Hi, I'm Patrick Curtis, CEO and founder of Wall Street Oasis.

This is a chat with Aaron, another WSO Academy alum that was able to break into investment banking at Wells Fargo coming from Northeastern.

He joined the program his sophomore year and he shares why networking through the academy gave him such an advantage.

Enjoy. All right, Aaron, thanks so much for joining us today.

Yeah, of course.

It's a pleasure.

So I'd love to you to give the listeners that kind of short summary bio of kind of where you came from. Yeah, absolutely. So my name's

Aaron. I'm now 30 year at Northeast University. Originally from Nashville, didn't know anything

about finance, but got to Northeast and realized when I were to pursue finance, and that's

how I found in Walshita basis. Cool. So talk to me about some people are familiar with the co-op program. Some people are not. So if you could just give a quick summary of kind of what that is and then kind of where you were when you found us and how you were feeling kind of near the beginning of your, because I guess you guys northeastern, was it like suddenly, oh, I want banking or I want finance? Or was it more like I'm exploring because you do a little of BC or you know, you're like the bias. You're kind of just learning a little bit, right? Yeah, no, definitely. I think, yeah, I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to do finance until like pretty deep into my freshman year. So I missed out. Oh, you know, like maybe doing the right clubs. I did have a VC internship that I really liked, and that's sort of what pushed me into

going into finance.

So maybe I can take a step back and explain the co-op program first.

So Northeastern has something that's sort of unique to the Northeastern and a few other schools

in the country, where instead of doing like summer internships, we do six-month-long internships with companies. So we'll go and like fully integrate, not take classes for that period and work for a company for six months. And we do that twice in our college career. So you pretty much have one year of working experience before you come out of school. And I came to Washington Reuases at the summer of my sophomore year because I was going to start recruiting for that sort of co-op program right as school started.

And I was pretty scared because I hadn't sort of, you know, taking the right accounting classes.

I hadn't done the, you know, freshman networking that a lot of people spend time doing.

I had that BC experience.

I really wanted to figure out, like, was I

ready and, like, in a sort of position to myself for recruitment? And yeah, and I think, you know, so far, it's worked out pretty well. And Aaron came to us. I remember you, I remember thinking, on our first call, I'm like, he'll be fine. He's super sharp and driven. Even though you're a little bit later. I think the great thing about the Northeastern program is for people who are a little bit

later, it kind of allows that pause. I know this is much more common. Like in Canada, they do this all the time. Like it's the off cycle internships, a little bit in the UK as well. But for the U.S. it's a little bit less common. But talk to me about kind of what you landed initially. So you had a BC1. Talk to me

about like what you were thinking about and how you kind of once you joined Academy, what you

started working on right away. Yeah, definitely. I think, I guess the journey was pretty interesting.

...