If you want to get a job on Wall Street, there are two words that can go a long way towards determining your success: target school.
Think Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Penn, Columbia, and MIT — elite schools where the Wall Street recruiters come to them, trusting that they’ll be provided with reliably bright young candidates.
That means students who attend less prestigious schools may have a harder time getting their foot in the door of the world of high finance. It doesn’t doom their chances altogether, but a confluence of factors can weigh on job prospects: their résumé is less likely to stand out; fewer recruiters, if any, are coming to campus; faculty members may not have a network to draw on; or the right finance and accounting classes may not even be part of the curriculum.
However, some of these non-target students have found an alternative path to the big leagues through an online platform called Wall Street Oasis.
For a $7,000 — or a higher fee of $11,000, which guarantees a job placement or your money back — Wall Street Oasis customers get access to its “Academy,” a series of courses on how to build various financial models. They can also set up mock interviews with Wall Street pros who give them feedback on how to improve their performance. Further, the platform gives you access to a vast network of over 3,000 mentors that you can reach out to.
Founded in 2006 by former banker Patrick Curtis, Wall Street Oasis is perhaps best known for its discussion forums, which give both established and aspiring bankers a place to discuss topics ranging from Wall Street culture to AI use to thoughts on certain stocks.
But the company’s biggest money maker is its Academy, Curtis said, and its customers have largely been successful in finding jobs. Eighty-eight percent of students who finished at least 90% of the courses get hired for a role within 12 months of starting the program, he said.
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The company’s mission of helping students break into Wall Street careers is something personal for Curtis.
“When I joined investment banking at Rothschild back in 2002, I knew I had no idea where I was going. I was a liberal arts major, didn’t have the finance background or anything like that,” he told Business Insider. “There should be a community or a place that people could speak to learn more about these careers and what the actual good path might be for them.”
According to WSO customers who spoke with Business Insider, the fee is well worth it — if only for the networking benefits alone.
Lucius Nguyen, a student at Georgia State University, said WSO helped him land an investment banking internship at Wells Fargo for next summer. He said he connected with a former Wells Fargo managing director through WSO, who told him about the job and what he’d be looking for in an employee if he was hiring.
Another student who used WSO to land a full-time investment banking gig at Bank of America said he was also able to set up chats with people at the bank during his job search.
“I’ve probably spoken to like 10 or 15 people at Bank of America before I went through the interview process,” they said.
Even those who have used WSO to transition out of banking have found the platform’s network useful. Kshitij Galav, a former Nomura banker who attended the University of Wisconsin and now works as a finance associate at a tech startup, said he joined WSO to get coaching for his specific path.
For example, WSO mentors who had taken a similar career path helped him narrow down the types of startups he could look for opportunities at, then pick out who to reach out to at each company, and how exactly to reach out to them.
While buying access to a huge network of bankers is helpful, some have found the academic portion of WSO’s offering particularly valuable — especially if they feel they need to brush up on their financial knowledge, or if they don’t have much to begin with.
Dylan West, who now works at an investment bank, said he studied political science and economics and used WSO to land his first job at an M&A valuation firm.
“I did not take a single finance class,” West said.
