Her family had immigrated from Fujian, China, to New York City just seven years earlier and helping in the family business was just something that children were expected to do, she said. A few years later she enrolled in Brooklyn Technical High School, where she found herself intrigued by economics and concepts like game theory.

Following a Passion for Books

When it came time to choose a college, she chose the Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center, where she majored in global business with a concentration in digital media and technology. She finished her degree in December after just three and a half years. When she accepts her diploma with her classmates this May, she’ll become the first in her family to graduate from college. Next month, she’ll begin a paid internship with Penguin/Random House.

While the diverse student population of Brooklyn Tech convinced her that she wanted to stay in New York, it was the Jesuit principle of “men and women for others” and the relatively small size that attracted her to the Gabelli School.

“I felt like I was going to a school that was really aligned with what I wanted—as well as one that provided the opportunity for different career paths,” she said.

Living at home presented challenges, as the commute on the D train was an hour one way, but Chen made the most of it. It afforded her ample time to read and influenced her decision to apply for the internship with Penguin/Random House, where she’ll assist in international sales and marketing. The position will allow her to work in a field that she loves, and one that she has experience in as well, having interned in marketing with Amalgamated Bank in 2019.

“While I was in school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. One month, I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do data analysis, and the next one I wanted to do something like finance. I just kept jumping around,” she said laughing.

When a student mentor asked her if she could imagine what she’d do for the rest of her life, “it was pretty clear that the answer was, books. I really loved reading, especially during the commute,” she said.

Helping International Students Adjust

Chen was an active presence on campus as well. As a Global Transition Assistant, she worked with incoming international students in August to help them adjust to life in New York City. Those weeks were some of her best memories of her time at Fordham.

“You’re meeting different people from different places and spending time with them, learning new cultures, and just having fun for a whole week—enjoying life before school starts,” she said.

She was also a teaching assistant for Career IP, a one-credit class for Gabelli School first-year students that Jennifer O’Neil, assistant director of Personal and Professional Development, described as “backpacks to briefcases.” O’Neil said Chen was so good at her job, she was like a stealth worker.

“You mention something to her once, and when you realize you forgot to follow up with her and ask her about it—she’s had it done for three days,” she said.

O’Neil said she was confident that Chen would she’d succeed no matter where she ends up.

“She’s just so pleasant to be around and can do so many different tasks that require a wide range of abilities. You don’t pigeonhole her and say, ‘Oh, she’s a finance person’ or ‘She’s a publishing person,’” she said. “She can do anything that she sets her mind to.”

For Chen, the past year has been an odd one, to say the least. The transition to remote learning meant that the hour of reading on her commute disappeared. And although she finished school in December, the pandemic delayed the start of her internship. But she has plenty of warm memories of Fordham. She said she will fondly remember carefree chats with Vin DeCola, S.J., assistant dean for the B.S. in Global Business, “talking about nothing but everything at the same time”—as well as his annual dumpling parties. And, of course, she’ll always remember her work with international students.

“Everyone participating every day together for a week before the semester starts? Yeah, those are some really fond memories,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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