A Two-Way Street

Now in its 20th year, EY fills an average of 60 internships and full-time positions with Fordham University students and graduates annually, with 75% of the interns coming from the Gabelli School.

“We’re looking for well-rounded students with entrepreneurial skills and enthusiasm, who are always willing to learn, and have strong academic records,” she said.

Such an internship helped Huiling Cai, BS ’21, secure a full-time position with the Big Four accounting firm after graduation. Cai’s education gave her a solid framework of concepts to put in place and the internship allowed her to experience a day in the life of an auditor. “The internship reinforced my plan; it’s exactly what I wanted to do,” Cai said.

Now working as an assurance associate at EY, Cai is embracing the learning curve and thoroughly enjoying her role serving clients in the insurance industry. “I love EY’s business environment, where I have countless resources for development and growth, as well as the support from the people around me,” she said.

A similar opportunity made possible through The Estée Lauder Companies new internship partnership with the Gabelli School also set Bridget Fong, BS ’21, on the path to a rewarding career. Fong had always been focused on the environment and sustainability issues, and realized that she could cultivate her interest into a career when she interned with the organization’s Global Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability team. The group drives the company’s social impact and sustainability strategy, programs, and goals and encompasses everything from expanding ELC’s renewable energy portfolio to engaging employees in volunteerism.

“The internship paired well with my education and definitely solidified that I wanted to work in this space,” Fong said. Her enthusiasm and impressive job performance led Fong to become the first Gabelli School intern to be offered a full-time position on ELC’s Global Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability team. Considering her passion for protecting the environment, the opportunity was a dream come true.

“Following the reports of scientists, it is clear that we need to make changes to the way our societies operate in order to limit the negative impacts of climate change and protect vulnerable populations,” Fong said.“Business is a crucial player in this, and I am passionate about fostering change.”

According to Shea Jameel, director, sustainability, global corporate citizenship and sustainability at The Estée Lauder Companies,, interns have tackled many meaningful projects, such as conducting research on the intersection of climate change and racial justice, developing tips on how employees can make their home offices more sustainable, designing a personal branding workshop for young women of color, and supporting the ESG team on external reporting.

“Fordham interns bring a diversity of perspectives and experiences which provides great insight to our teams, and they are valuable contributors to our work,” she said. Thanks to ELC’s president and CEO Fabrizio Freda, Jameel added, the company has a long-held belief that “leadership comes from every chair, and there is immense value in listening to the voices of the firm’s rising talent around the globe. At ELC, we know the power of diversity and what different points of view and experiences bring to the table; this includes generational diversity, which is why these programs are a key to our shared success.”

In addition to learning by doing in the workplace, Gabelli School students also have opportunities to test and showcase their creative problem-solving skills in several competitions hosted by industry sponsors throughout the year.

For the past three years, for example, students have been participating in competitions staged by the media agency Mindshare. Each event pits teams from business schools against each other to analyze data sets on media viewership, sales, industry trends, and customer relationship management to develop solutions for specific simulated business challenges. Some take the form of weeklong case competitions; others, shorter 24-hour “hackathons.”

Just participating in the competitions gives students valuable experience as they collaborate on the kinds of practical projects they’d encounter as professionals. But winning—as Fordham did in December and February—brings an additional perk: a coveted interview for open positions with Mindshare. Ikechi Okoronkwo, the company’s executive director and head of business intelligence and analytics, and an adjunct faculty member at the Gabelli School, said that partnering with schools like Fordham doesn’t just provide a unique learning experience for students; it’s another, hands-on way for the company to identify promising talent. “Experiential learning pulls out certain qualities from a student that are hard to replicate in a classroom environment,” said Okoronkwo. And, he added, presenting in front of industry professionals creates a healthy type of pressure for participants. “The stakes are high in terms of, ‘Oh, I might get a job’ or, ‘I want to show up well and create a contact with somebody who could become a mentor.’”

Okoronkwo, who got his start in the industry after winning such an event, now manages them for Mindshare. And the recent group of Fordham winners said they appreciated both the chance to compete and the opportunities that still awaited them.

“It can be difficult to find time to network while studying and juggling a lot of different things,” said Ken Coseto, MS ’22, who was on the winning team in a February competition that asked students to develop a pitch for a luxury SUV brand. “So this gives us an opportunity to have a direct line with people at Mindshare.”

His teammate Shambhavi Chaturvedi, MS ’22, concurred. “I think it really helps because, being an international student, I feel that it is already difficult getting into the job market,” she said. “I think it gives me a good edge and boosts my chances. Even getting one step ahead is a big push. It’s good that we have such things in our university that help us get ahead.”

Another competition, sponsored by Deloitte, a long-time, dedicated collaborator with the Gabelli School, also asks students to work as a team—in this case, to analyze decades of data from the NCAA Basketball Tournament to develop a model that predicts future results. Professor RP Raghupathi, PhD, said that March Data Crunch Madness challenges students to take the data-science knowledge and skills they’ve gained in the classroom and apply them creatively, giving them both invaluable experience and a great talking point on future interviews.

The winning team isn’t necessarily the one whose model is the most accurate—fortunate for a tournament known for upsets and underdogs that make it famously difficult to project results—but one that looks at the data in inventive ways and presents its findings in a clear, compelling manner.

“One of our advising deans actually looked at all the participants last summer to get approval for this year’s competition, and found that most of the participants, especially the winners, indeed got positions sooner rather than later, just about at the time of graduation,” said Raghupathi. Asmita Dipak Tamhaney, MS ’22, noted that the competition gave her the opportunity to test the technical knowledge she gained in the MS in Business Analytics program.

“This competition has been like a great internship project experience where you apply various techniques and algorithms learned during business analytics degree courses in a real-world scenario,” she said. “I see this as one of the important steps for my professional growth.”

The Fordham Foundry’s annual Pitch Challenge brings students and alumni together with industry leaders to pitch business ideas, get solid advice—and compete for a chance to win prize money. In six years, more than 500 teams have participated and more than $120,000 has been awarded.

Industry experts support the Pitch Challenge by serving as coaches, judges, sponsors, and members of the Advisory Board. They are venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and executives representing organizations such as BNP Paribas, Brown Brothers Harriman, the City of New York, EY, GE Corporate, and Google.

John Murphy, BS ’90, a recently retired executive vice president and CFO at Adobe, a 2019 sponsor, encouraged teams to present their ideas using Adobe Creative Cloud applications, including the newly launched Adobe Spark. The teams gave feedback on the software, offering suggestions and tweaks.

“Any entrepreneur needs to be able to communicate their story in the most effective ways, and Adobe software enables people to tell their story creatively using innovative types of software products,” he said.

The same year, Brandon Adamson, MBA ’20, won first place for his pitch for BeautiMaps, an all-in-one beauty platform app for clients and service providers.

Adamson said that in addition to judging the competition, industry coaches walked him through the “meat and potatoes” of starting a business. “They spent a lot of time helping students and participants find a better path to make businesses more valuable, more profitable, more applicable,” he said. “They played a good hand in helping people move forward.”

Ingrid He, MBA ’22, who won second place in last year’s Pitch Challenge, agreed that the coaches helped to refine her business idea for her healthcare symptom-tracking app and identify shortcomings. “Being involved in the Pitch Challenge gave me a more well-rounded sense of what investors might be looking for and the metrics they would care about,” she said. “I really had no experience with that. It gave a real-world application of what I learned in classes.”

Trademark attributes of an entrepreneur—creativity, resilience, and figuring out how to do more with less—are the same characteristics employers look for in employees, noted Al Bartosic, BS ’84, executive director of the Fordham Foundry, which hosts the annual Pitch Challenge.

“Corporate sponsorship of our competition events is a win-win,” he said. “It supports the efforts of students and alumni and connects them with people and companies who may be useful in their network. From a corporate perspective, it can help the corporate sponsor amplify their brand with the Fordham entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are always happy to have sponsors who see the value of entrepreneurship and are aligned with Fordham’s cura personalis message.

A shared commitment to corporate environmental, social, and governance responsibility is the mantra of 52 organizations that comprise the Gabelli School’s Responsible Business Coalition (RBC), including PVH Corp., the fashion company behind popular brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein. Beyond the ongoing work of the RBC across industry sectors—which includes frequent CEO roundtables and the establishment of benchmarks and sustainability goals—is collaborative leading-edge research.

The Gabelli School’s partnership with PVH Corp. resulted in eight faculty corporate social responsibility (CSR) grants in 2020 and 2021 for research that is currently underway. One project that was funded through a PVH CSR grant focuses on the media industry and social accountability.

“I started thinking about what it means to be a successful media organization through the lens of being socially accountable and socially driven, not just profit driven,” said Allie Kosterich, PhD, assistant professor of communications and media management. “It’s helpful for faculty to be able to understand how we can best drive these research initiatives and [in doing so] drive best practices for companies to be successful on the social level as well as the business level. The global workforce is increasingly composed of younger generations who are more diverse, more environmentally aware, more socially driven. Given this, interest in what we may call pro-social behavior is much more of a business imperative.”

Being selected for a PVH CSR grant made it possible for Kosterich to explore this topic in depth and submit a paper that is currently under review for publication in a scholarly journal. Professor Sris Chatterjee, PhD, and Nemmara Chidambaran, PhD, from the finance and business economics area also presented a proposal on “Pay-CSR Sensitivity.” “Firms are increasingly using CSR-related elements as part of managerial compensation,” Chidambaran said. “In our research, we are hoping to better understand and quantify these CSR-based compensation elements. Our proposal was selected by the research committee and we are, of course, glad for the recognition.”

In addition to the research fellowships, PVH funded the subscription to the S&P Market Intelligence ESG Package and the MSCI Time Series ESG data for Gabelli School. “Much of the research in ESG uses these databases and it is really important for our faculty and students to have access,” Chidambaran added.