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. 

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!

The Smart Girls Group: an Incredible Fordham Experience

Over the past two years, I have been asked many times about the best part of Fordham. My answer has always been, and always will be, the people I have met here. The people at Fordham are some of the most driven, inspiring, caring people i have ever met. One of my friends is an incredible example of this spirit within the Fordham community. One of my good friends Emily Raleigh, a sophomore in the Gabelli School of Business, founded her own company two years ago as a senior in college, and it has flourished.

Emily Raleigh, Gabelli School of Business Class of 2016, and founder of the Smart Girls Group

I feel incredibly lucky not only to know Emily, but also to work for her company the Smart Girls Group. The Smart Girls Group is a social enterprise dedicated to empowering the next generation of influential women. The Smart Girls Group has campus chapters, online classes, an online magazine, and an international sisterhood. The Smart Girls Group's office is located at the Fordham Foundry, a small business incubator just outside Fordham's Rose Hill campus. The Foundry helps student entrepreneurs, like my friend Emily, get their small businesses started. 

With the Smart Girls Group, I serve as the Deputy Editor for our monthly magazine, the Smart Girls Guide. One of my main duties as the Deputy Editor is to read and edit every article before it gets published in the magazine. I also review the magazine one last time after it has been put together to catch any last-minute mistakes or typos. With this job, I get the opportunity to work with the incredible girls of the Smart Girls Group staff, and collaborate with them on ideas how to further the company and make a bigger impact on the rising global community of driven young women. 

A past issue of the Smart Girls Guide magazine

Being a friend of the founder of the company, I have an inside look at what it is like to work in a social enterprise, which is what I would like to do post graduation. Emily inspires me, and many others, every day, and she is one of many students at Fordham who are doing incredible things to change the Fordham community and the world. But these students working to change the world are often doing so very quietly, and you may not know about it unless you know them personally. Dinner conversations with Emily have come to include pitching new ideas to better Smart Girls Group, planning collaborations and sponsorships with powerful people and companies, and discussing crucial issues of feminism, like whether Beyonce or Sheryl Sandburg is more inspiring. The definitive answer to that question was never decided, but we concluded they're both very important in their own ways. 

Human Resource Internship at Cohen & Steers

Last spring, I applied for several summer Human Resource internships through Fordham University’s career portal as well as online job posting sites. After several resume submissions along with several phone and on-site interviews, I finally landed not one, but five internship offers!

So, which one to choose? Each one had its own benefits – all were paid, but they were all in different areas of NY or NJ and specialized in different sections of HR. In the end, I decided to accept the internship offer at Cohen & Steers for several reasons. First, this internship opportunity allowed me complete a variety of human resource functions that I had not yet been exposed to - tracking and processing FMLA leave, running and analyzing reports, and processing verifications of employment requests. In addition, Cohen & Steers ran a brown-bag lunch session twice a week where all the interns would eat lunch together with an employee from one of the departments. I had the opportunity to learn about the trading, finance, internal sales, and institutional marketing departments, to name a few. In addition, I was able to befriend the other interns- two of which were also Fordham students!

I feel extremely fortunate to have been offered an internship with Cohen & Steers. Continuing the internship throughout the school year has allowed me to continue to learn new HR functions and prepare myself for a career after graduation.  

Study Abroad Fall 2011 in Rome, Italy

This past fall, I studied abroad in Rome, Italy through the University of Chicago- John Felice Rome Center (JFRC). I always knew I wanted to study business in Italy, so choosing a program was not a difficult task for me. The JFRC allowed me to take five classes that Fordham would accept, offered orientation programs to help students get acquainted with each other and the foreign country, as well as promoted traveling.

The JFRC was home to two hundred other students from across the US. Here, I made many friends and traveling buddies, who I have continued to keep in touch with since returning to the States. As many study abroad participants will detest, there has not been a day since I’ve come home where I have not thought about my time abroad.

Immersing into Italy’s culture was at first a challenge, yet at the end, extremely rewarding. My high school Italian knowledge was quickly put to use, as I was always using the language to ask for directions, buy bus tickets, and pay for meals. I learned patience waiting for the buses, the ability to organize my schedule around a country that does not work on Sundays, and most of all, a love for gelato.

My favorite part about being abroad was the opportunities I took to travel. Not having class on Fridays, I maximized my weekends traveling throughout Western Europe with friends I met at my program. I visited cities such as London, Dublin, Paris, Munich, Barcelona, Milan, and Florence. I even went on a ten day study trip with my program traveling in Athens and throughout the different Greek Islands.

I became more independent from my traveling. Not only was this my first time traveling alone, it was also my first time abroad. It was exciting, yet scary, planning trips without the consent of my parents. This experience makes me eager to continue my travels abroad.

Deciding to study abroad has been the best decision I have made at Fordham so far. I will always remember the places I traveled, the things I learned, and the people I met. Luckily, Fordham’s International and Study Abroad Programs (ISAP) office was helpful and provided me with dozens of brochures, the opportunity to meet with ambassadors from different programs, as well as helpful guidelines about making the most of your time abroad. I definitely recommend studying abroad!

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

Learn all about it! Fordham's Integrated Learning Communities

Fordham students at the Rose Hill campus can choose from a variety of residence halls intentionally designed to pursue their goals, which integrate our renowned intellectual tradition with experience-based learning. We call these special places Integrated Learning Communities (ILCs) and the number and quality of these ILCs are expanding.

Texas native and International Political Economy major Jean Beagle shares information about The West Wing ILC for Ignation Leadership and Civil Service while sophomore and business major Alexandra Anello thinks globally with a little help from the ILC-Global Business.

And be sure to check out Fordham's Freshmen Integrated Learning Communities here.