Strategic plan
To ensure that the Gabelli School of Business constantly builds on its strong foundation, Dean Donna Rapaccioli oversees the implementation of a strategic plan and updates its major goals and initiatives each year.
Presently, the plan concentrates on the continual enhancement of four areas:
- Academic curriculum
- Globalization
- Student personal and professional development
- Pedagogical excellence and innovation
A brief snapshot of these four areas follows. Please note that the programs and plans described below are nowhere near exhaustive; they are meant to offer a general sense of the school’s strategic direction.
Academic curriculum
Recent milestones:
- Extended implementation of the integrated business core
- Fully developed The Ground Floor course and sophomore integrated projects
- Increased participation in undergraduate research
- Published the first Fordham Business Student Research Journal
- Added eight new entrepreneurship courses
- Created a minor in sustainable business
Future plans:
- Continue to make the business program more writing-intensive
- Provide greater leadership assessment services for students
- Expand the new value investing specialization
- Continue to increase quantitative rigor in all courses, especially market analytics, management, business policy and portfolio management
Globalization
Recent milestones:
- Increased the proportion of international students in the freshman class to a full 10 percent for the Class of 2015
- Raised participation overall in international study: 256 Gabelli students did some type of study abroad in 2010-2011 alone
- Filled out the full-year cycle at our satellite campus in London by adding a fall-term component for accounting and marketing majors
- Tied our one- and two-week study tours more strongly to course content
- Worked to solidify new relationships with universities abroad, focusing our efforts on Turkey and India and looking toward South Africa and Ireland next
Future plans
- Expand partnerships with additional Jesuit institutions abroad
- Identify specific study-abroad opportunities for each major
- Design more fair trade/microfinance classes in additional countries to augment our current offerings in Kenya
Student personal and professional development
Recent milestones:
- Devised a summer shared-learning experience for each grade level, in the form of a common reading assignment tied to a class theme
- Revised our August orientation program to better serve incoming freshmen
- Created a Facebook page for the Class of 2015 in May so that freshmen could get to know one another before the start of school
- Bolstered our pre-law advising for students considering the LSAT and law school
- Supplemented our existing career development program with new workshops, online résumé reviews, online guides for juniors and school-wide events such as Access Your Future Week
- Added more than 100 new corporate recruiters to our roster
- Fostered online networking services for Gabelli alumni
Future plans:
- Expand our Jesuit-run program of discernment exercises for self-discovery and personal development
- Offer more seminars that prepare students to articulate their expertise and value
- Further expand our internship database
Pedagogical excellence and innovation
Recent milestones:
- Refined our balanced pursuit of theoretical and practical approaches
- Encouraged faculty to incorporate more team-based projects and collaborative learning into their classes
- Improved our system for determining whether professors' methods are successfully conveying material to students
- Continued to foster the use of cutting-edge technology in the classroom
Future plans:
- Provide teaching workshops on new topics suited to faculty needs and interests
- Launch a program in which faculty members gain new ideas for their own lessons by observing colleagues' classes
