By Andrew Morse
The Investment Banking Society, a club proposed by Craig Barone, GSB ’15, has been approved by USG. The club will now move on in the approval process to the Dean’s office.
The goal of the Investment Banking Society is to help Fordham students who are interested in the banking industry to network, learn technical skills and give back to the Fordham community.
Barone got the idea for the club from his work experience.
“I got a job at UBS with their leveraged finance and financial sponsor’s team,” said Barone. “I was mentoring three students at Fordham. I figured why not make this on a larger scale? I wanted to create a club.”
The structure of the club is designed so that upperclassmen and students with more work experience can help mentor and teach younger students. “It is more geared to younger students, and we have weekly meetings,” said Barone. “We have a panel of mentors including me and five other students, and we assigned mentors to each club member.”
The Investment Banking Society focuses on giving students the skills and experience they will need to work in the banking industry.
“We really promote interaction, and a lot of the work we do happens outside of the meetings,” said Barone. “We want to make them be active in terms of learning, participating and giving presentations.”
Barone continued, mentioning some of the activities in which the club partakes, “we do mock interviews, we give them material to read, help them learn how to network, help with classes and with the technical and math knowledge like modeling. We really prep people for interviews. We want to get them 200 percent ready.”
The club is also in the middle of a competition in which participants must create a financial model for the New York-based fashion designer Michael Kors.
Barone hopes that former club members and alumni will be able to give back to the Investment Banking Society when they are out in the work force.
“We had a managing director from CitiGroup who is a Fordham alumnus come to me and say he wants to recruit directly from Fordham, and it turned into one student getting an offer,” said Barone. “It is hard to break into the industry without a mentor, and I know that when I was a freshman I would have loved to have had that.”
A key problem facing the Investment Banking Society moving forward is that the club’s founders are seniors this year.
“Right now I am the president, and Jackson Mills is the vice president,” said Barone. “Levi Glick will be our president next year, and Alex Liebert will be our vice president. We are in a phase-out period for the seniors. We will be handing it down to Alex and Levi. We have a lot of turnover with seniors this year.”
James McCann, a professor of finance and business economics, serves as the club’s faculty advisor. He has served as a valuable resource for the club.
“Professor James McCann is the faculty advisor, and he helps to get us a lot of guest speakers including the chief risk officer from UBS,” said Barone. “We use professor McCann a lot to market ourselves.”
The club started out running informally for the past year, and the founders are looking forward to achieving approved club status.
“When we first started, it was not that many people, but now in a given meeting it is usually around 40 people or so, but some events we get up to about 70 people,” said Barone. “When we first started, we would send email blasts to finance related classes and tell them what we are all about. We haven’t marketed anything in the past year, because we haven’t had to. The amount of members has increased exponentially.”
Barone is excited for the potential of the Investment Banking Society to help Fordham students within the industry. He hopes the club’s structure will lead to underclassmen learning from upperclassmen and upperclassmen having access to opportunities from alumni and former members.
“The key thing is the mentorship aspect. That sets us apart; we are very interactive,” said Barone.
