During his many past engagements with students, Gabelli has told them that he likes to hire candidates with a Ph.D.—meaning “poor, hungry and driven,” which he proudly claims as being part of his own background growing up in the Bronx. But this time, he referred to Ph.D.s as being “passionate, hungry, and driven.” To illustrate this point, he cited the story of a Gabelli School student from China who took the initiative to travel to Connecticut where Gabelli was meeting with clients at a function.

“He came to Greenwich where we were having a meeting for our clients, and asked for a job—and I said, ‘You are exactly what we want: passionate, hungry and driven.’ And we hired him on the spot.”

He added that this particular student understood one of his oft-repeated mantras. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get,” he said, referring to what he calls his “11th Commandment.”

Gabelli learned early on that hard work and perseverance pay off. He went from working as a caddy at a local golf course to investing in stocks from the age of 13 to graduating from Fordham and earning an MBA from Columbia University Business School in 1967—as well as being enrolled in (but never attending) the Ph.D. program at NYU.

After a career of almost 10 years on Wall Street as a sell-side analyst, Gabelli launched his own firm in 1977, GAMCO Investors, which now manages more than $30 billion in assets.

Obstacles Can Yield Opportunities

During his presentation to the Class of 2026, Gabelli hit on several investment “I” buzzwords, including inflation, interest rates, infections, invasions, infrastructure, and incomplete energy policies. While he acknowledged some level of international turmoil, he assured students that current global economic challenges would give way to major opportunities over the next 10 years.

During the Q&A segment that followed, students persisted in voicing their concern about international affairs and market volatility. One asked about the looming European recession, to which Gabelli responded, “Stop worrying about recession. You have recessions every three or four years, so what?”

He did acknowledge that countries such as Germany are facing a rough winter due to Russia cutting energy supplies, but he also focused on potential positive responses and results.

“The good news about high energy prices in the United States and Germany is simple: They’ll come up with an accelerated way to make renewables,” he said. “They’ll come up with [innovations in]wind, solar, fiber, and battery storage support. They’ll accelerate that.”

Remaining Current and Focused

Gabelli noted that ultimately, the concerns of the past have been met with a “massive increase in innovation” and that students should seek out opportunities through research.

“The topics in 1965, 1985, 2005, aren’t going to be the same as in 2025, 2045,” he said. “You are going to have the best time over the next 20 years with the world of the digital revolution.”

He also stressed the importance of working hard.

“Work from five to nine when everyone works nine to five and just read everything that you can about anything that you do, whether it’s investment banking, sales, marketing, or product innovation,” he recommended.

Toward the end of the program, one student revisited the concept of the 11^th commandment. “You said the 11th commandment is ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get,’” he stated.

“Yes. You don’t get it if you don’t ask,” responded Gabelli.

“So, someone has to ask,” the student replied, “do you think I can come work for you three years after I graduate?”

“Ah, see you asked the wrong way,” Gabelli answered. “How about, ‘I would like to learn the disciplines of your firm and serving customers. And I’d like to join you tomorrow,’ not in three years. You’re going to change your mind. You’re going to get rich in between. Why not tomorrow?”

“Do I have a chance to rephrase my question?” the student asked.

“Yes! That’s a smart guy, instant thinking,” Gabelli responded. “You know how to reach me.”

From August 18 to 26, the students visited Buenos Aires, Argentina, as part of a monthlong onboarding process that emphasized camaraderie, academic excellence, and helping the less fortunate.

Julita Haber, Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor of communications and media management and director of the full-time MBA program, said this year’s trip, which followed three weeks of orientation both on campus and remotely, expanded upon previous years’ trips, when students did consulting work for local nonprofit organizations. This year, they also brought goods with them to donate to charities and devoted a full day to community service, helping to refurbish a shelter for homeless children.

Serving Local Charities

The three nonprofit groups they worked with were Mensajeros de la Paz, which runs residential homes and daycare centers for underserved children and the elderly; Pilares, which works alongside the families living in precarious settlements in Buenos Aires; and Educar y Crecer, which designs, implements, and evaluates high quality educational programs for children living in vulnerable situations.

“This year, we enriched their involvement and touched on their emotional connection with these populations,” she said, noting that after interviewing the heads of the NGOs about issues such as human resources and marketing, students then presented their findings in person at the NGO’s headquarters.

“Emotionally, students felt a lot more compelled to tap into a social innovation space and do things that open up their ability to give back, which I think is important for MBAs.”

Argentina isn’t the only place the students are traveling; in March, MBA students will travel to London to work with for-profit companies. Both trips are part of a program that emphasizes a global outlook, personalized leadership development, collaboration, rigorous curriculum, and business with purpose.

Forming Tight Bonds

Kostapanos Miliaresis, a member of the class who created to a spreadsheet to track the unassembled bicycles, sheets, towels, rain gear, and other items that the cohort brought with them to donate, said the trip resonated a great deal with him. The mission of Ethelon, the company he co-founded seven years ago in Athens, Greece, is to connect companies with volunteer opportunities. He decided to get his MBA to explore new opportunities, and Fordham’s designation as a Changemaker Campus convinced him to move to New York City. The trip was a great bonding experience, he said.

“We have all these get-to-know kind of gatherings, but when you spend all this time together, you really get a better sense of who someone is,” he said.

Hermann Rinnen, a native of Dusseldorf, Germany, said the trip exceeded his expectations. A 2013 graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Rinnen said he enrolled in the MBA program to strengthen his accounting and finance skills. He was part of a team that addressed human resource management at Mensajeros de la Paz, a project that enabled him to share insights he’s gleaned as co-owner of a family-owned logistics company, Rinnen GmbH & Co.

He said he considers the group’s donations and the service work to be even more important than the consulting projects.

“With the consulting project, we also benefitted from it, not just the organization. We were able to grow and apply knowledge and insight. But doing the community service opened my eyes to how important community work is and how important it is to pay attention to people,” he said.

“I think it was a really great experience to have one day of this kind of community work, I could have done it two or three more days.”

Haber said the trip, which was the third of its kind, has proven to be an excellent bonding experience. This year, the group was treated to a reception at the home of new Fordham Trustee Dario Wertheim, GABELLI ’91. Wertheim also earned an MBA at the business school, and is currently the director of Grupo Werthein, a firm whose portfolio includes mass consumption, energy, insurance, agribusiness, real estate, and technology.

“By having our students travel together, we are actually creating cohesive cohorts,” Haber said.

“That cohesiveness is something that distinguishes us from other, larger MBA programs.”

But shortly after graduating and accepting an offer from a master’s degree program in music, she realized she was taking the wrong path.

“It sounds like an apocryphal story,” Edelman admits, “but I woke up one morning and said, ‘I’m doing the wrong thing.’ So I took the GMAT, applied to Fordham, and started going to business school at night that September.”

She was attracted to Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business because of the University’s culture, which the 1980 grad describes as “scrappy, diverse, with no pretensions. And you can still feel that now.”

Two years after enrolling in Fordham’s MBA program, where she concentrated in marketing and operations research, she got a job in marketing at Avon. Over the course of 25 years there, she worked her way up through several marketing and product development positions and later led the sales organization and global supply chain—until she ended up in IT. “I had not written a piece of code since I had been in the seventh grade,” she laughs, “but they felt I understood the Global IT area well enough to run it while we recruited a CIO.” She fell in love with the job and ended up as senior vice president and chief information officer for eight years.

She left the company in 2008 to deal with family matters and, for flexibility, decided to focus on expanding her positions as a board member for two public companies. But she was soon recruited as vice chairman at Emigrant Bank, which Fordham founder Archbishop John Hughes helped establish. The bank’s values and ethos have a lot in common with those of her graduate alma mater, Edelman says, noting that both were founded to support Irish immigrants. And, she adds, she loves working for an organization whose “footprint is primarily in the community.”

“It almost seems like, no matter who I meet, if I tell them where I work it’s like, ‘Oh, I had my first mortgage with you,’” she says. “It’s terrific to see the values and legacy of the bank in action.”

Edelman especially enjoys using the diverse experiences and knowledge she’s gained to support young women as they begin their own careers, something she does often with her own daughter, Julia, now a first-year law student at Fordham, and her friends.

“I’m close with several of her friends,” Edelman explains, “and I’ve met with several of them often, either helping them write resumes or coaching them on how to handle work situations that sometimes get political. Early in my career I had terrific mentors, people who explained the dynamics that weren’t apparent to a young person starting out in the workforce. And that was tremendously beneficial to me. So I have a great time with her friends, soaking in the stories, and helping them if I can.”

Though sometimes, she says, they already know exactly what to do. “I’m so impressed with this generation. Sometimes they tell me the situation, and I just ask what they think they should do next, and they’ve got it. They just need to hear themselves speak it.”

She hopes to touch on some of these themes during her keynote speech at next month’s second annual Women’s Philanthropy Summit at Fordham, which will be held on October 24 on the Lincoln Center campus.

“Part of what’s important for women and women’s development,” Edelman says, “is leadership, not only in terms of your professional life but your full life.”

This generation of young women, she says, “is focusing on supporting each woman’s personal choice, on self-reliance and independence, which I think is positive. So a focus on personal principles is important.

“We’re in a world right now with a lot of mixed signals. So individuals who have a constancy to them, a set of beliefs, an inner strength—they are going to prevail and lead.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
I am most passionate about my family and our extended family of friends. I’m very fortunate that both my parents are still alive, and I’m very close with my sister and brother. And then there’s my daughter, Julia, and her friends and their parents. We are loving, close, together constantly, and help each other navigate life.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
It came from a friend in the form of a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Because the reality is that, in business and in life, there often can be multiple “rights.” But if you operate in a way that’s consistent with your values and with what you really believe, you can’t look back with regret. Everything may not work out, but you have your integrity.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
In New York, it’s Lincoln Center, especially the Metropolitan Opera House. I think it’s an extraordinarily beautiful place, with an energy and a dynamism all its own.

In the world, I have two. First, my home in rural Connecticut. It’s very quiet. It’s very slow. It’s very nature-filled. And I love that. But also Florence, Italy. I inherited that one from my dad. We traveled there together, and I’ve been there since. I’ve brought Julia and her friend and her friend’s mom there too. There’s this intersection, particularly from the Renaissance period, of the highest order in architecture and art and music—all in one very walkable city.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
I am a student of human behavior. I have to name three. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence for me filled in the blanks about certain characteristics of high-performing leaders that translate into more success than others. Because I don’t know how you can be a great leader if you do not have self-awareness, if you don’t listen, if you don’t have empathy. It’s the glue that holds together why certain people make certain situations—situations that by all rights should never have worked—work. Next is John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about tragedy on Mount Everest. It’s an incredible story of a plan that goes awry, of team dynamics, of individualism and—to some degree—selfishness. And then Endurance, by Alfred Lansing, about Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated trip to Antarctica 100 years ago—an incredible story of leadership, resilience, integrity, and persistence.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
Alan Alda. He is a man of diverse talents and interests, humble and honest, and forever young. He is still trying to change the world for the better, including through his podcast and his book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? I saw an interview he did recently where he said that the question he most likes to ask people, either as an icebreaker or just as a way of getting some noise out of the system, is “what are you passionate about?” Because people are absolutely willing to talk about that, and all of a sudden you learn something about them, and all of a sudden maybe you have a connection you didn’t know about.

In fact, in her role as chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, clarifying seemingly impenetrable financial topics for the average person is a big part of her day.

“Too often with people who are pundits, it seems that their number one goal is to sound like the smartest girl or guy in the room, and more often than not they’re going to turn people off,” she says.

At Schwab, Sonders keeps a lot of plates spinning, providing market and economic analysis as well as spearheading investor education initiatives. She often shares her views as an expert guest on a range of television programs on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg TV and Radio, and CNN, to name a few.

“We’re all time constrained, and there is an appreciation for [experts] to get to the point and to take complex [financial] topics and explain them in a way that’s easier to understand,” she says.

She maintains that investing is about more than just facts and figures, a widely held false impression that turns many people off before they even get started.

“I don’t use math to any significant degree in anything that I do on a day-to-day basis,” she says, emphasizing that strategy and analysis often are more at play. “There is this misperception [that this business] is all about stats and accounting.”

A Process, Not a Gamble

When it comes to investing, the 1990 Gabelli School of Business MBA graduate wants people to know that following the hot tip of the moment (or the trending topic on Twitter) is hardly wise.

In fact, there’s one question she’s asked often that she hates: Should investors “get in” or “get out” of the market right now?

“I have a love-hate relationship with that question,” she says. “I hate it because it’s a ridiculous question, but I love it because it gives me an opportunity to pontificate on why it’s a ridiculous question.

“Neither get in nor get out is an investing strategy,” she says. “That’s simply gambling on a moment in time. Investing should never be about a moment in time, it should always be about a process over time.”

And one-size-fits-all advice just doesn’t cut it in her view.

“I hate the cookie-cutter approach,” says Sonders, who adds that a 24-year-old with an appetite for risk warrants a far different investing strategy than a 70-year-old retiree.

Moving Beyond Gordon Gekko

In addition to slicing through what she calls a cacophony of financial advice due to social media and a 24-hour news cycle, Sonders is also adamant about clearing up some misperceptions about Wall Street—and the role that women can play there.

“One of the biggest shames of the aftermath of the financial crisis is how big of a black eye the industry has gotten,” Sonders says.

Wall Street and the broader financial services space are not brimming with Gordon Gekko-type clones, she says, referring to the fictional corporate raider who argued that “greed … is good.” She says that such a view discounts what a positive impact the industry has on so many individuals’ lives, and it overlooks opportunities that exist there for those who don’t fit that stereotype. “[Some people] may not understand what the broader industry does for investors, and for companies and our economy,” she says.

And that brings her to another myth about financial services: that it’s solely a boys’ club.

Women in Finance—a Bull Market

Sonders posits that the boys’-club culture likely dates back to a time when the typical path to Wall Street was through training programs set up by wire houses, which eventually funneled young professionals onto trading floors.

“There’s no question that’s kind of the classic boys’ network,” she says. “That sense of [women] feeling out of place [in the industry] might have been greater in that era. That’s not the path I took. I had a very different set of experiences.”

In addition to working with many women at the start of her career—she began at the Zweig/Avatar Group before moving in 1999 to U.S. Trust, which was acquired by Schwab a year later—she says the firms she worked for believed in promoting from within and rewarding workers based on their merit, not their gender.

“My only two jobs have been at firms that have been blind to gender,” she says.

Today, she emphasizes that there are so many “different and unique opportunities [for women] to start out in the business,” with the wealth management and private client spaces being particularly ripe for opportunity.

“We crossed the chasm where more than half the wealth in the U.S. is controlled by women,” she says. “It’s an awesome time for women,” she adds.

Looking back at her career, Sonders has no regrets.

“I have kind of a creed or motto that I think about in my life,” she says. “When I’m asked, what would you change? In general, my response is I wouldn’t change a thing. … The slightest little change would have put [me] on a completely different path.”

—Kelsey Butler, FCLC ’10

For more of Liz Ann Sonders’ thoughts on her career and opportunities for women on Wall Street, listen to her November 2017 conversation with fellow Fordham alumna Veronica Dagher, GABELLI ’00, ’05, host of The Wall Street Journal’s podcast Secrets of Wealthy Women.

The full-time MBA ranking includes quantitative and qualitative data from current MBA candidates and recent graduates of global MBA programs. Factors such as educational experience, potential to network, and faculty quality were measured in the publication’s annual report. A total of 153 schools were asked to participate.

Ranked favorably for its student-alumni ratio and No. 12 for its network potential, the Gabelli School was recognized as one of world’s leading business programs.

“We have placed an emphasis firmly on quality in the MBA program,” said Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School. “We’re making sure that our curriculum is industry relevant, ensuring that we have the best faculty, and creating new opportunities for students to take on consulting-style work.”

In the regional ranking, the Gabelli School comes in at 54, and 92 overall. This puts the school third behind the Columbia Business School and New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business in the New York City region. Among Jesuit institutions, the Gabelli School ranks second behind Georgetown University.

“Our debut in the Economist‘s global rankings as a top 100 full-time MBA program really demonstrates that the Gabelli School of Business is on the move,” said Benjamin M. Cole, Ph.D., director of the Full-Time MBA and Professional MBA programs.

The school’s entrance in the Economist survey comes months after the Gabelli School launched its cutting-edge MBA onboarding program, Gabelli Launch. The innovative program took 42 incoming full-time MBA students to Argentina to work on social impact consulting projects with local NGOs, such as Fundación Emanuel, Red Por La Infancia, and Azul Solidario.

Besides this intensive orientation program, Cole said the school would be offering new courses this spring on blockchain and cryptocurrencies— as well as bootcamp-style training in social entrepreneurship. These features are important differentiators in the MBA market, he said.

“We have exciting programming that helps students attain the personal transformation they came to achieve at Fordham.”

Gabelli Launch gave the MBA candidates, who hail from India, China, Haiti, Italy, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Peru, South Africa, Taiwan and the United States, not only a chance to get to know each other before classes started but also an opportunity to be stretched in important ways. Week One focused on helping the students discover their own leadership style. Week Three focused on specific dimensions of the job search, and long-term career development. And Week Four threw them into the world of data and analytics, asking the students to tackle an industry that they knew nothing about—3-D printing.

But it was Week Two that took the entire cohort to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they engaged with a unique service learning consultancy challenge, putting their marketing, negotiation, financial, cross-cultural communication, time-management, and problem-solving skills into action before the MBA program even began.

“Coming to the States for an MBA can be challenging [because of] different cultures, language, and social barriers,” said MBA student Ramon Barbosa, a managing consultant from Brazil, who credits the weeklong trip for helping to break those barriers. “I know that my MBA experience is going to be enhanced in ways that it wouldn’t—if not for the trip.”

From Aug. 5 to 12, the students worked as advisers to nonprofits that included Energizar Foundation, an organization that promotes renewable energy in Argentina and Latin America; Fundación Emanuel, a pioneering foster care program in La Plata; and FC Bola, a new soccer ball business helping children living in impoverished communities. Some of the NGOs sought guidance in drafting a branding and marketing plan. Others were struggling to develop a corporate strategy, and a few required recommendations on how to diversify their fundraising models to achieve greater impact.

“The students were on teams that were constructed to be cross-cultural in nature, dealing with clients who were not native speakers of English,” said Benjamin M. Cole, Ph.D., director of the Full-time Cohort MBA and Professional MBA programs, who accompanied the students on the trip.

“Given that they were only going to have five days on the ground, they needed to be as effective and efficient as possible. The students had to use their wit and knowledge, and the technology that the school provided to set up virtual meetings and collect data about the organizations before they even set foot in Argentina. At Gabelli, we focus on ‘business with impact,’ and these projects helped set expectations very high.”

No spectators, only participants

When MBA candidate Linda Werner, a manufacturing financial controller from Germany, arrived in Argentina with her teammates, they spent two days brainstorming with leaders of the anti-child-abuse organization Red Por La Infancia.

The organization, which recently began collaborating with the U.N. human rights education initiative THINK EQUAL, wanted to shift its focus from merely being a refuge for victims to manufacturing products and services that educate children and parents about abuse.

“When we got to the school, there were lots of teachers and a couple of people who were part of the board, but there were only two students,” said Swain, whose team was also tasked with helping the organization to clarify its brand message, update its website, and unify its name across all online platforms.

“When we got to the school, there were lots of teachers and a couple of people who were part of the board, but there were only two students,” said Swain, whose team was also tasked with helping the organization to clarify its brand message, update its website, and unify its name across all online platforms.

After learning that many participants ride horses to school, and often miss days, weeks, and months of classes because of bad weather and muddy roads, the MBA students proposed using technology to combat low attendance.

“I think a lot of nonprofits do amazing work and they need to stay around, but we can’t just think that doing good is a responsibility of nonprofits alone.”

“I was amazed to learn that sometimes we think that making an impact is just a matter of being more effective and efficient,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t realize that there are so many cultural barriers that we might have to overcome before trying to make an impact.”

Cole said that was just one of many lessons Gabelli Launch intended to impart.

“It’s not easy, and I’m not trying to project that I have the silver bullet,” he says, “but I share a bit about my own past and try to show them that there are some controllable things they can do to put themselves in a position to win.”

Crawley grew up on the working-class West Side of Chicago. As a young boy, he lost both of his parents, one of them violently. But his grandparents raised him, and he found extra support in the local community.

“I’ve had the good fortune of having folks who’ve believed in me and supported me,” he says, “everything from the Boys and Girls Club to my extended family to my colleagues when I first joined Morgan Stanley.”

“I had zero connectivity with [my undergraduate] school,” Crawley says. “When I went to Fordham for my MBA, it was the first time I had experienced that sense of community with an academic institution,” Crawley says. “I tapped into a powerful alumni network, and I also made a few of my very best friends.”

Networking has been central to his rise at Morgan Stanley, he says, but it’s his work as a mentor, “especially for black and brown individuals from below the poverty line,” that is “core to who I am.”

Crawley often helps junior analysts at Morgan Stanley, some of whom are fellow Fordham graduates, get their footing. He has come back to Fordham’s campus to speak at events with current students and alumni. He’s a new trustee for the national Boys and Girls Club, where he serves on the Midwest Regional Team based out of his native Chicago. And he recently joined the board of Covenant House New York, where he continues to meet with those young men.

For Crawley, who now lives in New York with his wife and twin daughters, it’s simply his responsibility.

“I have been given a platform to enable real change in people,” he says. “There is just a modicum of difference between me and the outcome of my life and these kids that I’m speaking to at Covenant House [and the Boys and Girls Club]. We are literally cut from the same tree, but people took the time to mentor and mold me.

“That’s why I want us to keep pushing forward.”

The magazine’s annual survey of Chinese business schools, which it published in the spring, found that fulltime MBA graduates needed 2.7 years on average to recover the investment they made in getting their degrees. Part-time MBA graduates needed even less time to recoup their investment—their return took only 1.5 years on average. Before enrolling in the MBA programs, only 19 percent of the students were high-level managers. One year after they graduated, the number had jumped to 28 percent and the magazine found that after four years, the figure had climbed to 47 percent. In all, 10 fulltime and 15 part-time MBA programs were selected at the top of the Forbes list.

The BiMBA program, founded in 1998, was the first foreign MBA degree program in Beijing to be approved by the Chinese government. Fordham is the degree-granting institution in a consortium of 26 American Jesuit business schools that provide the program’s faculty.

The rankings are based on surveys of almost 100,000 business majors, 2,000 recruiters and the business programs themselves, and a study of which schools send the most students to top MBA programs. The complete rankings are available in the May 8, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek, and on BusinessWeek Online.

Fordham’s College of Business Administration, founded in 1920, has been rated a “best buy” in undergraduate education by U.S. News & World Report.