The goal of the event was to help students find internships for the spring and summer and connect them with potential employers for future full-time opportunities. At Fordham, nearly 90% of undergraduates complete at least one internship before graduating.

Fordham News spoke to students and employers about their goals and the connections they made.

Jacqueline Risch, a senior at the Gabelli School of Business majoring in marketing, was interested in connecting with leaders from the beauty and fashion industries.

What did you think of the internship fair?
I thought it was great. It was actually my first in-person career fair because I was a COVID freshman, so I was a little nervous. It was really fun to be able to get out here and see all the tables and excitement. I got some contacts [from L’Oréal and Tapestry, Inc.], dropped my resume off, and I’m going to track some people down on LinkedIn afterward.

Ekin Kara, a recruiter from AlphaSights, an information services company, said the company was trying to build more of a brand presence at Fordham.

Why did you come to the internship fair at Fordham?
From a recruiting perspective, Fordham is actually one of the campuses that we’re trying to build our brand presence in. It was a higher-level strategic decision—our offices are in New York and San Francisco, and with Fordham being such a reputable school in the New York City area, I feel like there’s a lot of untapped potential.

Sean Borsum, a first-year student majoring in environmental studies, said that he was looking for employers that would allow him to work on environmental issues.

What interested you in the Wildlife Conservation Society specifically?
For me, it’s the environment. I personally like the research side, just getting to know more about the world that we live in and also climate change—all of that is pretty important.

Was it helpful to have employers come to campus and meet with you?
It’s amazing. It’s the most valuable thing you can have, not only for your resume, but also just meeting people in the community and for the future. It’s incredible.

Alumnus Raymond Moya, PCS ’18, a volunteer and community outreach associate at South Bronx United, said he wanted to use the fair to grow the nonprofit’s partnership with Fordham.

Can you tell us a bit about South Bronx United and the internships available?
We’re a sports-based youth development organization and we use soccer as a tool for social change. We help young athletes with career mentorship and career development. We also do a lot of community work, and on top of that we offer immigration and social services to student-athletes and their families and the overall community. We have education internships, communication internships, nonprofit development internships, and community outreach internships.

Benjamin Sano, a first-year student at the Gabelli School of Business majoring in finance, said he enjoyed getting the opportunity to meet with employers.

Why did you choose to connect with South Bronx United?
In Ground Floor [a first-year business course], we have to choose a Bronx company to research. So I went over there to further my knowledge of their company and maybe look to intern next year.

What was it like talking to employers?
It was very interesting. This is my first time doing 30-second pitches and things like that. I don’t like going out of my way to speak to people, I get nervous. But they’re here for us. I was thinking about it as a chance to get my name out there, and hopefully I’ll get an internship my first year. That would be awesome.

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity. Additional reporting by Franco Giacomarra.

Bal initially majored in biology at Fordham, but he switched to computer science in his junior year. Working closely with Damian Lyons, Ph.D., director of the University’s Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, he used technology originally associated with gaming to help herpetologists at the zoo track and study the movements of Kihansi spray toads. The toads had been classified as extinct in the wild in 2009, but in the past decade, scientists at the Bronx Zoo, headquarters of the Wildlife Conservation Society, have been breeding the toads on site and helping to reintroduce them to their native habitat in Tanzania.

According to Lyons, Bal expanded the code to effectively track the toads solely using depth imagery. He also added a color-tracking feature so that made it possible to zero in on the toads when they moved, such as jumping onto a leaf. Bal also created new software to generate behavior analytics.

As an undergrad, Bal also was a volunteer EMT with Fordham University EMS, and he worked as a software engineer intern at Amazon, an experience he said he helped him not only get job offers but also learn “how to work professionally, scalably, and consistently in the real world.”

Today, he’s a software engineer at SpaceX, working on ground network software systems for Starlink, the aerospace manufacturer’s satellite internet service. But one day down the line, Bal said he hopes to launch his own company.

What Fordham course has had the greatest influence on you and your career path so far? How and why was it so influential?
Professor Damian Lyons’ Brains and Behaviors in Beasts and Bots. It was basically a class where we looked at different animal behaviors and then emulated them with robotics (e.g., a bug might walk around until it hits a wall, then it’ll turn and keep moving until it hits a wall, rotate, and so on. At one point we made a robot that did the same). It was a lot of fun, but I would say research outside of class was way more impactful. Classes are good for developing baseline skills, but the best way to solidify your knowledge, grow it, and put it to work is to utilize the resources available to students on campus outside of required coursework, like labs and research opportunities.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
Definitely Lyons. Without the opportunities and encouragement he provided, I’m certain I wouldn’t have made professional progress at the same rate that I have. He introduced me to complex, real-world problems and helped me understand how to break them down into manageable chunks to create something useful. That overall thought process and all of the small nuances I learned along the way have been invaluable in my professional career.

What are you optimistic about?
I’m optimistic about our future. I think that the next few generations will have an extremely large impact on humanity’s trajectory due to their intersection with powerful and exciting technologies that they’ve grown up with, as opposed to previous generations that still remember what it was like to not have smartphones or the entire internet at their fingertips.

The more crowded the neighborhood, the more social the bird. Such are the findings of an interspecies study by Fordham College at Rose Hill junior Lindsay Thomas.

Thomas, who is majoring in biology and minoring in sociology, unveiled her research at the Sixth Annual Bronx Science Consortium Poster Symposium on Wed., Oct. 3. Her work focused on observing birds, and how humans interact with them, in New York City parks. She hypothesized that birds live in different “avian communities” across the city, and, just like their human counterparts, their behavior often reflects the environment of their neighborhood.

In crowded parks, like Central Park, Thomas found that birds and humans interacted closely. People could get close to birds before the birds would take off and seek refuge in nearby woods—and not even that far into the woods. In less crowded parks, like Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, birds flew away much sooner when people approached them, and they fled much deeper into the wooded areas.

“In Central Park the birds are competing for the same areas of the park as humans so they tend to hang out in areas such as footpaths and fountains,” said Thomas. “Unfortunately, birds also tend to use humans as easy food sources due to frequent hand feeding.”

Thomas wasn’t alone in tracking bird-human observations; she was supported by New York City high school students recruited for the study through Project TRUE (Teens Researching Urban Ecology), a program funded by the National Science Foundation that pairs teens with educators from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Fordham researchers.

One of the students, Angel Torres, riffed on Thomas’ work. Out in the field he noticed that birds were more vocal in crowded parks where they were competing with humans and city noise; they were less vocal in quieter parks. However, regardless of the park, when the same species of bird was observed in close proximity to others of the same species, vocalization rates increased.

Thomas’ groundwork for the research began after Tiffany House, her counselor from CSTEP (Fordham’s Collegiate Science, Engineering, and Technology Program), encouraged her to apply for a summer research internship with Project TRUE. As Thomas lives in Rockland County, CSTEP funded her housing for the internship.

Through the Wildlife Conservation Society, she was matched with Jocelyn Harrison, a conservation educator from Central Park who helped her iron out research methods and questions. She was also mentored by Fordham graduate student Emily Casper. By July, she was explaining research methods to three teens and working in the field gathering data with them.

Observing her own mentors opened up new possibilities for Thomas.

“It was great seeing people who were more along in their careers, like Jocelyn. I didn’t know that her job even existed,” she said of the conservation educator. “And I didn’t know we had such a diverse graduate program in biology until I met Emily. Her research is in marine biology! I thought you had to go somewhere else to study that.”

After college, Thomas hopes to pursue fellowship opportunities. Her interests lie at the intersection of policy, public health, and the sciences.

And as inspired as she was by her mentors, Thomas was also inspired by her mentees.

“One of the major takeaways,” she said, “was just working with the high school students and seeing how smart and driven they were.”

Thomas said she went to a low-income high school where budget cuts led to reduction of advanced placement classes.

“When I started this program, my main goal was to provide the students with guidance that I didn’t have at their age,” she said. “If I heard they were interested in college, I would be really on to it and encourage them.” Last month one of the students sent her a college essay to read.

“I tried to offer support beyond the program, support that I didn’t get,” she said.