Jaeha LeeNew York

NYU, part 2 of 5

1,000 cold emails

I didn't know anyone in finance. So I wrote to people until some of them wrote back.

2023 – nowStern, Finance, Statistics and Mathematics

Context

The most common path at Stern is finance, and I wanted to see it from the inside instead of guessing about it. I had no network in the industry.

The problem

The usual way in, someone who knows someone, wasn’t available to me. What was available was email.

What I did

Volume

I wrote to people who did the work, at banks, venture capital firms, private equity funds and hedge funds. Over that first year it added up to more than 1,000 cold emails to more than 500 firms, more than 200 of them banks. I kept rewriting the email as I went.

Rejection

Most people didn’t reply. Of those who did, many said no. Over the year that came to hundreds of rejections, plus a much larger number of messages nobody answered, which is a no you have to interpret yourself.

Staying in touch

Some people replied, said there was nothing right now, and were open to staying in touch. I stayed in touch.

What came of it

My first formal internship, at GreensLedge the following summer, came straight out of those emails. My next two roles, at Piermont and at Morgan Stanley, came from people I first wrote to that year and kept in touch with.

  1. Wrote

    1,000+

    • emails to more than 500 firms
    • 200+ of them banks
    • the rest VC, private equity, hedge funds

  2. Heard back

    Mostly no

    • hundreds of rejections
    • far more with no reply at all

  3. Stayed in touch

    • with people who said “not right now”

  4. Came of it

    3 roles

    • GreensLedge, summer 2024
    • Piermont, summer 2025
    • Morgan Stanley, fall 2025
Fig. 1 How a year of cold emails turned into three roles.

What I learned

Persistence is sometimes less about confidence than about being willing to look stupid repeatedly. Every unanswered email is a small, private embarrassment, and a thousand of them is a lot. It gets easier once you stop treating each one as a verdict. Sometimes progress is just being willing to send the next email after nothing happened with the previous fifty.

A cold email also isn’t a one-time shot. The first message is the start of a relationship, and most of the value comes from what happens after it.