Gianna Migliorisi has worked in tech for more than a decade, but until last spring, she didn’t realize just how unwelcoming the industry could be for women.

“My entire career I was walking around, oblivious, thinking that I was no different from any of my male colleagues, that every other woman in technology was treated with the same respect and equality that I had been fortunate enough to encounter in the workplace,” she wrote in a post on Medium.

Her epiphany came at the 2018 Women of Silicon Valley conference in San Francisco, where she heard stories of female software engineers who had to work harder than their male counterparts in order to gain approval, or sometimes, even to get in the door. According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, only 26% of professional computing jobs in the 2018 U.S. workforce were held by women, and only 20% of Fortune 500 chief information officer (CIO) positions were held by women in 2018.

The conference was such an eye-opener for her, she says, because she has always felt supported in her academic and career choices.

“I didn’t really appreciate how important it is for women in a science field to be recognized, because there are not many of us,” she says.

The Brooklyn native not only grew up with parents who both worked in the sciences—her mother is a scientist who taught anatomy to medical and nursing students, and her father is a pharmacist—but she also received a great deal of encouragement from faculty at Fordham.

During her sophomore year, computer science professor Robert Moniot, Ph.D., nominated her for a Clare Boothe Luce Scholarship for women in the sciences. The award gave her the financial support to enroll in Fordham’s dual-degree program in computer science. She began taking graduate-level courses as an undergraduate, and earned her master’s degree in 2008.

While finishing her master’s, Migliorisi began working at National Grid, the utilities company. She later joined HBO, where she was part of the team that launched the HBO Go app, and worked at a software company before joining Discovery Inc. in August 2015. As a senior director of technical product management, she works with engineers to build features and products for the company’s streaming apps, including those for TLC and Animal Planet.

Her professional success, and the experience she had at the Women in Silicon Valley Conference, has led Migliorisi to try to make sure she creates an environment in which other women can succeed.

“I’ve been making a conscious effort to try to be more supportive of [my women colleagues’]particular struggles,” she says. “I definitely make it more of a priority now to hire more women and make sure I look around to make sure other people are hiring more women.”

Migliorisi knows she was fortunate to find at Fordham an environment where she felt supported and could develop her skills and confidence.

“[My professors] never discouraged me from anything and never made me feel like I wasn’t capable of doing this job or learning,” she says. “They were super helpful, especially when you needed that extra effort, and they had a genuine interest in your success. I had a really, really good experience.”

Beyond academics, Migliorisi was a member of the Commuting Students Association, an orientation leader and orientation coordinator, and a member of the Senior Week Committee.

“As a commuter, I wanted to feel like I had a connection to my school and make sure that other commuters had that connection, too,” she says. “Fordham did a great job of catering to commuting students and making resources and activities available for them to be a part of.”

That positive experience has led Migliorisi to stay involved with Fordham however she can, from donating to attending events.

“Really, I had such a wonderful experience there that I definitely believe in giving back to a place that I feel like shaped me as a person.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?

This is hard because I get excited about a lot of things … but I feel like I’m most passionate about making others happy. I bake a lot, which relieves stress for me, but I bake things and bring them to work because it makes everyone so happy. Little things like that. Saying thank you for something small, buying someone some flowers to cheer them up … giving hugs … organizing happy hours. Everyone works really hard, and I like to make sure they know they’re appreciated, so it makes me happy to make others happy.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

“No one wants to mess with something that’s working.” My manager always reminds me of that when there is a lot of change going on in the workplace, and when certain changes can lead to uncertainty. Change isn’t easy, and when the future is uncertain, it makes it harder sometimes to concentrate and do your job. Remembering to just do your best and keep focusing on your mission will help you navigate the waters of change, and most of the time, bad change won’t come your way if things are going in the right direction.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?

How do you pick one place in New York City? I think anywhere there’s a spot of green in NYC is my favorite place. There’s nothing like hanging out at Bryant Park on a nice summer afternoon. In the world: Anywhere where there’s a beach with nice warm water is my happy place.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, has had a huge influence on me, particularly as a leader in a work environment. It teaches you to take ownership of everything, including the mistakes of a team. If you’re a leader, and your team is underperforming, it’s not their fault, it’s yours. You as a leader, no matter what situation you are in, have an obligation to the people you lead—to build trust, encourage, and inspire them. If someone on your team fails, it’s because you failed in some way. Never misplace the blame; always own your mistakes.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?

Professor Stuart Sherman in the English department. I absolutely hated English classes, and English professors didn’t like me that much. I was never very good at analyzing things from a creative perspective (I’m a logical thinker) and my writing wasn’t amazing. Professor Sherman took the time to help me be a better writer. He taught his courses with so much passion and love and enthusiasm, it was infectious. He made me love a course I absolutely hated, and in my mind, that is the mark of an amazing teacher. I may not remember everything I learned in his classes, but I remember him for his energy and his kind heart and his love for teaching.

Student Podcasting

Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., an associate professor of history, teaches in Fordham’s Medieval Studies program, one of the biggest programs of its kind in the world. His presentation, Podcasting and the History Graduate Classroom, offered ideas on how to make dense topics easier to digest.

While teaching a course on the Crusader states, which Paul described as “an arcane subject, even within the field of medieval history,” he wanted his students to have a way of interpreting these esoteric and difficult ideas to a larger audience.

“My students were gaining knowledge about something that no one else knows about. So the idea was to get comfortable with communicating these difficult ideas… How are we going to be able to explain the skills and the knowledge that this person has gained in some sort of wider context?”

As a solution, Paul came up with the podcasting idea. He tasked his students with creating a seven-to-10 minute podcast, encouraging them to listen to other popular history podcasts to get a feel of what to do. For the assignment, they were required to gather the technology and equipment they needed, write a script, record the podcast, and work with Paul on editing their audio until they were satisfied with the final products, which were then uploaded to SoundCloud and linked to their website, The Crusader States, for anyone to listen to.

Students were graded on how effectively they organized the information in a comprehensible way, which “was challenging to some people, especially people who were in Ph.D. programs, who have identified themselves as an intellectual. And they’re like, ‘I deliberately can’t speak to other people,’ so we break that down and say ‘you have to try.’”

The podcasts received encouraging responses from Paul’s Twitter followers. Listeners bantered back and forth, gave feedback, wrote comments, and even started to look forward to new episodes after the year ended, which Paul jokingly called “season 2” of the podcast series.

Using Polling Techniques for Instant Feedback

Usha Sankar, Ph.D., a lecturer in the biological sciences department who teaches courses like human physiology, was also looking for ways to keep students engaged. She has found polling techniques to be a useful strategy.

Using polling software, Sankar incorporated an interactive strategy into her lectures to keep her classroom energy as dynamic as possible.

There are many polling technologies out there—Sankar uses Poll Everywhere, a live interactive audience participation website used to gather responses. It can be used to create pop quizzes, polls, teaching games, and more. Students access their personal account page on their phones, answer questions directly, and see responses in real time.

Sankar has hosted a medley of quizzes, games, and competitions on her own Poll Everywhere page to test students about what they’ve learned during the lecture. The interactive aspect of the polling strategy allows her students to feel more engaged than if they were just listening to a lecture.

“Polling is a great way to gauge student engagement and understanding of concepts. The best polling methods are those that are intuitive, easy to access, cheap, encourage full participation, and provide detailed reports and feedback,” she said.

She’s also “constantly looking to improve my teaching,” she said, and polling is a great way to get feedback.

Keeping Students Engaged with Creative Pedagogy

Jane Suda, head of reference and information services in the Walsh Library on the Rose Hill campus, was impressed with the presentations she sat in on during the day, and their emphasis on “how you can use different technologies to make important learning points to the students and also make a creative classroom environment that is not your standard ‘write a paper, take a test’ environment,’” she said.

“In essence it’s like taking the classroom, breaking down the walls, and saying OK, now we’re gonna take what you’re learning in this one class, and throw it out into the public, and so we’re all polling, we’re podcasting, we’re creating websites, and so it’s not just what am I doing for the teacher, but what am I doing for the world, and that’s really dynamic. It changes what the classroom is all about.”

Our phones are flooded with alerts and we are compelled to view them all because we feel “FOMO”—the fear of missing out, says Kirk A. Bingaman, Ph.D., an associate professor at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. Our ability to give someone our full, undivided attention has therefore declined, he said. But he’s found a solution in a common religious practice—something he calls “contemplative spiritual practices.”

“In religious settings, [it’s] what we’ve always done to bring us closer to God, make us more spiritual,” Bingaman said. “In a digital world, we need to also be doing it to preserve the human attentional capacity.”

The practice is one of the major themes in Bingaman’s new book, “Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now” (2018). In 143 pages, he details the threats and opportunities that advanced technology—including smartphones and social media—brings, and how the digital age has influenced how we define personhood.

The Power of Prayer and Meditation in the Digital Age

All readers—religious and atheist alike—can learn lessons from his book, especially the parts where Bingaman describes how people can preserve and increase their attentional stability in our hectic digital world, he said.

One way to hone our ability to focus is to regularly conduct contemplative spiritual practices, such as centering prayer—a method of meditation where one focuses on a sacred word or a mantra, like the Bible phrase “Do not be anxious,” and silently prays. Ideally, he added, one should pray this way for 20 minutes a day to achieve the desired effect.

Those who are not religious can turn to mindfulness meditation, he said. Instead of focusing on a religious word or phrase, one should focus on the rhythm of their breathing.

Plenty of people can use these practices in their professions, said Bingaman, including pastoral and spiritual care providers, counselors, clergy, chaplains, educators, and clinical care practitioners working with anxious clients.

As he talks about in the book, studies have shown that these mindfulness-based therapy exercises can change the brain for the better. If you practice them regularly, he explained, they have the power to shape the brain’s neural pathways and help stabilize one’s attention. And in the age of technology and digital distractions, he said, these contemplative-meditational practices are becoming comparably important to religious belief and doctrine.  

Technology of the 21st Century

Bingaman’s book doesn’t focus only on the negative aspects of the digital age; he also gives credit to the ways that technology has made our lives easier.

Many of our daily errands are easily completed, thanks to advanced systems like self-checkout stands at the supermarket, cashless toll lanes at tunnels and bridges, and ATMs at the bank, Bingaman said. He added that medical technology, like cochlear hearing implants, can also have life-changing effects. He mentioned that thanks to those little chips, his father, who suffered from a loss of hearing, could once again hear the songbirds that he loved when he was young.

Bingaman also recalled a meeting with his financial adviser, who, thanks to a computer algorithms program, completed a complex procedure in a matter of minutes.

“My advisor’s brilliant, but he said, ‘I can’t even begin to compare to just the speed,’” Bingaman said, snapping his fingers, “‘and [the program]did it more precisely than I could’ve done it. I would’ve spent hours on it.’”

In his book, Bingaman explores this new hybrid humanity—a mix between natural biology and technology—and the theological implications for religious faith communities.

“What constitutes human personhood in an age of increasing technological enhancement?” he asked. “If we’re more and more technologically enhanced, how will we be a reflection of the divine image in the future?”

But at the rate that machine intelligence is advancing, Bingaman stressed, the most important question isn’t about meditation or even machinery: It’s about who we are and who we want to become.

“How do we hold onto our humanity?” he said. “How do we preserve the most precious qualities of human experience, while we have this window of time and opportunity?”

What if you had to walk across a balance beam atop a 1,400-foot skyscraper to lead your team to victory?

That was one of the two virtual reality exercises that the 2018 cohort of the Executive MBA (EMBA) program at the Gabelli School of Business in Westchester found themselves wrestling with in a course led by professor Julita Haber, Ph.D. 

The experience was created through a head-mounted device that simulated the fear of heights. The software and equipment was provided by Lyron Bentovim, president and CEO of the Glimpse Group, a virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) company.

Haber, a clinical assistant professor in the leading people and organizations department, believes the emotional immersive exercise can help students understand the skills and characteristics that are key to building and leading high-performing teams.

“The topic of team dynamics and technology go very well together,” she said. “I wanted to create activities that would evoke emotions and enhance their communication skills to reach a goal.”

It’s a team exercise that’s relevant to students’ work in the program, which thrusts them into leadership situations.

“In general, most of the students in the program have developed an expertise in a specific area, but they want to have more of a bird’s-eye view of an organization to formulate and implement strategies as leaders,” said Francis Petit, associate dean for global initiatives and partnerships at the Gabelli School.

Though EMBA student Ryan Grillo was able to climb the computer-generated skyscraper and walk across the beam successfully, his responsibility to his team didn’t end when he completed the task, he said.

“We were all trying to help the students who were afraid of heights eliminate some of their fears,” said Grillo,  who works as a general manager at a company that manufactures elevators and other related products. “I’d say, ‘Walk straight or walk towards my voice. You can do it.’ Some people were able to walk over or at least take baby steps.”

In the second VR/AR exercise, one student from each team was selected to deactivate a bomb. The student received directions from five other team members.

“Our team trusted each other more than I had anticipated,” said Stephanie Miano, GABELLI ’18, a sales manager at an international based luxury brand. “When it came down to the wire, we communicated effectively and did our best to work together.”

“Each exercise provided me with a different framework for my thought process in how to approach a situation,” added William J. Allan, GABELLI ’18, a financial professional at a global business and tech consultancy. “It [showed]me the importance of delegation and teamwork in time-sensitive situations.”

Haber said VR/AR experiences can challenge misconceptions about team work, including the myth that people don’t need to like each other to work well.

“When people like each other, it often helps to achieve a high quality of creative and innovative results,” she said, adding that effective teamwork is crucial to team success. “Well-designed team processes that are coupled with an individual’s ability to influence others can increase a team’s sense of control over the deliverables.”

According to Sanjiv Das, Ph.D., the keynote speaker of the inaugural Gabelli School of Business Fintech Conference, by 2020 at least five percent of all economic transactions will be handled by artificial intelligence (AI).

“The banks are saying, ‘what can we do with modern technology to actually monetize the data that we have?’” said Das at the March 16 conference that focused on blockchain, cryptocurrency, machine learning, textual analysis, risk management, and regulation. “The prognosis is that any bank that doesn’t become a technology company is probably at risk.”

A Santa Clara University professor of finance and business analytics, Das identified 10 areas where FinTech is gaining clout, including fraud detection, cybersecurity, deep learning, and personal and consumer finance.  He cited mathematical innovations, hardware, and big data as game changers.

“The fact that they now have mathematics that actually allows us to include very large-scale models with millions of parameters is absolutely key,” he said. “You have to feed the beast, and the beast eats data.”

As the FinTech space expands, Das said, financial institutions are faced with an important question when it comes to talent pipelining: Should they train their in-house engineers in finance or teach their finance professionals technology?

“My bet is that you can take finance [professionals]and teach them technology,” he said. “Everything has become so commoditized that it’s actually very easy to do this with the tools that we currently have.”

Still, to excel in the sector, professionals need training across disciplines, he said. “You’re going to have to learn something about behavioral psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and statistics.”

“If you want to get under the hood with of all of this, the two skills you’ll need to learn are linear algebra and statistics.”

Enhancing customer-service

Some banks are tapping into conversational AI and chatbots that assist customers in managing their personal finances.

This month, Bank of America launched its virtual financial assistant Erica, a chatbot that helps users with bank-related issues such as making payments, checking balances, and reaching a savings goal.

Das said that chatbots like Erica aim to enhance customer-service experiences in financial services.

“When you call customer service, there is a huge variety in the quality,” he said. “You might get somebody who knows what he’s talking about or you might get someone who is one week on the job. If you can replace those people with a chatbot…you’re going to have much better service at a very low cost.”

AI has proven good at predicting things where data are stationery–for example, detecting cancer through cells that don’t change. But AI is less effective at making successful market predictions, Das said.

“Market predictions is a tough problem because markets are not stationary, so we need to figure out better models,” he said.

While experts have argued that machines will never outsmart human intelligence—even though they learn from experience— Das doesn’t think humans beat machines in every domain.

“Humans learn from experience too, but we can’t do a million games over a weekend. The machine can. It’s faster learning and it’s more accurate.”

“What humans are better at is explaining why they made the decision whether it’s wrong or right,” he said.

Bill Baker, Ph.D., the Claudio Acquaviva Chair in the Graduate School of Education and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, and Education, presented “The Digital Media Transition: Redefining the American Media Landscape,” in which he called for more digital citizenship.

A Fragmented Media Landscape

With hundreds of television channels to choose from, and thousands of on-demand options, Baker said the American populace has become fragmented in its choice of news sources. He contextualized today’s landscape by comparing it to a time, a few decades ago, when the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite provided Americans with their “water cooler conversations” the next day.

“All of our news came from that trusted source: Cronkite told you stuff you didn’t want to hear but needed to hear,” he said. “But not anymore, that’s one of the reasons why we’re so messed up.”

Today’s choice of news sources allows viewers to select news that fits one’s viewpoint, and “we end up reinforcing our own beliefs, and reinforce our own prejudices,” Baker said.

Moreover, during the last presidential election, Baker shared a disturbing statistic: Of the total Facebook engagement for the top 20 election stories, 8.7 million people got their information from fake news while 7.3 million got their news from mainstream established media.

“More [Americans] believed in the fake than real news,” he said. “We have to figure a way to get more trusted mainstream media.”

He said that, in Germany, a no-frills, 15-minute public news broadcast had a larger audience share than all the American news broadcasts combined. German public media is so trusted that the government pours $10 billion into it every year, as opposed to the $400 million contributed to America’s public broadcasting—which is also under threat by the Trump administration, he said.

Baker added that the administration’s opposition to net neutrality is a threat to smaller players, like pubic media, independents, and new startups.

“They will end up being second-class citizens,” he said.

Fighting Back With Facts, and Wikipedia

In the afternoon session, Samantha Weald, outreach manager of the Wiki Education Foundation, encouraged faculty to help shore up fact-based knowledge by incorporating Wikipedia projects into their coursework, particularly on the graduate level.

Once viewed as an unreliable source, Wikipedia’s credibility has grown over the years, she said. Yet, the platform has a “gap” problem.

Part of the reason, Weald said, is that 85 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors are young, white males from developed, Western nations—a fact that skews content, she said. For example, only 16.9 percent of Wikipedia’s biographies are about women.

“Information is only as good as how readily available it is,” she said.

College students can fill in those gaps with their original research, while also folding more good-sourced academic material into the free, public, accessible site, she said. According to a Knight Foundation study, Wikipedia is the most-used source of news, with eight billion page views a month.

“Imagine a world in which every human has equal access to knowledge—for free,” she said. “Teaching our students to become digital citizens [can]make that a reality.”

Two Fordham faculty members Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., professor of psychology, and Carla Romney, D.Sc., associate dean for STEM and director of pre-health education
said they’d already used Wikipedia projects in their courses. In his Social Psych course, Takooshian assigned students to come up with 30 biographies of people who were virtually unknown in their field.

“Instead of assigning a paper, I assign[ed]Wikipedia entries,” said Takooshian.

Weald said her foundation works with colleges around the United States and Canada to create Wikipedia-connected courses; to date, some 358 courses are ongoing.

In addition to Baker and Weald, Gardner Campbell, Ph.D., associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, gave a talk titled “Exercising the Franchise of Digital Citizenship,” while concurrent sessions examined online textbooks, online teaching techniques, digital copyrights, cybersecurity, multimedia, ergonomics, and social media etiquette.

Janet Sassi contributed to this article. 

Their goal was to emphasize the dangers associated with the unrestricted Web, especially pornography and gender mixing. Rabbinic leaders discussed the internet’s encroachment on ultra-Orthodox Jewish values in an age they dubbed “a crisis of emune (faith).”

Nearly five years later, Ayala Fader, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology, sees this challenge in the ultra-Orthodox community as a critical moment of cultural and religious change. She said the internet has amplified existing tensions among the ultra-Orthodox. There is a sense that more and more ultra-Orthodox Jews are leaving their communities or losing faith, but continuing to practice publicly— living what they call “double lives.”

As a result, Fader said, the internet has become a nexus for these concerns, with leadership trying to control its use and those living double lives using it as a lifeline to connect with other religious doubters.

“I don’t know if so many more people are leaving than a decade earlier or if they’re just louder, more public, and more well-organized, but I think there’s a sense in the communities that this is a moment when they need to start thinking about how they’re going to move into the 21st century,” said Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Fader has been awarded a $50,400 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her forthcoming book, Double Life: Faith, Doubt and the internet, which examines the community’s contemporary struggle to define authentic ultra-Orthodoxy.

“I was thrilled to be awarded the fellowship. It will give me sustained time to just focus on writing the book,” said Fader, who has been conducting research on this topic since 2013.

Fader first began the project by connecting with ultra-Orthodox Jews who had, during the mid-2000s, been active on the J-blogosphere, a Jewish blogging community. After interviewing members of various forums and Jewish blogging sites, she learned that the internet gave ultra-Orthodox Jews living double lives an opportunity to explore secular knowledge and activities, like going out together, and learning to bicycle and ski. It also provided a space where they could anonymously critique their communities and their rabbinic leadership.

“There are a lot of reasons that led people to lose faith in the kind of ultra-Orthodoxy they were living,” said Fader, who noted that the community had adapted to other types of technologies in the past—from newspapers and radio to television and books—without as much difficulty. “The internet is problematic because people need to use it for business. You can’t throw out the internet and you can’t keep it out. It’s also easily accessed, privately.”

Watch Ayala Fader discuss the ultra-Orthodox community’s response to “kosher” cellphones. 

To better influence their constituency to resist the lure of the internet, many rabbinic leaders are working closely with ultra-Orthodox schools.

“If you don’t agree to sign a contract when your children begin school [pledging]that you won’t have the internet at home, [and]that you won’t have a smartphone, then your kids can be denied access to school,” said Fader. “There are people who have left their communities—not because they didn’t have access to smartphones but because they didn’t feel they could continue to live these kinds of double lives.”

In recent years, there have been a few compromises allowing for some use. In 2013, the cell phone company Rami Levy Communications began selling “kosher smartphones” or rabbi-approved mobile phones that filter and block content considered immoral. Samsung, one of the world’s largest tech companies, debuted its first kosher smartphone specifically for ultra-Orthodox users last year.

Yet, despite efforts to permit some access to the Web, there is still a push to position smartphones as dangerous or contaminating objects, said Fader.

“There is a movement to not carry smartphones out in public, and an effort by educators in particular to create a sense of shame in having them,” said Fader.

She said the constant tug of war between the internet and religion isn’t limited to the ultra-Orthodox faith. It exists in many insular religious communities around the world.

“For religious communities that attempt to control their members’ access to the wider world, the internet is both an incredible tool and a dangerous piece of technology,” she said.

August marks one year since students from the Brazil Scientific Mobility Program (BSMP) arrived on campus. Run by the Institute of International Education and supported by the Brazilian government, BSMP places top-achieving junior and senior students pursuing STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at U.S. colleges and universities to gain global experience, improve their language skills, and increase international dialogue in science and technology.

The Fordham cohort—Aryadne Guardieiro Pereira Rezende, Tulio Aimola, Caio Batista de Melo, and Dicksson Rammon Oliveira de Almeida—have spent the year studying and researching alongside Fordham students and faculty.

“Fordham is a wonderful university. It teaches you to grow not just as a professional, but also as a person. I loved my semesters there,” said Guardieiro, a computer science major from Uberlandia, Minas Gerais.

Guardieiro worked with Damian Lyons, PhD, professor of computer and information science, on the use of drones to hunt and kill Aedes aegypti mosquitos, which spread diseases such as dengue and Zika virus, both of which are significant problems in Brazil.

“Different fields were available to research here,” said Batista de Melo, a computer science major from Brazil’s capital, Brasília. Batista de Melo researched with Frank Hsu, PhD, the Clavius Distinguished Professor of Science and Professor of Computer and Information Science, in Fordham’s Laboratory of Informatics and Data Mining.

“Our project used IBM’s Watson, which might not have been possible to use in Brazil, since it is such a new technology.”

The program has benefitted both Fordham and Brazilian students alike, said Carla Romney, DSc, associate dean for STEM and pre-health education, who oversaw BSMP at Fordham. Because it’s difficult for science students to devote a full semester to travel, the experience served as a sort of “reverse study abroad” for Fordham students.

“Having international students in the classroom has been an amazing internationalization experience for Fordham students, too,” Romney said. “It brings a different atmosphere into the classroom when you have students with widely divergent viewpoints and experiences. You get to know other cultures, other worlds.”

BSMP students complete two semesters of academic study at an American institution, followed by a summer of experiential learning in the form of internships, research, volunteering, or other types of “academic training.”

Earlier this summer, the four were joined by an additional 17 BSMP students who had been at other American colleges and universities and who took up residence at Fordham to undertake internships and positions at various New York City companies and organizations.

The experience was challenging both academically as well as personally, said Oliveira, a computer science major from Recife, Pernambuco who researched smartwatch applications in the Wireless Sensor and Data Mining (WISDM) lab with Gary Weiss, PhD, associate professor of computer and information science.

“The cultural shock was really unexpected, and for several months it made me feel uneasy,” Oliveira said. “Over time, I learned to overcome it. Being from a predominantly tropical country, I considered the winter to be the greatest challenge of all.”

In addition to culture shock, there was the inevitable loneliness, which Guardieiro said she felt deeply at times. However, she felt supported by her academic adviser and fellow students, and eventually came to love her newfound independence.

“I learned to never lose an opportunity to do what I needed or wanted to just because I did not have company to do so,” she said. “I learned to expose myself to new—and not always comfortable—experiences, and I was amazed with the results I got. I took dancing classes with great teachers, visited places like Wall Street companies and all kinds of museums, and visited many states by myself.”

The Brazilian government recently put a one-year moratorium on the scholarship exchange program, but Romney said Fordham would continue its partnership with the program when it resumes.

When it does, Guardieiro has advice ready for future Fordham-BSMP students:

“Don’t be afraid to do everything you want to… This kind of experience is given to us to learn as much as we can.”

“It’s important you understand my goal,” says Calacanis, a veteran tech entrepreneur and an early investor in Uber and other successful startups. “I like winning. You’ve been picked by us out of all the hundreds of companies that applied—and by us, I mean me—because you can win. You are here to win. We’re going to win together.”

Calacanis started Launch to support entrepreneurs and inspire innovation. In addition to the incubator classes, he hosts the annual Launch Festival, a startup conference that draws thousands of attendees. He claims he might cut back on his involvement with the class this year, since he and his wife recently had twin girls (they also have a 6-year-old daughter). But he doesn’t seem to believe it. Just seconds later, he says he’ll probably come to all the sessions. And besides, it hasn’t been a time of cutting back for Calacanis. He also hosts This Week in Startups, a podcast named by several tech sites as one of the best of its kind, and he’ll soon star in a reality TV show he’s co-creating for Harvey Weinstein’s company about—no surprise—startups.

The show will be authentic, he promises, and different from others on entrepreneurship, such as Shark Tank, in that it will focus on how startups are actually created. He’ll personally pick the participants and judges, he says, and the show will help him achieve his goal of becoming the greatest angel investor of all time, helping others build wildly successful companies.

In class, Calacanis advises the entrepreneurs, often lacing his insights with expletives and exclamations. He decries Silicon Valley “tourists” who just want to get rich quick with “apps no one wants!” And he says there used to be too much money in startups, “now there’s no money!” But he tells his students they’re hard workers with skills and a real product, and he says what venture capitalists need to hear is simple: Who are your customers, how much money do they give you, and what’s your profit margin? Grinning broadly, he says it takes less than 30 seconds to make that kind of pitch, “and it’s everything investors want! Anything else is window dressing!”

A few days later, at his Launch offices in the Tenderloin district, Calacanis says there’s a good reason why he seems to be having the time of his life in his class: He is.

Calacanis has been in the tech world a long time. He started the Silicon Alley Reporter back in the mid-1990s and built it from a 16-page newsletter to a glossy magazine of a few hundred pages, becoming a key player in the internet industry as it was taking off in New York City. He not only published and edited the magazine, he delivered it as well, pulling a luggage cart around Manhattan. On the masthead, he listed himself as “Publisher, Editor, and Delivery Boy.”

The New Yorker called him “the kid who hooked up New York’s wired world,” and Charlie Rose, 60 Minutes, and other old-media giants sought the insights of the upstart publisher from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with a bartender father and a mom who worked as a nurse. He says it was a heady time. “All of a sudden you get to pick who’s on the cover of the magazine in the hottest technology sector in the history of mankind. There’s billions of dollars at stake, and you have 75 people working for you at the age of 27. For a kid with no power from Brooklyn who had to hop the turnstile, it’s pretty awesome.”

He displayed that kind of hustle getting into Fordham, a story he recounts fondly. With less-than-stellar grades, he knew Fordham was a long shot. But he was determined to go, so he listened to his taekwondo teacher, a Fordham alumnus, who told him to be persistent. Calacanis stayed in touch with an admission officer, bringing him reference letters from teachers and bosses, and showing him his senior year grades, which had risen significantly. Finally, Calacanis says, the admission officer told him he was leaving Fordham, and his last act at the University would be to grant admission to the most promising nontraditional student. When Calacanis told his father, his dad responded by saying that he’d just lost his bar for nonpayment of taxes. Good luck paying for school, he told his son.

After all that work to get in, Calacanis wasn’t going to let not having the tuition stop him. He went to Fordham full time at night and worked multiple jobs—as a barback, a waiter, and a tech in the University’s computer labs. He says he brought that work ethic to his founding of Silicon Alley Reporter. After it folded in the dotcom crash, he co-founded and built Weblogs Inc., a network of blogs supported by advertising. A few years later, in 2005, he sold it to AOL for more than $25 million.

Calacanis has called his investing success “dumb luck.” But as an early investor in Uber, Thumbtack, and other billion- and multimillion-dollar companies, he doesn’t actually believe that. “I say it as a joke to see if people are paying attention,” he says. “When I tell people I got lucky seven times, I’m trying to make a point to them, whether they get it or not, that I’m not lucky, I’m hardworking.”

Back at his Launch offices, Calacanis is summoned to get made up for his podcast. He continues talking as he walks upstairs. Now that he’s in his 40s, and he’s made his money and has a family, he says he’s outgrown his immature impulses to prove that his successes were more than just luck. And he wants to share his advice with a broader audience. Most reality shows are silly, he says, but if done well, they can teach people something about fashion, say, or cooking. He wants to do that for entrepreneurship—and not just for the ratings but for a fame that’s more lasting.

“I don’t need to be a celebrity or get any more press,” he says. “It all goes back to the grand plan to be the best angel investor of all time.”

—Emily Wilson 

Since its founding in 2013, his online bulk-shopping service Boxed has raised $26 million, hired nearly 70 full-time employees, and opened three shipping centers, which can deliver Costco-style value packs of anything from cereal to toilet paper anywhere in the lower 48 states within two days. And earlier this year, Huang announced an ambitious plan to fund college tuition for his employees’ children.

What inspired you to guarantee college tuition for children of your full-time staff?

My undergraduate tuition at Johns Hopkins was paid partially by financial aid but also through the generosity of my mom’s employer. They gave me a huge scholarship. I guess they saw something in me. 

And now you want to give the same opportunity to your employees?

Absolutely. I look at the folks in our warehouses and see that some of them can’t even afford a car. How are they ever going to get above that level? My parents were able to fight their way through hard work and a stroke of luck. But if that luck never strikes, there could be generations stuck at that level. I thought, “Why not give these folks that upward mobility that I achieved?”

How are you funding the program?

We have cash to cover the short-term obligations, and then the longer-term funds are tied up in my personal stock in the company. If Boxed does well, there’s enough to pay a lot of tuition. If Boxed doesn’t do well, the program won’t work. It’s kind of a motivation cycle that feeds into itself.

So it’s about leveling the playing field, correcting injustices. Is that at all why you chose to go to Fordham Law?

I always had a passion for the law, but as a kid I was more reacting to injustice. I could tell, even as a child, that my parents were having a difficult time with simple things, like getting a driver’s license. I still remember one vivid moment: The DMV rejected my mother’s signature [they couldn’t read her handwriting]. As I got older, I realized there’s some screwed up stuff going on in the world, and so that was the genesis of me being an attorney.

Why’d you go into tech?

I saw the rise of Facebook and mobile gaming upstarts like Zynga. I also had one of the first iPhones. I thought, “These things are only going to get more powerful.” We started Astro Ape Studios, and things really took off. Within a couple of years, Zynga bought the company, using us as their New York office.

 How did you make the transition from gaming to online retailing?

The most sophistication and knowledge on mobile is concentrated in gaming. We were at the forefront of knowing how user behavior works, how user acquisition works, how to make a great experience. So why not go after the largest prize we could find? The consumer bulk-shopping industry is a significant driver of the economy, but only 1.5 percent of it exists online.

It’s fairly far from where you started. Is your law degree still useful? 

Fordham has a pretty liberal study abroad policy, so my first summer we went to Korea, and I worked at Samsung in a business capacity. I really was exposed to both sides of the table. My training as an attorney helps me know what I don’t know, which is just as important as knowing something myself. If you don’t have legal training, either you need an expert for everything or you think nothing is dangerous, which can really screw you later on.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Corinne Iozzio, FCLC ’05.

In his July 22 keynote speech, “You Should be Innovating,” Rochelle mixed anecdotes about his children with discussion on the creation of Google Classroom and other platforms that seek to teach innovation. He spoke at the Graduate School of Education’s second annual Developing Digital Literacies conference at the Lincoln Center campus.

“I believe teachers should model innovation so that students understand it, accept it, and value it,” he said. He offered an “innovation rubric for teachers:” creativity, optimism, passion, decisiveness, experimentation, collaboration, acceptance of failure, communication, and research.

A recent convert to the teaching value of 3D printing, Rochelle said the act of physically making something is very important to learning how to innovate.

“In the creation process, sure, there may be something that you call ‘failure,’ but there really is no failure when you’re creating,” he said.

And it doesn’t matter what you create, he said, noting that he keeps a “box of failures” from his own 3D printing experiments.

Optimism, he said, is a skill that can be learned, in order to resist the temptation to say something won’t work. At one point in history, bottled water was probably deemed a stupid idea, he said. At Google, self-driving cars were likewise frowned on, initially.

Value Ideas

“Practice by getting your kids together and saying ‘Let’s come up with crazy ideas.’ And the thing you’re practicing is, when someone comes up with the worst idea, and another kid says ‘Oh that’s so stupid,’ that’s when you stop and say ‘You don’t know if it’s stupid or not, and we don’t care. It’s an idea,’” he said.

“You want to practice getting all the great ideas out there—and you don’t know which ones are great until you keep going.”

Being decisive is a big part of the equation too, because even if you screw up, you’ll know which way will be the right direction next time, he said. And while the failure can also be beneficial, he cautioned that it’s crucial to explain the difference between failure in assessment and failure in practice, and in trying and experimenting. It’s not ok to fail a test, for instance.

Rochelle brought his own family into the lecture when he addressed the topic of passion. His son Jeremy was so enamored with trucks, he said, that for his 13th birthday Rochelle rented him a small backhoe and let him dig holes in their back yard.

“The key is about discovery. Help the kids discover what they’re going to be passionate about. They don’t know and they need to be introduced to as many things as possible,” he said.

“What you [teachers]do changes the world. It’s critical that the kids understand and get a feeling for what they want to do, and modeling that and understanding it requires innovation.”

The GSE’s Digital Literacies Collaborative organized the conference.