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. 

ILCGB - Living in and Connecting with the Global Network

If you're enrolled in business school, applying to business school, or have any interest in the business world whatsoever; two things have been engraved into your mind -- networking and the global perspective. While the Gabelli School pushes students to study business with a global perspective, Fordham students have unlimited reign when it comes to expanding their studies, whether it be through a club or class like FairTrade or studying abroad for a semester. One option for sophomores wishing to take their professional network to the next level is the Integrated Learning Community for Global Business, or ILC-GB.

Signing in at the European Conference

Located in O'Hare Hall Residential College, ILC-GB combines living with learning as do nearly a dozen other Integrated Learning Communities on the Rose Hill campus. As the name states, ILC-GB focuses on global business, and is open to all sophomore residents on the Rose Hill (even FCRH students may apply!). Like most ILC's, everyone on our wing of O'Hare has one class we all take together in a classroom inside our residence hall. While it technically is a class, ILC-GB is very personalized and focuses on preparing students for networking and attaining great careers and internships as a result. A typical "class" isn't even really a class, and typically consists of guest speakers. These guests are typically Fordham Alumni and have ranged from managing directors of hedge funds to the CEO of Lacoste.


ILC-GB also offers students opportunities to get outside the classroom and expand their network by taking students on trips to special events, like the European Conference at Harvard University. Fordham took care of transportation, registration, and even our lodging expenses at the Revere Hotel. The conference was an incredible experience and a great way to broaden your perspective on how business and politics interact across the Atlantic, and also enabled us to be able to network and converse with MEP's (members of European Parliament) and other professionals involved with the policy of the EU.

A group of ILC-GB residents leaving Harvard

While ILC-GB is a superb experience for sophomores that I would recommend to everyone in Gabelli, Fordham offers three excellent ILC's for freshmen that you can apply for when you apply for housing in the early summer, and more info on those can be found on Fordham's website. 

Gabelli Service-Learning Program

There are countless volunteer opportunities here at Fordham, whether it is through Campus Ministry, the Dorothy Day Center, or various other organizations.  Students even have the choice to volunteer for credit through the service-learning program, whether you are a Rose Hill or Gabelli student.  As a Gabelli student, I have been involved with the Gabelli Service-Learning Program (GSLP) for a couple semesters now.  The GSLP partners with several different local non-profit organizations, giving students the opportunity to help the Bronx community while also developing new business-relevant skills.

Gabelli Service-Learning partner organizations

Participants earn 1.0 credit (graded) upon completion of 30+ hours of community service throughout the semester, 2 reflection papers, and attending a service-learning seminar.  The program partners with organizations that focus on various aspects of business, giving students the opportunity to maximize the experience based on their desired career path.  For example, students interested in accounting are encouraged to sign up for the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program (VITA).  There are also organizations that foster general business skills for students who may still be undeclared.

Fordham Road BID promotional material

My personal experience has been with the Fordham Road Business Improvement District (BID), which focuses on marketing and management.  Volunteering with this non-profit has taught me a lot more about promotion and further developed my communication skills.  During the fall semester, I helped enroll businesses in their Holiday Shopping Discount Program as well as assisted with the preparation and implementation of their annual charity event.  For the spring semester, I am helping to promote events such as Fordham Fever Fridays, movie nights, and sidewalk sales.  No matter where you choose to volunteer, the service-learning program is a great way to gain experience while helping the local community.

2015 Gabelli Consulting Cup

The pinnacle of sophomore year, or even your academic career for some, is the 1st Integrated Project in the Gabelli School of Business. As mentioned earlier in this blog, IP1 takes place your first semester of sophomore year for Gabelli students, and culminates in The Consulting Cup, formerly known as the Core Bowl.

What's at stake: The Consulting Cup & other awards 

The Consulting Cup is the final round of competition for the semester-long consulting project all Gabelli sophomores complete. The sophomore class is divided into 84 teams of 5 or 6 students, who are assigned a company that they must analyze, discover an opportunity for the company, and provide a full-blown implementation plan that they must then present at the end of the semester. The first round happens in December, and those presentations are recorded and shown to the deans and faculty to be narrowed down to the top six that will compete in the Consulting Cup. Whats at stake, you might ask? The winning team takes home $1,000 and gets their names engraved in the actual Gabelli Consulting Cup that is displayed in Hughes Hall on the Rose Hill Campus. The judges for the cup are also high-ranking business professionals, many with ties to Fordham, and all finalists get this excellent opportunity to network with them and prove they can fully analyze a company, create a solution, and effectively present it to a huge audience -- over 100 students, faculty members, and special guests.

My team and our Business Comm. Professor, Dr. LaMarque

My awesome team and I were lucky enough to make it to the finals this year. The company we were assigned was McDonald's, and our unique solution was a subsidiary brand that combined fast causal dining with technology and environmental sustainability. 

Though my team didn't take home first place and the $1,000, we managed to make second place -- which is still pretty impressive. From this experience we gained knowledge across all divisions of the business world, networked with individuals in the field, and made a long-lasting bond as a team that not only worked together but succeeded together.

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

Harry Markopolis

E&Y sponsored the first in series on individuals who had to make tough ethical decisions in their careers. Today, they invited Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos to speak at Fordham. In the beautiful Keating 1st auditorium, Mr. Markopolos overviewed some key give-aways in the made-up statements Madoff used as he "made off" with investers' money. In fact, he said that identifying the ponzi scheme was a simple matter--getting the SEC to listen and take action was the hard part. He explained how many financial institutions turned a blind eye to these blatant misrepresentations because they were receiving such high returns.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Walking through the 5th Avenue Tiffany's store at 7 am, I felt like I was in the movie Sweet Home Alabama when Patrick Dempsey tells Reese Witherspoon, "pick one." The beautiful sparkling diamonds and jewels teased the 40 Gabelli School of Business students as we passed by to the elevators. We were going to meet the COO of Tiffany and Co, a Graduate School of Business alum. The CEO Breakfast series provides student the opportunity to attend breakfast meetings hosted by executives of major firms in NYC as well as the chance to personally interact with successful business leaders. Most of these executives are Fordham alumni.

Inside of the elegant conference room, there were signature "Tiffany blue" folders set out for us. The famous blue book was inside, which is only sent out to 3,000 of Tiffany's most lost loyal customers, as well as a booklet on sustainability and financial information for investors. The COO, Mr. Jim Fernandez, began to inform our group about the company background, expansion plans throughout Europe and Asia, policies on gold and silver mining, new products for the Holiday Season, and financial data. Tiffany & Co is an industry gem because it emphasizes working off of tradition and class while maintaining fair trade practices in all of its work. Mr. Fernandez also provided us with a valuable question and answer session. This was a truly unique experience that I will always remember, demonstrating that the Gabelli School of Business truly goes out of its way to take full advantage of opportunities in NYC. This was a remarkable way to meet a Fordham alumni and hear his first hand perspective and advice for young business students. I plan on participating in many more Gabelli events because I know they are all worth my time and provide valuable insight. The CEO Breakfast series also has events at Goldman Sachs, UBS Financial, KPMP, Good Morning America, and Bloomberg.

Mario Gabelli Visits Fordham

On December 1, Mario Gabelli of the newly named Gabelli School of Business spoke to students on what to expect in the business world of tomorrow and the important roles they will soon play in it.

Read more about Gabelli's lecture at the Fordham eNews Room

A New Name for CBA

Goodbye College of Business Administration, Hello Gabelli School of Business.

College of Business Administration: A New Name for CBA: "There was a whisper around campus about it today. I was told that the Wall Street Journal wrote up a piece about it. In retrospect, I suppo..."