But after two years of living in Jersey City, she felt confident enough to enroll in graduate school at the Gabelli School of Business. When she graduates this month, she will be a very different person.

“The whole experience of Gabelli has been so enriching and so valuable to me, and has transformed me,” she said.

Accounting was a passion for her already; she had worked in the field for five years in India, but it took her a few years before she felt comfortable enough in her new home to consider pursuing it further.

“I thought I should definitely make use of this wonderful opportunity of living here in the U.S.,” she said, noting that three of the big four accounting firms are headquartered in New York City.

Badekila and her husband have made the most of living in the United States. In the four years since she moved here, they have visited 30 states, with stops at national parks like the Grand Canyon.

In addition to her studies, she founded the Gabelli School’s South Asian Business Association (SABA).

“I was very aware of how it feels to live far away from your family and friends,” said Badekila, who serves as the group’s president. “I was really very keen on this concept of building a community inside a bigger community and letting people meet each other and get people from their own countries to talk to each other.”

That community extends to prospective students as well. Badekila has worked with the Gabelli School’s admissions office to send personalized welcome e-mails to prospective Indian students who have been offered admission.

The SABA group organized a Diwali party for more than 150 people in the fall. It was also scheduled to present the first ever Global Asia Conference on March 26, featuring a keynote address from Viral Acharya, Ph.D., former deputy governor of Reserve Bank of India. The event was postponed when Fordham closed its campuses but is tentatively scheduled for next fall. It would have been a part of the Gabelli School’s centennial celebration, and it was expected to draw attendees from around the New York metropolitan area, so Badekila admits she was disappointed it was put on hold. It hasn’t been all for naught though.

“I was able to reach out to all these people in the field and build good relations with them as I was planning the conference. I was able to build my own leadership and people skills, so it was tremendously helpful,” she said.

As part of her studies, Badekila got first-hand experience in the world of New York accounting. She worked on KPMG’s professional practice research team—a project overseen by Barbara Porco, Ph.D., Bene Merenti Professor of Accounting and Taxation, that had Badekila researching fraud in investment banking and capital markets industries. She was also a lead volunteer in 2019 for the annual symposium sponsored by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), a nonprofit organization that sets sustainability accounting standards for the accounting industry.

She he was offered a position at EY that is tentatively scheduled to begin in October.

Badekila said her time at Fordham has expanding her horizons when it comes to the accounting field.

“Accountancy is something which I’ve been involved in the past several years, but I was not very familiar with classes like forensic accounting, sustainability research and reporting, or data analytics,” she said.

“These were really new topics to me, which I found really fascinating. I could never have imagined that these kinds of topics are a part of accounting.”

Porco said Badekila was always willing to invest enormous energy in projects she was asked to join.

“She approached each one of them with enthusiasm, professionalism, dedication, integrity, and in many ways, incomparable acumen,” she said.

“To me, she is the personification of the type of individual you would hope would be assigned to your team. We can teach students how to do journal entries, we can teach them how to do tax returns. You can’t teach attitude though, you just can’t. That’s what she brings— this inspiring, enthusiastic, contagious attitude. It engulfs everyone that works with her.”

Badekila credits people like Porco and Lonnie Kussin, assistant dean of advising and student engagement, with helping her adapt and thrive. She also said she’s grateful for her husband’s support, noting that he’s pushed her “into achieving more and dreaming bigger.”

“I come from really a very humble background. If I was still living in India, I wouldn’t have even thought of doing a master’s, but after living a couple of years here, my husband and I decided we just save enough for me to get a master’s here,” she said.

It was a gamble they decided to take together, and while there were times when she wasn’t sure if it was worth the effort, she’s confident now that it was the right move.

“I’m ready for anything,” she said.

The Center for Professional Accounting Practices (CPAP) nurtures interdisciplinary collaborations among policymakers as well as accounting, auditing, tax, and forensics professionals through informative research, workshops, lectures, and conferences.

“We really want to be a catalyst for change and a think tank for considering information,” said Barbara Porco, Ph.D., a clinical associate professor of accounting and taxation and co-director of CPAP.

With an emphasis on research of current practical relevance and cultivating partnerships with distinguished advisers and professionals who are engaged in innovative work, CPAP is primed to be on the front line of change in the marketplace. This approach will also allow the center to bridge the gap between academia and the accounting profession.

“Our goal is to reflect what’s happening in the practice,” said Stanley Veliotis, Ph.D., associate professor of accounting and taxation and co-director of CPAP. “If we’re just talking to our own students, then we’re talking to ourselves. This is an opportunity to get the word out to people who are also practicing accounting.”

Last fall, CPAP hosted “OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project and International Corporate Tax Avoidance,” which highlighted changes in the international tax system and the tax planning techniques of global companies. The panelists included notable accounting experts Greg Ballentine, Ph.D, a former associate director of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Management and Budget; Reed College professor Kimberly Clausing, Ph.D, an award-winning researcher on international taxation and tax avoidance; Manal Corwin, KPMG LLP’s national service line leader for international tax; and NYU Law professor Mitchell Kane, a former clerk for the Honorable Karen LeCraft Henderson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Though CPAP is in the early stages of its development, its directors said it has the potential to create impact by promoting engaging discussions, not just about current tax issues, but also about auditing and assurance, fraud, financial analysis, and sustainability reporting. According to Porco, these practices tend to overlap, but have traditionally been examined separately in academia. CPAP hopes to change that.

“Accounting professionals have to understand data analytics and how information is processed in order to audit and provide assurance,” she explained. “They also have to understand how the data is stored, communicated, and transferred.”

Porco said a holistic approach to accounting would enable practitioners to confidently cultivate financial, environmental, and social growth—or a “triple bottom line” for their clients and organizations.

CPAP is equally committed to furthering conversations about the latest strategies for detecting fraud and best practices in fraud prevention, which can ultimately take the profession to new heights.

“The center is a breeding ground to talk about things that can lead to improvements and policy changes in the profession,” said Veliotis.

Two of this year’s graduates—Andrew Santis, who is receiving a bachelor’s of science in marketing with a concentration in global business, and Stephanie Ballantyne, who graduates with a dual master’s degree in public accounting and taxation—have worked, lived, and studied in more than a dozen countries between the two of them.

To Ballantyne, the global bent at the Gabelli School felt like home. Born in Germany and raised in Switzerland, she completed her undergraduate degree in accounting finance at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and then worked for Deloitte Zurich before coming to Fordham.

The move was challenging, she said; but then, having attended an international high school and traveled as a student to the likes of Egypt, Russia, and Greece, the challenge was a familiar one.

“I’ve always had culture shock happening at some point or another, but I grew up knowing I’d have an international lifestyle,” said Ballantyne, whose credits include president of the Gabelli School’s Accounting and Tax Society and chief operating officer of the Finance Society.

“I like New York,” she said. “Switzerland is a bit more laid back—they start work earlier, but also leave earlier, and on the weekends their phones are turned off. For someone starting their career, it can seem a bit slow.”

The New York pace has suited Ballantyne. She interned at Deloitte in Manhattan last summer, and by August she had secured a full-time offer.

“It was a big change, coming here—especially because I started at Fordham in 2014 during the polar vortex. There were about two snow days per week, which made it hard to meet people,” she said. “But overall, Fordham was definitely the right choice.”

For Santis, a native New Yorker, it was a study tour to Spain during his junior year that sparked his passion for global business—but his real adventure began when he returned home to his internship at Cardwell Beach, a digital marketing agency.

“My boss knew how much I enjoyed Madrid, and in March he called and said they wanted to offer me compensation for my work, which would be to send me abroad to work for the summer,” he said. “It didn’t even have to be Spain—I could choose any country I wanted.”

His options boundless, Santis chose a multi-city tour of Europe. He began with a week in Paris, and then joined up with fellow Gabelli School students for a summer semester program at Fordham’s London Centre. After London, he continued on to Germany, where he spent a week each in Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich.

In the mornings Santis explored the city, and in the afternoons, once his New York colleagues were at the office, he worked on creating buyer personas for Cardwell Beach.

“It was definitely a test of strength and character,” Santis said. “I learned a lot about myself by venturing out to another part of the world on my own.”

Both Santis and Ballantyne have jobs lined up following graduation. Ballantyne will continue with Deloitte in Manhattan, and Santis will take a full-time position at Cardwell Beach (a position for which he will craft his own title and job description).

“Fordham prepared me well,” Ballantyne said. “All the opportunities are here—you just have to take the initiative to go get them.”

To the women of the Gabelli School, though, it’s business as usual.

“The environment is open here,” said Rosa Romeo, a clinical assistant professor of accounting and taxation, who is the faculty moderator of Fordham’s chapter of Smart Woman Securities (SWS).

“There’s a tone at the top that as long as you do the work and you get the grades, you can accomplish what you want. There is no ‘you can’t do this because you’re a girl’ sentiment. You want this role—go for it. You want this internship—go for it.”

One needn’t look further than SWS to see this attitude in play, Romeo said. A nonprofit organization with chapters on 21 campuses around the country, SWS focuses on investment education for undergraduate women. The Gabelli School’s chapter is among the oldest—Fordham and Yale, which launched in January 2009, were the third and fourth colleges to form chapters following Harvard, where SWS originated, and Columbia.

“SWS is definitely shaping my experience at Fordham,” said Lauren Kelly, a sophomore finance major who joined SWS during her freshman year. “It’s about mentorship, building networks, and educating others. Basically, it’s an environment of women helping women.”

With more than 50 active members, SWS is one of the largest clubs on campus. Each new recruit is paired with an upperclassman member, who serves as a mentor in anything from club activities to classes to internships to interviewing.

“We encourage people to go for coffee with their mentors, to not be afraid to ask questions,” said Erika Schwartz, a junior accounting major and the chief operating officer of Fordham SWS. “The business world is competitive, so we emphasize supportiveness and being there for one another.”

Throughout the year, the group offers numerous educational seminars for its attendees, covering themes from résumé building to investment minutiae. Their cornerstone activity is an investment project, in which the students learn to research and analyze stocks and present their recommendations to a panel of judges.

In December, a group that included Elizabeth Fonger, a junior at Fordham College Rose Hill, Lorem Basile, a sophomore at the Gabelli School, and Kelly took their stock skills to Boston for the national SWS stock pitching competition. The group pitched Lululemon, and came in second place, behind Harvard.

“I think I’ve gotten a lot opportunities [from SWS]and have been the beneficiary of good mentorship. And I’ve been able to then pass that on to younger members,” Kelly said.

As chief development officer for SWS, Kelly recruits speakers for the group’s annual Women in Leadership Conference, which takes place this year on April 8. In past years, the group has hosted speakers such as Barbara Desoer, CEO of Citibank, N.A., and Andrea Jung, former CEO of Avon Products, as well as Fordham alumnae MaryAnne Gilmartin, FCRH ’86, president and CEO of Forest City Ratner, and Patricia David, GABELLI ’81, global head of diversity for J.P. Morgan Chase.

Their talks—which draw both male and female students—are reliably empowering, Kelly said. Last year, Liz Ann Sonders, GABELLI ’90, the senior vice president and chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, spoke about her business education at Fordham and the successful career that followed.

“Someone asked her why she wanted to go into finance, and she said to us, ‘I just thought it was the coolest thing ever to be a woman on Wall Street.’ We all loved that!” Kelly said.

“[SWS] isn’t only about education and building a network. It’s about smashing the perception that there aren’t women in senior-level positions in the business world.”

“Business is, in many ways, still a man’s world. So, if you’re a woman, it is more important to project knowledge, to be curious and confident,” said Donna Rapaccioli, PhD, dean of the Gabelli School. “To this end, there are opportunities around every corner at the Gabelli School for women to learn and to take on leadership roles.”

The business world has come a long way in working toward gender equality, Rapaccioli said. Still, in many areas there remains a “subtle bias” both about women’s ability to fulfill high-level roles and their interest in pursuing such roles in these male-dominated, high-intensity environments.

“What will finally eliminate this bias is a critical mass of extraordinarily talented women surprising the field—planting a stake in the ground in areas where people expect to see men,” Rapaccioli said.

“Our female students are these women. They are making me extraordinarily proud now, and I cannot wait to see what they are accomplishing when they are 25, 35, or 50.”

Natasha Rimba, GSB 13, graduated from the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. So when it was time to look for a college, she didn’t have to look far.

Rimba, a native of Flushing, Queens, knew she wanted to stay in New York City, and she liked the Jesuit model of education. So she enrolled at Fordham College at Lincoln Center with visions of law school in her head.

She had a change of heart her sophomore year though. Accounting, which was offered nine miles north at the Gabelli School of Business at the Rose Hill campus, was calling.

“I’ve always been fascinated by numbers. Math was one of my strongest subjects when I was in high school, and I was also inspired by my father,” she said.

“He’s been working in the field for more than 20 years and he loves what he does as accountant.”

Although it meant she would spend an additional year working toward a degree, and would lengthen her commute from Flushing to as much as an hour and 45 minutes, Rimba never regretted making the switch.

Rimba said her decision to major in accounting was like eureka moment, and she fully embraced it through extracurriculars such as ALPFA, (Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting), where she served as treasurer while at Fordham.

In the summer of 2011, she attended the ALPFA-KPMG National Audit competition in Anaheim, California and at a career fair there, she landed an interview with the accounting firm Deloitte.

That led to an internship at the firm a year later, and now that she’s graduated, cum laude, she has a position waiting for her at the firm in October. Her summer days are now dedicated to studying to become a certified public accountant.

“I pretty much stay home and study all day,” she said.

“Only ten percent of the people who take the C.P.A. exam pass the first time around, so if I can pass two of them before I start working full time, that would be great. But if not, I don’t think I would be that disappointed.”

She plans to specialize in taxation, which she found she was good at after participating in the PriceWaterhouseCoopers xTAX competition her junior year.

“No matter what I want to do, whether I decide I want to do accounting, or maybe open up my own business, it’s very useful to know the tax law,” she said.

The internship that she parlayed into her current job was beyond valuable. Fordham’s Career Services Department was instrumental in her efforts too, helping her gain an internship at the accounting firm KPMG, which she turned down in favor of Deloitte.

“I don’t think I would have been able to get a job, or even an internship at the “Big Four” if it wasn’t for Fordham,” she said.

“All of my friends who majored in accounting were able to get a job or an internship at the Big Four. I think if you major in accounting, you shouldn’t worry about not having a job after graduating.”

“For most of my projects, I just open up academic journals, flip through them and find something interesting,” he said. “And I keep reading and then think ‘I could do something about this.’”

That “go-wherever-things-are-interesting” attitude has led Shon, an assistant professor of accounting in the Fordham Schools of Business, to a wide variety of projects.

His recent research has touched on insider trading, research and development (R&D) expenditures, the effects of market sentiment on sell-side analysts’ credibility, and option-trading strategies around earnings announcements.

His most recent paper, “Insiders’ Sales Under Rule 10b5-1 Plans and Meeting-or-Beating Earnings Expectations,” co-authored with Stanley Veliotis, Ph.D., assistant professor of accounting and taxation, will appear this year in the journal Management Science.

Shon and Veliotis examined data to determine whether company CEOs actively engaged in efforts to meet or beat earnings expectations when there was a pre-commitment to sell their equity shares. Rule 10b5-1 was instituted by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2000 to allow company heads to sell stock without raising suspicions of insider trading, by letting them pre-commit to selling a set number of shares on a date in the future.

“[We] flip it on its head and say look, if CEOs pre-commit on the front end to selling their shares, they’re just more likely to go out of their way to make sure the stock price increases at the time they need to sell,” Shon said.

“We ask, ‘Are CEOs more likely to meet or beat earning expectations if they pre-committed to selling shares beforehand?’ And we find what is perhaps pretty obvious to some critics—which is that they are.”

Shon and Veliotis confirmed these suspicions by analyzing data collected by a private firm from forms that executives file to indicate that they plan to execute a trade under Rule 10b5-1.

And while the data are clear, the “take” on such practice is two-sided. One camp says that “CEOs are fleecing all of us, including the shareholders,” he said.
“The other camp says ‘Look, for every dollar they’re getting compensated, they’re adding 10 dollars to shareholder value, isn’t that what you want?’ There’s a valid argument on both sides.”

The machinations of the stock market are of particular interest to Shon. In 2010, he published “Do Stock Returns Vary With Campaign Contributions? Bush versus Gore: The Florida Recount,” in the journal Economics & Politics. In 2009, the Journal of Accounting, Auditing, and Finance published his article, “Are Earnings Surprises Interpreted More Optimistically on Sunny Days? Accounting Information and the Sunshine Effect.”
When it comes to establishing a connection between earnings reports and the weather, Shon said he wasn’t surprised to find a slight “bump” in earnings, as psychology literature is full of examples of how people tend to commit fewer suicides and tip better when it’s sunny outside.

Not every investor is so easily swayed by outside conditions, though. Shon found that smaller, less sophisticated ones, such as those who make small trades on eTrade, were more likely to be affected by sunnier weather.

“It’s not the sophisticated Warren Buffetts of the world. And even if the less-sophisticated investors do bid up the price of a stock, the magnitude is quite small, like one percent higher than they should be,” he said.

“So if the stock price is $101 instead of $100, in the next two or three days, you find that extra dollar that shouldn’t have been there anyway gets eaten away at, by essentially the smart money.”

Shon’s latest paper, “Temporary R&D Cuts and Meeting-or-Beating Earnings Expectations,” which he co-authored with Meng Yan, Ph.D., assistant professor of accounting and taxation, addresses another curious phenomenon that is often timed to help meet or beat earnings expectations: the cutting of R&D expenditures.

When a company is at risk of falling short of its earnings expectations, it’s not uncommon for it to cut R&D expenses as a means of boosting profits.
“This is preposterous, right? How can you stop the long-term viability of your company just to meet some earnings number? But it has been documented by Fortune 500 CEOs’ comments in surveys,” Shon said.

In the paper, Shon and Yan measure whether a company is merely slashing R&D costs to make up for a short-term fall in profits, or if the cuts are a symptom of a larger problem.

“One of the best ways to predict whether R&D will ramp back up is to look at when [a company]cuts R&D. Did it just meet or beat their earnings expectations? Because if it just met its earning expectations and it [simultaneously]cut R&D, there’s a really good chance that it cut their R&D to meet those expectations.

“Those are the guys that are going to ramp back up,” he said.