Gabelli Business Core: Integrated Project

Consulting Cup Trophy

As a senior in the Gabelli School of Business, I am finishing up with my core and major classes this year. One of the key components of students in the business school is the integrated core curriculum. During sophomore through senior years, students are required to take a one-credit class called Integrated Project. This class is especially integrated into all the core business classes during sophomore year as a competition. Students use the knowledge gained throughout their classes to compete in the "Consulting Cup." Students are assigned groups and a company to research, analyze, and present a solution to a current issue the company is facing. Everyone is competing with each other for a cash prize and title of champions.

Consulting Cup winners my sophomore year, 2013

The junior year Integrated Project focuses a lot on financial modeling and also allows students to perfect their excel skills. While there isn't a full competition at the end, it also involves a final group project based on completing a full financial analysis and discounted cash flow of a company.

Simulation program

 Currently I am enrolled in the Senior Year IP. This class focuses on simulation learning. It is a great final class because it applies a lot of concepts we have learned over the past four years into real-life scenarios. Some concepts we have focused on are risk, return on investment, and marketing strategies. The simulations also allow students to make educated decisions that managements of companies have to make every day.

Sample prize!

Each week, we are given a case to read before class and then once we arrive there is a special program we login to in order to start our simulation. We have to input different financial decisions based off of industry and background information generated from the case and program. We see our results for each financial period in real time, as well as how the competitors are doing. Our professor also makes it a fun and friendly competition by giving away prizes to the top four students who generate the most revenue in each simulation!

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!