A Day in the Life of an Applied Accounting and Finance Student at Fordham

Fordham's Gabelli School of Business at Rose Hill has tons of opportunities for students of all schools and majors. From internships, to clubs, to case competitions, to networking events, there is something for everyone at the Gabelli School. I have taken advantage of many of the Gabelli School's opportunities over my last few years here, and I am continuing to do so now as a senior. In this blog, I will be discussing my experience as an Applied Accounting and Finance major at Fordham. 

Fordham's Beta Alpha Psi students volunteering with KPMG professionals

Majoring in Applied Accounting and Finance at Fordham has been an amazing experience, and has been filled with so many amazing opportunities! I am a part of Fordham's chapter of Beta Alpha Psi (BAP) an honor society for accounting and finance majors. In this society, students have the opportunity to network with professionals from Big Four accounting firms, mid sized accounting firms, banks, and other commercial companies. As a part of our membership, students in Beta Alpha Psi also have the opportunity to participate in fulfilling community service events. My favorite BAP community service event was an event sponsored by KPMG's Family for Literacy last semester. Fordham students went to a public school in Manhattan, and read books to students. The event was a great way for Fordham students to collaborate with accounting professionals while giving back to our community. 

Majoring in Applied Accounting and Finance at 

Fordham has opened the door to so many awesome 

career opportunities! Here's a great picture of me 

at KPMG's National Intern Training in Orlando, FL

Fordham is a great school for accounting majors who want the opportunity to intern and work for large or mid sized accounting firms. Due to Fordham's proximity to Manhattan, many business students can easily intern or work at the firms during the school year or over the summer. Another one of my fantastic experiences while attending the Gabelli School was interning at KPMG for the past two summers. Last May, I also attended one of KPMG's leadership conferences with a select group of students from universities across the country. Next summer, I will return to KPMG to intern in the Audit practice in Manhattan. I am so happy that I chose to attend a school that has allowed me to become involved with so many amazing opportunities related to my major. 

Me at my amazing summer internship 

at KPMG's Montvale, NJ office!

Being an Applied Accounting and Finance student at Fordham has been exciting, challenging, and rewarding. The Gabelli School's extensive academic curriculum combined with amazing opportunities to intern and network with firms has transformed me into a well-rounded, passionate young professional. If you are a prospective student interested in a career in accounting or finance, Fordham will definitely offer you the tools and opportunities to be successful. 

Networking at a Carnival!

Last week, Beta Alpha Psi held an on-campus networking carnival for Accounting, Finance and Information Systems students to network with different firms in an informal way. The club invited a total of 12 companies to the event. Each company had their own carnival booth with a game, where students had to participate in order to try and win prizes. Simultaneously, students were networking with both recruiters and full time workers from the respective company.

The prize I won at the Deloitte booth.

The first company I networked with was PwC, one of the big four accounting firms. Their carnival game was to knock down bowling pins that were stacked in a pyramid with a beanbag. While I didn’t knock down as many as I wanted, I got a nice PwC reusable bag as well as materials about their leadership programs and summer internships.

PwC reusable bag

The other three big four accounting firms, EY, Deloitte, and KPMG were present. In addition, some midsized accounting firms were there, such as McGladrey and Grant Thornton. However, it was not all accounting! Becker, a CPA Review Course Firm was there as well as a recruiting agency and some finance firms, like JP Morgan. This is one of the great things about Fordham. Its location so close to Manhattan allows so many companies to easily come on campus continuously throughout the year to recruit and hold fun events like this one!

Can't wait to wear my luck CPA shirt!

Getting Down to Business with Gabelli

While this blog has recently focused a lot on the incredible resources and opportunities Fordham's NYC location offers students pursuing careers in business, this entry will give you an inside look at what it's like to be a Gabelli student inside the classroom.

While core curriculum is often a dreaded topic and subject of debate across America, Fordham has reinvented the core for business students into what Gabelli calls the Integrated Business Core. Completed mostly in your sophomore year, the integrated business core turns seven of your foundation business classes into fourteen split-semester classes that you take in a cohort each semester. While that sounds like a lot, let me simplify it for you. Instead of taking Intro to Management first semester and Intro to Strategy second semester, Gabelli splits up the classes into segmented classes Management 1 and Management 2, and Strategy 1 and Strategy 2. This way it allows you to integrate what you're learning in management with what you're learning in strategy, because in the real world all functions of business co-exist at once, so why shouldn't it be taught that way? And while on paper this sounds academically strenuous, the bulk of these classes only meet once a week as opposed to two or three times a week like a traditional class.

I also just mentioned how everything is taken in a cohort. For those of you that don't know, the cohort is your group of classes that you have in common with about 25 other students. So yes, just like in grade school, you'll have every class with the same 25 students in each and every class. While this sounds a bit boring and overwhelming, many of my friends, and myself included, love it.  The community feeling you get from taking a cohorted schedule doesn't compare to anything else you'll ever experience in college. 

My dysfunctional IP Team trying to take a photo (I'm in the vest)

Lastly, the biggest component of the cohort and the integrated core is the integrated project, or IP. The integrated project first semester sophomore year teaches you to work as a team, which is a prevalent setting in the business world. At the start of the semester, before classes even begin, there's a huge kick-off where everyone in your cohort is assigned and Integrated Project team and a Fortune-500 company. This sets the tone for the following semester, as your IP team will have to work together by integrating everything learned in your business classes to identify and create a solution for a problem or opportunity within the company you're researching. To make this more exciting, it's all a competition and the top teams at the end of the semester compete against each other in the "Core Bowl", and the winners take home $1,000 as a reward for conquering the integrated core. The IP and the cohort really emphasize teamwork and looking at a problem from every perspective of business, all part of what makes Gabelli graduates stand out from the rest of the crowd!

NYC: Live, Learn, Intern

At colleges across America, an internship is the prize goal of students to bridge the gap between their final two years of school, or even during their final semester. Many students aren't lucky enough to get an internship and are thrown into the "real world" after graduation. This isn't the case at Fordham, in fact it's quite the opposite. With over 93% of students completing an internship, Fordham is a leader in job placement and giving students "real world" experience in and outside of the classroom. After all, it's New York City, why not take advantage of it?

The view from my desk at my internship

This semester, I started my 3rd internship of my college career at a startup called The Vanity Project (TVP). Co-founded by a Fordham Law student, TVP specializes in creating high-quality clothing and merchandise for non-profit organizations, most of which are sponsored by headlining celebrities. Even with my heavy course-load this semester, I'm able to juggle working one full day a week (Wednesday, my day off from class) at our incredible office space in Chelsea, just a 25-30 minute ride on the D express subway train from Fordham's Rose Hill Campus. TVP is a great fit for me because it combines my past experience in retail with my studies of finance here at Gabelli, and it's also a place I feel proud working for because so much of our work goes to supporting nonprofit groups and charities like NoMore, Global Citizen, EQIL, and many more.

Coming into college, I was skeptical of Fordham's career services program, but I've been nothing but amazed with the office ever since I've been here. Going through the college search, all 20 (yes, 20) schools I visited claimed they had the best, but Fordham's landed me two internships in my three semesters here. Career services does everything from helping with résumé building, polishing up LinkedIn profiles, giving mock interviews, career fairs, and everything in between. Landing two internships before my Sophomore year did nothing but shock most of my friends from home, but then again, they don't all have the world's greatest city right at their fingertips.

A collage from the Global Citizen festival in central park.
Global Citizen is one of the many charities TVP makes merchandise for