Now that the celebratory dust surrounding commencement is finally settling, the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) deserves a shout-out for some impressive recognition it received recently.

Each year Fordham’s Executive MBA program is recognized by Poets and Quants magazine, as the program climbs its way up the magazine’s ranking of rankings list.

“It’s based on performance on other rankings so it’s very interdependent,” explained Francis Petit, Ph.D., associate dean of executive programs. “So if you keep doing well on other rankings, like Financial Times or Bloomberg, it’ll have positive effect.”

Poets & Quants ranked the program 39th worldwide, up from 41 in 2013, and 42 in 2012. Petit cited the program’s international emersion elective as key to its success.

In addition, CEO Magazine ranked Fordham’s EMBA as a tier one program.

Another big win for GBA came directly from one of its students. MBA student Michael Hartigan took first place in this year’s All-America Student Analyst Competition sponsored by Institutional Investor magazine.

The competition brought together more than 2,100 students from over 81 universities, to trade $100,000 in virtual money. The four-month contest scored students in the same manner as any major investment house would to assess their own employees.

“Michael took a very solid approach from constructing a sound portfolio of three stocks that he felt were uncorrelated and took calculated risks,” said Robert Fuest, an adjunct professor at Fordham and the faculty advisor for students in the competition.

“He understands the difference between a good company versus a good stock; sometimes it could be a good company, but it’s a bad stock. And he gets that.”

In addition to Hartigan, seven other MBA students made it into the top 100 contenders, making Fordham the leading school in the competition.

“Part of what we’re doing is giving students practical experience and discussing business as it is in real life, not just theoretical,” said Fuest, who is also the COO of Landor and Fuest Capital.

“I think that taking a clinical aspect to learning is critical. They do it in law, they do it in medicine, and they do it in some business schools. This competition helps us to do that here.”

In its final installation of panel discussions for the school year, the Fordham Wall Street Council invited three heavy hitters in finance to participate in a conversation on gender and corporate leadership on April 25. Heidi Miller, Ph.D., former president of J.P. Morgan International, joined Cathleen Ellsworth, GBA ’93, managing director and chief marketing officer for First Reserve Corporation, and Rae Etherington, GBA ’94, managing director of BNY Mellon Clearing, LLC.

The event, sponsored by the Graduate School of Business Administration, took on a more casual tone than some of the council’s previous events, which often veered deep into policy or theory. Not that the participants weren’t well versed, they simply weren’t there to talk about that. Etherington said she’s usually called on to talk about CAT bonds, not glass ceilings.

The room overlooking Central Park at the New York Athletic Club, once an oak-paneled bastion of male dominance, was filled with to near capacity with women.

None of the panelists started with a leg up in the finance industry. Both Etherington and Ellsworth talked of humble beginnings, with both their fathers on the police force. Etherington taught French in small town in Idaho, while Miller began her career with a doctorate in history from Yale.

“The question I’m often asked is ‘How does someone with a Ph.D. in history become the CFO of what was then the largest bank in the United States,'” she said. “I’ve always found that question somewhat puzzling, as I myself have described my career as inadvertent, meandering, and spontaneous.”

Miller said that if such an answer doesn’t satiate audiences looking for something a bit more concrete, she could offer up “Heidi’s Top Rules to Live and Work By.” Advice, she said, that could be taken regardless of gender…

1. Only work for people that you respect.
“You don’t have to like them or have dinner with them, but you do have to respect them… Bad bosses are to be avoided at all costs… Insecurity in a boss means that their only desire is to shine only themselves and consequently they won’t give you the opportunity to shine independently.”

2. Take jobs that are enjoyable, not just the one where you think you need to learn something.
“Sometimes someone is great at marketing and they think they better learn finance, and then get stuck in those finance jobs and fail…  I benefited from being in areas that were less sexy than others. It was in those marginal areas that people didn’t flock to that gave me an opportunity to do more than someone at my level might have in another area. I remember when I went into emerging markets everybody was into leverage buyouts. Leverage buyouts were crowded with every alpha male in the bank. But as a consequence I was able to take on roles that were well beyond my qualifications at that moment.”


3. It’s not the name of the organization that you are asked to work for; it’s what you do.
“Go somewhere and work with people, whether it’s a blue chip or not, and work where you’ll have a breadth of opportunity. It’s not the name on the door, it’s what you do. Again, big companies fail. It’s much more important to develop your skills.”

4. Work with supervisors to clearly define your job, how your success will be measured, and where it will land you.
“Take control of these

6. Cultivate your network.
“Collect business cards. Even if you’re not searching for a job, find out what they do. Ask them what makes them successful in their jobs. These are conversations that people love to have, they love to talk about what they do. This becomes part of your network. I don’t care if that takes ten or twenty years, that network will hold you in good stead… Stay in touch and build your organic network.”

7. Take risk.
“Sometimes a woman who applies for a job will have a resume that has 90 percent of the experience needed to qualify for that job, but the conversation will focus on the 10 percent that disqualifies them. Women are reluctant to jump that experience gap and claim they can do it. A guy comes in and his resume is just the reverse, and spends that time in the interview and sells the gap.”

8. Set your limits and articulate them clearly to your boss and yourself.
“Burnout is real. We have limits; we have families, and community interests. If we deny these other interests in our lives, we often get resentful and reach a point where we can’t do the job.”

9. Find your own style, your own voice, and your own authenticity.
“You have to do it your way. If you’re looking and reading every book and trying to figure out ‘What’s the way I have to look in order to be successful?’ Well, if it’s not comfortable, it’s not going to be right.”

10. Be flexible. 
“Sometimes you’ve got to roll with the punches, industries change and you’ve got to be prepared to change as well. You’ve got to be open to doing different things. Business is great because you are constantly learning and you constantly need to reinvent yourself. There are so many different things to do under this umbrella of finance.”

In a separate and final piece of advice for women, Miller quoted former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who said, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help women.”

For many New York City public school students, the idea of going to college is a unique goal. But the idea of going to graduate school might be utterly foreign.

“A lot of these kids aren’t even aware that you can go back to school after college,” said Julia Zangwill, president of the Fordham Graduate Marketing Society at the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA).

Before coming to Fordham, Zangwill worked with Publicolor, a nonprofit whose gateway program transforms schools into welcoming environments by getting the student volunteers to repaint their institutional-looking environments with upbeat colors and murals. On Saturday, Jan 25, Zangwill and her fellow society members donned painter’s cloths and chipped in to help at Public School 50 in Manhattan.

An important upshot of the project is that the grade school students get to meet and work with graduate school students. With 15 GBA students on hand, the kids got some one-on-one time that opened their eyes.

“Wow, you must love school,” seemed to be the initial reaction the students had to hearing how much time can be spent studying after high school, said Zangwill. But that quickly changed when they heard that that their fellow painters were business students.

“The kids were joking . . . asking about what stocks they should buy,” said Zangwill.  “They knew the lingo.”

The GBA’s Graduate Marketing Society aims to enhance the educational and professional experiences of students and alumni of the GBA marketing program. On Thursday, Jan. 30 they will hold their capstone event when they host a career panel on entertainment marketing. Click here for more information. 

Michael Sansarran, GSB ’13, former Corrigan Scholar, Nicole Campiglia,
FCLC ’13 former Corrigan Scholar, Matthew McDonnell, FCRH ’14,
current Corrigan Scholar, E. Gerald Corrigan, Maygan Anthony, FCRH ’14,
current Corrigan Scholar, and Mark Espina, FCRH ’16, and current
Corrigan Scholar. (Photo by Bruce Gilbert)

—Patrick Verel

Gen. Pace was appointed the 16th Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. armed forces, in 2005.

Twenty-six students from around the globe attend the Graduate School of Business Administration’s (GBA) 3 Continent Master of Global Management (3CMGM) Program. The courses are taught on campuses in Belgium, India, and the United States. While this is all made possible by air travel, the carbon footprint of so much commuting became a source of concern for students, so they set out to plant a few thousand trees to mitigate the problem.

Planting a few thousand trees is no easy task when there’s masters-level coursework to complete. But as the students are training to be global business managers, they sought out a global management solution to solve the problem.

Antwerp Management School in Belgium and the Xavier Institute of Management in Bhubaneswar, India, have already hosted the students for the yearlong program. The cohort arrived for the last leg of their journey at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in May.

As physically planting the trees was an impossibility, the group decided to partner with WeForest.org, a Belgian-based NGO specializing in tree planting. They created an off-shoot called WePlant.org. After sowing the seeds of the operation in Antwerp, they planted their first tree in India this past the spring. On August 1 the group will promote the program here in New York City.

The students mined the program’s three locales for unique regional responses to the initiative. Belgium had the NGO. The advantageous conversion of dollars to rupees meant more trees could be purchased in India, thus making India a logical place to plant the trees. The August 1 event will no doubt prove media-savvy New York as the perfect place for promoting the program. But the problem of global warming is hardly limited to three regions.

“Pollution is the same in any part of the world,” said student Aditya Prasad Kola. “As we are part of a global community we are obliged to clean up our mess.”

The trees will be planted on the Sirumalai Hills in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Kola, who is from India, added that as a developing nation, India has very high pollution levels, making it “a perfect place” for the initiative.

The way the program works is that students ask companies to buy trees from WeForest to offset their own carbon foot print. For each tree that companies buy from WeForest, WePlant gets a tree of their own. The trees cost about $1.50 each.

The students calculated that they produced 130 metric tons of CO2 emissions through intercontinental air travel. To eliminate their footprint, they’ll need to plant about 4,300 trees this year. After four years the trees will have matured and the footprint should be eliminated.

The students have already sold more than 750 trees, bringing the total number of trees to more than 1500 so far. The ultimate goal of planting 8,600 trees would create one full time job and three temporary jobs in India.

The students said that plotting out the success of the program fed into their coursework.

“Completely detached from the environmental aspect, is that by working on this project we’re also developing our skills and knowledge when it comes to fundraising and project management,” said student Ahmed El-Jafoufi.

All of the students said they expect the experience to affect the way they do business in the future.

“With governments cutting their budgets, it’s a good time for the companies to step in and help,” said student Phillipe Surmont, adding that it’s also good business. “If I have to choose between two brands and one takes responsibility for certain issues, I’m going to choose that brand.”

“Many students who are from family businesses want to strike out on their own, but it’s important for them to put to look at these business opportunities pragmatically,” said Howard.

Howard, who works on special projects for the Graduate School of Business Administration, is putting the final touches on a Tuesday, June 4 symposium,Turning the Family Tree into a Money Tree. The Fordham Institute for Family and Private Enterprise will host the event, through Fordham Accelerator for Business, in the 12th-floor Lounge/E. Corrigan Conference Center at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

Two family-owned businesses will be on hand to discuss their companies’ challenges and successes. The Fabrega Family has restored an historic building, transforming it into a successful “eco-fairy castle” hotel. Solen and Habibe Altop will share their stories as women running a successful bed manufacturing company in a conservative patriarchal environment in Istanbul, Turkey.

The keynote speaker will be Sarah Hemminger, Ph.D., founder of the Incentive Mentoring Program. While most of the speakers will focus on traditional family structures, Hemminger is interested in non-intentional families that might choose to support someone from a broken family unit, such as teachers who band together to help a student struggling due to problems at home.

“Hemminger’s innovative thinking bridges cultures and households,” said Howard. “It is healthy mentally, physically, and economically and it’s really the wave of the future.”

To register for the symposium click here.

Here’s a video of Hemminger giving a TED talk about her work…

“He was quite a force,” said David Gautschi, Ph.D., dean of the Fordham Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA), where Filonuk served as first vice chair of the Board of Overseers. “Over the three years that I’ve been here his interests have really expanded.”

A managing director at BNY Mellon, Filonuk lent his considerable expertise to several GBA projects, helping to launch the Fordham Innovation Fund and taking an active role in GBA’s career services. He served as an adviser to the school’s quantitative finance program and arranged for internships for some of its students at BNY Mellon. In 2012, he helped lead a group of quantitative finance students in a research study that was published in the Journal of Fixed Income.

Filonuk spent three decades at BNY Mellon, including six years in Brussels. He brought a global perspective to his work on the internationally focused Fordham Consortium and was active on the Fordham Wall Street Council. He also supported the work of the entrepreneurship programs at the undergraduate Gabelli School of Business and brought BNY Mellon executives into the activities of GBA’s Fordham Accelerator for Business.

A Connecticut resident, Filonuk earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1977 and his M.B.A. in finance and economics from GBA in 1983. He met Fordham Trustee Ed Stroz, GSB ’79, through his service on the GBA Board of Overseers, which Stroz chairs. The two had lunch together a few weeks after meeting.

“We ate at a French restaurant in Manhattan, and Bill impressed me as he spoke fluent French with the waiter,” Stroz said. “GBA benefited greatly from Bill’s contributions. He was a perfect gentleman in his manner with people, and he was a true executive in his approach and the rigor he brought to our work.

“He wanted to give something back to Fordham, and to assist the people he knew he could help,” Stroz said. “I will miss him greatly, and so will Fordham.”

Gautschi called Filonuk’s death “a tremendous shock and loss.”

“This man was gentle, caring, generous with his time, very, very smart and thoughtful, and probably one of the most gracious people I’ve ever met,” he said. “We’re very interested in doing what we can to keep his spirit alive.”

In honor of their colleague, the Board of Overseers, the administration, faculty, and staff of the Graduate School of Business Administration have established the William Filonuk Jr. Memorial Scholarship at Fordham GBA. Those who wish to contribute may do so at www.fordham.edu/onlinegiving (Select “Graduate School of Business Administration” and “GBA Annual Fund” from the drop-down menus. Under “Additional Gift Instructions,” please type “William Filonuk Jr. Memorial Scholarship.”). Checks may be made out to Fordham University/William Filonuk Jr. Memorial Scholarship and mailed to Mary Ann Routledge, Director of Development, Graduate School of Business Administration, Fordham University, 888 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10019. For more information, contact Mary Ann Routledge at [email protected] or 212-636-7184.

Filonuk is survived by his wife of 35 years, Susan Elizabeth Filonuk; his son, David T. Filonuk, of Pittsburgh, Pa.; his father, William Filonuk Sr.; and his brother, James Filonuk, James’ wife, Jo-Anne, and their children. A memorial visitation will be held on Monday, June 3, from 4 to 8 p.m. at the Hoyt Funeral Home, 199 Main St., New Canaan, Conn.

“We continually innovate our EMBA program and we are doing so by offering additional international elective courses,” said Francis Petit, Ph.D., adding that the program offered an elective course in Istanbul, Turkey in April and will be offering a similar course this July in Galway, Ireland.

Poets and Quants placed the program at 41 worldwide, and CEO placed the program among their Tier 1 rankings.

“We’re always honored to recieve a ranking, it helps keeps up our momentum,” said Petit.

Kaushik Basu, Ph.D., chief economist and senior vice president for development economics at the World Bank, received a doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa, and gave the keynote address at the diploma ceremony for the Graduate School of Business Administration, held Sunday, May 19, at Avery Fisher Hall. 

A Paean to Reason and Empathy

I want to begin by expressing my deepest gratitude to Fordham University for the invitation to give this year’s commencement address and for conferring on me the Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa. Being an academic and a researcher, I cannot deny that few honors match the satisfaction that comes from getting recognition from one of the leading universities of America. Thank you, Fordham.

An invitation to give a commencement address is a carte blanche to the speaker to inflict unasked for advice on graduating students. A nobler person may have resisted the opportunity. I will not. This also means there will be collateral damage on unsuspecting faculty and family who may have gathered in the auditorium. But to deflect the charge that I am inflicting this speech on others’ family, I have brought along with me to this event not only my children, daughter-in-law and wife, but also my mother-in-law. So, in case you too have brought your mother-in-law to the commencement and she complains, you now have a line of defense.

Dear graduating students, congratulations. You are about to go out into a big, wide, exciting world. There will be trials and tribulations. There will be periods of elation and also days of feeling down and low. On such days try to remember that life is full of uncertainty and that this cuts both ways.

I did my schooling at St. Xavier’s in Calcutta (now called Kolkata); then I went to St. Stephen’s College in Delhi for my undergraduate degree. Those were blissful years when I managed to delude my parents into believing I was studying. I moved on, geographically, subsequently but consider myself to have remain firmly rooted in the fraternity of St. Xavier’s and St. Stephen’s.

My academic interests were kindled in London, where I went for graduate studies. In 1975, soon after starting my PhD at the London School of Economics, I applied for the Young Professionals Program at the World Bank. I was delighted to be short-listed and flew to Paris for the final interview. There was great excitement among my friends and family. I did not get the job. What I did not know then was that this was one of the luckiest breaks in my life. I turned to research and discovered a passion which I had not realized I had in me. That is what I mean by uncertainty cutting both ways.

The lure of research, I have to admit, has little to do with the desire to do good and help society. It is driven mainly by an urge to aesthetics and pursuit of beauty in nature. For the researcher, research is an end in itself, akin to the creation of music or art. The benefit to society can be large but it is usually a by-product of this creative urge.

In my case, when nearly four years ago, I went into policy-making that was an act of sacrifice; I had to tear myself away from research and my total absorption with deductive reasoning to trying to make a contribution to the world around me. Though I did go into it in a spirit of deliberately trying to do good, telling myself “enough of self-indulgence”, in its own way the life of a policymaker has turned out to be fulfilling.

Drawing on my own experience let me give you, graduating students, some advice. I want to talk to you, in particular, about the art of reason and the importance of compassion.

One faculty we all possess and is the most under-utilized of human faculties is reason. Any good economist will tell you that good policy must be evidence-based. This message has now sunk in. All treasuries, ministries of finance, central banks and important international organizations have legions of researchers who collate data, and dissect and analyze them. Where we have deficiency, however, is in the use of reason—plain deductive reasoning. I believe there are huge gains to be made if our decision-making is not just evidence-based but also reason-based—more so than has been the case thus far. Moreover, this is true not just for national level policymaking but in the conduct of our personal lives.

Reasoning is a strange skill. Truths uncovered by reason have a magical quality. Pythagoras did not hit upon the theorem named after him by collecting evidence on right-angled triangles from around the world, but through pure thought. Bertrand Russell had once remarked that mathematics is a profession where you cannot tell apart a person at work and a person asleep. This is true for all kinds of deductive reasoning. And unlike mathematics, deductive reasoning is an art available to all. We must simply learn to hone this skill to think and use it well.

People in search of happiness read self-help books, seek counseling, practice meditation, and get medication. What they do not use adequately to battle the blues is the power of reasoning. Reason can’t solve all your problems but it can play a large mitigating role.

The first rule of reason is honesty. There are situations in life where kindness and concern for others make us hold back on certain kinds of speech. That is as it should be. Speech can hurt as much as physical violence. If the latter is wrong, so must be the former. But to ourselves, in our minds, we should practice the utmost honesty. Honesty in thought may be inconvenient but in the long-run it helps.

Consider what we are often told—that if there is a will, there is a way; with sufficient determination, we can achieve anything. But to believe in this you have to suspend reason. And my advice is don’t. There are things in life which through sufficient determination you can achieve; but there are also things which no matter how hard you try, you will never get. It is best to see this clearly and realistically and then make your own choices rationally. You will make better decisions.

Second, it is important to be modest about our knowledge and to know how little we know. There have been prominent philosophers in history, from Pyrrho of Elis some 300 years B.C., through Sextus Empiricus in the second century A.D. to David Hume in the 18th century, who have been skeptics in the sense of being deeply aware of the frailty of human understanding. There are important traditions in oriental thought that belong to the same tradition. The ancient Indian philosophy of maya and some early Chinese poetry capture this exceedingly well. Here is a famous poem from the 3rd century BC, attributed to the philosopher Chuang Tzu: “Once upon a time I dreamt I was a butterfly. Then I awoke. And now I do not know if I am a man dreaming I am a butterfly or a butterfly that has fallen asleep and dreaming I am a man.”

I would not recommend that you take this philosophy to the extremity to which some of these philosophers did. Pyrrho, it is believed, walked past a fellow Greek philosopher who had fallen into a ditch, without making any attempt to rescue him; and later explained that he could not be sure that the philosopher would be better off outside the ditch than in it.

Do not take skepticism to such extremes. But practiced in moderation, it can actually be liberating. To be aware that what we see with our naked eyes can be illusory stands to reason and can be a source of calm.

Third, when you get angry and upset with someone, in your personal or professional life, try to understand that people are products of their history, life experience, and environment. Once you learn to reason about the causes of human behavior, this will come naturally. This is not incompatible with taking steps to stop people from acting or speaking in certain ways. You can have distaste for certain actions but not for the actor. And let me assure you that to learn this art is to take a big load off your shoulder.

The art of empathy and compassion is related to a well-known axiom of welfare economics. This is called the principle of anonymity and refers to the need to treat individuals with the same respect, irrespective of their name, race, ethnicity. It asks us, when dealing with people, to pause and think “if I were you.” The principle of anonymity has been used by prominent philosophers, like Immanuel Kant. But I can do no better than to introduce you to this idea by quoting someone who, in my opinion, is the greatest living economist in the world, Kenneth Arrow. Arrow had quoted the epitaph of Martin Engelbrod to explain this principle.

Here lies Martin Engelbrod
Have mercy on my soul oh God
As I would you if I were God
And you were Martin Engelbrod.

Rooted in the same principle is Gandhi’s famous advice. When in a dilemma about which action to take, think of the poorest and saddest individual you have known—nothing else about that person matters—and do what will be better for that person.

Compassion and empathy do not have any contradictions with reason and have reach beyond. This principle of empathy—being able to understand and reach out to people who look different from you—can make the world a better place. And this should not be a difficult art. Once we look a little deeper, beyond our superficial differences, it becomes evident that we human beings have similarities that transcend race, religion and ethnicity. This is no surprise because we all share the same genetic roots, from the people who set out from Africa some 70,000 years ago and settled all over the earth. I know it sounds sentimental and moralistic but it is true, that for one group to turn against another is for siblings to turn against siblings. There should be no place for that.

And if that is not persuasion enough, there is a selfish reason for compassion. Curiously, compassion can be empowering. It enables us to deal better with other people and so ends up being a source of our own strength, joy and, in the end, happiness. Whether you become an academic, the CEO of a corporation or a stock trader, do not abandon empathy for those with whom you interact.

I have gone on for a while, giving you reasons for greater happiness in life. I will not prolong this further because of one last reason—giving too many reasons can be self-defeating. They can nullify one another. An old tale illustrates this well. A man charged in court with inflicting violence decided to persuade the jury with a profusion of reasons. So he argued, “Here are three reasons why I should be acquitted. First, I was out of town on the day of my alleged crime. Second, my religion prohibits the use of any form of violence. And, third, he hit me first.”

On that note I draw my lecture to a close. Thank you.

There was an array of countries represented when the Fordham International Students Association (FISA) of the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) gathered on the rooftop garden at the Empire Hotel on May 16. Students from Zambia mingled with others from Saudi Arabia and China.

Outgoing FISA president Clare Mwange Mukolwe, who is from Zambia, welcomed the families of graduating GBA students, many of whom traveled thousands of miles to come to New York for commencement.

A few of the students drew stark comparisons to their home countries’ manner of educating business students.

Hind Al Bakri said that as a woman in Saudi Arabia, she had to sit behind a screen during class lectures. Being able to talk to her Fordham professors face-to-face was a new experience.

Others drew distinctions in regional business styles. Eric Li said New Yorkers are a bit more aggressive in business than the Chinese, though he added that traditional Chinese humbleness seems to be morphing into a more international assertiveness, a notion that Kelsey Qianqian Si agreed with.

“Everywhere it’s aggressive in business,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s London, Shanghai, or New York.”

Quinqian Si, a native of Shanghai, is FISA’s incoming president. Chinese nationals like her represent 30 percent of the GBA’s incoming class of 1764 students. It’s a distinction that Dean Gautschi drew attention to in his welcoming remarks.

“We see China as a friendly place,” he said, before adding that fostering an international profile will be key to GBA’s future. He noted regions of the world that the school is focusing on include China, the Indian Subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, Europe, and the Middle East.

Mukolwe said that once the international mix comes together at Fordham, it looks a lot like New York City. She added that even within the club’s Chinese majority, the differences are not nuanced, but are quite distinct with China’s regional differences adding to the overall diversity.

“It’s not a melting pot, it’s more like a tossed salad, we bring all of our cultures together and everybody contributes to the taste,” she said.