’m going to take your posts at face value and assume that in fact, the professionals at an asset management firm actually take advice from a non-licensed HS kid when it comes to portfolio management and balancing assets. (may be dumb for them to do so, but it’s not my money).
But that doesn’t change reality- MORE pre-professional “gunning for Goldman” EC’s start to work against you. And taking college finance classes before you’ve actually learned what HS is there to teach you means you may have the technical skills (what is the numerator, what’s the denominator) before you have enough academic knowledge to apply those skills in any way approaching sophistication.
You could teach a fourth grader valuation. That doesn’t mean that an M&A team wants input from said fourth grader as to whether a projected acquisition by their client is a good idea or a dumb idea. The fourth grader doesn’t know history. The fourth grader doesn’t understand global political movements. The fourth grader doesn’t know the difference between a cyclical economic downturn and a Black Swan event, simply because you can’t teach this stuff to someone who hasn’t learned about the Civil War or the Spanish flu or WW2 or the Depression or the Cultural Revolution.
You really want to excel in a financial career? Stop doing finance, and start learning history. What did Leonardo Da Vinci know that Elon Musk hasn’t figured out yet?