“I’m not coming from a background where my entire family is doing finance,” he said. But some of the other students, he noticed, had been exposed to the fields of corporate banking and hedge funds because of their families’ experience in the field.

So Li, an international student originally from Shanghai, decided to learn everything he could from his classmates—from etiquette to insight into how financial markets work. Many of them, he said, began interning as early as freshman year.

“They had their part-time career, part-time jobs—and I was kind of jealous, honestly,” he said. “So that really pressured me a little bit, but at the same time, it encouraged me to do a better job.”

He continued applying throughout sophomore year, and landed an internship at Aflac. Around that time, he also began working with Jennifer O’Neil, associate director of career advising in the Gabelli School’s’s Personal and Professional Development office, who helped him improve his resume and tell his own story better.

“Before he even came to see me, he had gotten his first internship at Aflac and he did a great job of [not just]taking…an internship but leveraging his foreign language skills and coming up with an idea to penetrate the Chinese business community for [Aflac’s] products,” O’Neil said. “He’s just always thinking outside the box.”

This thinking allowed him not just to add an internship to his resume, O’Neil said, but “add value to Aflac in a way that another intern couldn’t.”

O’Neil said that her biggest role was helping Li take the skills he had acquired from Aflac, his work in school, and other hobbies and showcase them on his resume to highlight his unique interests, which extended beyond finance and academics. His first year on campus, he auditioned for the Fordham University Choir.

“When I went to the audition, I did not expect that it would be for this formal University choir,” he said with a laugh. “I thought it was a club, somewhere that could give you some kind of lesson—Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, something like that.”

Li said that he was the only one who hadn’t been singing since high school or middle school, but after the director took a chance on him, he decided to stick with it for all four years.

“I learn very quickly. I think that’s one of the things the director [saw in]me” he said.

It’s that dedication that helped him land a summer internship his junior year with Bank of America as a fulfillment, service, and operations analyst.

“I was lucky enough to get a return offer from them,” he said.

After Li graduates, he’ll be starting as a full-time corporate banking analyst at their headquarters in Shanghai.

“I will be covering multinational corporations’ subsidiaries that are operating in Asia, in China, who have a revenue of $2 billion and above as well as some local corporations,” he said.

O’Neil said, often international students have to work hard to overcome some of the challenges they face, such as language barriers or lack of familiarity with the country. Li was a great example of how that hard work can pay off, she said.

“I tell a lot of the international students—get on the treadmill next to your American counterparts and put the incline on 10 and put the speed about two miles per hour faster than them, because that’s how much harder you’re going to have to work,” she said. “And he did it.”

Li said that he was grateful for the support from Fordham faculty and staff, like O’Neil, as well as the unique education Fordham offers.

“Studying in the city at Fordham Gabelli, you’re able to talk to people from all over the world; being able to emerge from such an environment has definitely broadened my horizons and given me more insight from different people of different backgrounds.”

On Oct. 3, representatives from five of the most innovative companies in the world came to Fordham to give students a peek into the ways they constantly reinvent themselves.

Part of the second annual American Innovation Conference held at the Lincoln Center campus, the company presentations were followed by an awards ceremony that honored the top social innovators from the American Innovation Index, the only survey in the U.S measuring company social innovativeness based on customers’ experiences. It drew students and faculty from both Fordham and elsewhere.

The survey was launched last year by the Gabelli School of Business, the Norwegian School of Economics, and market research firm Rockbridge Associates. The top five companies in this year’s survey were Apple, Honda, Weber, Toyota, and Amazon; on Thursday, students heard from representatives from Toyota, IKEA (sixth on the list), John Deere (13th), Stanley Black & Decker (17th), and Aflac (18th).

Lerzan Aksoy, Ph.D., a professor of marketing at the Gabelli School of Business, said the rating is meant to provide value to companies, because the ones that are viewed by their customers as socially innovative achieve unique advantages in loyalty and word of mouth that ultimately contribute to long-term marketplace success.

“Because the Social Innovation Index is based on customer perceptions, it has a high level of objectivity and market validity,” she said, adding that when it’s used along with internal-metric evaluations, it can help provide a fuller picture of a company.

The Toyota Way

Brian Kiser, a vehicle product training specialist at Toyota, said his company stays innovative by following the two pillars of “The Toyota Way”: Kaizen, which is Japanese for continuous movement, and respect for people. The firm, which views itself as a mobility company, is particularly proud to be a leader in the production of electric vehicles, and Kiser said it plans to make an electric option available on every one of its cars by 2025.

He also predicted the company’s new Guardian accident avoidance system will help prevent collisions. The system, which will be available next year, detects potentially dangerous situations and “amplifies” human control, to prevent, say, a teenage driver from over-steering while avoiding an obstacle.

“Guardian coordinates the skills and strengths and the machine. The joy of driving is still real though as it’s an inherent and important part of the experience,” he said.

Listening to Customers

Maria Møllerskov Jonzo, a customer experience knowledge and insight leader at IKEA, said that her firm operates from the understanding that 80% of its customers’ satisfaction comes from their experience shopping for an item, while only 20% comes from the actual product. Since city dwellers are the company’s largest growing customer base, IKEA has begun opening outposts within city centers that are much smaller than the nearly 400,000 square foot big box stores it has traditionally occupied.

Most important, she said, is to listen more to customers, understand their experience, follow up, and act on their complaint. As she explained this, Jonzo displayed a screenshot of a complaint from a real customer, with certain sections highlighted to show where the company could learn valuable lessons.

“When we listen to the customer, we can actually know what’s going on, because they will tell us everything,” she said.

182 Years of Innovation

Mark Moran, director of technology and information center at John Deere, framed the 182-year-old agricultural, construction, and forestry machinery company’s mission as a simple one: Feed more people with better food. Two-thirds of its business comes from the agricultural sector, and it’s been able to innovate through a fervent embrace of technological breakthroughs. For instance, its most advanced tractors are capable of using GPS to determine where they are, down to the inch, even though GPS was not originally designed to be that precise. That enables the company to do things like deploy artificial intelligence to differentiate individual weeds from plants, and then spray only the former.

The company has also spent $1.8 million on its “Dollar for Doers” program, which provides funds to charitable groups that employees choose to volunteer for, he said. It all ties into the company’s ethos of “doing things right, and doing right for all of our constituents,” said Moran.

Helping Children with Cancer

Buffy Swinehart, senior manager of social purpose at Aflac, drew oohs and awws forth from the crowd when she showed off the insurance company’s therapeutic robot ducks, 5,700 of which it has sent to hospitals around the country. The ducks are designed to provide comfort and entertainment to children who are undergoing treatment for cancer. Cancer insurance was the first product the company offered, she said, and in the last 24 years, it has committed $136 million to research on pediatric cancer. Aflac and the firm it partnered with spent 18 months interviewing 82 patients about what needs a duck could meet; its unveiling represents a new way of helping a vulnerable population.

Experiment with Purpose

Mark Maybury, chief technology officer at Stanley Black & Decker, offered a personal note of thanks for his company’s award, noting that former Fordham professor Raymond Schroth, S.J., FCRH ’55, married him and his wife 34 years ago. Like John Deere, he noted that his firm has a long history of evolution, and although it still makes iconic brands like Craftsman tools, it has also branched out into areas such as electronic tags that identify newborns and their mothers to ensure they don’t get separated. The secret to innovation, he said, is to observe carefully, listen deeply, think outside the box, and experiment with purpose.

“I think it’s critical to recognize that the Ignatian philosophy of being men and women for others is embedded in the social good that’s a focus of these awards, and it’s particularly humbling to be recognized not only as an innovative company, but also one that’s dedicated to the social good,” he said.