As he prepares to graduate this year from the Gabelli School of Business, Andres Cintron is getting a unique variety of management experience: overseeing his fellow students who are teaching and mentoring in high schools to help students from the Bronx prepare to study business in college.
“This program has shown me how important it is to be organized because it’s so massive,” said Cintron, a Bronx native majoring in finance.
That program is the Gabelli School’s Corporate Communications High School Pipeline Program, begun six years ago to help students from underrepresented groups enroll at Fordham or comparable schools, thereby increasing their presence in university classrooms and in the world of business.
A key part of the program is scholarships. As a student co-leader, Cintron receives the Gabelli Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Scholarship, established in 2021 to support students who, like Cintron, took part in the program as high schoolers and serve the program in administrative roles as students at Fordham.
It has proved to be a critical piece of his financial aid, said Cintron. “The scholarship has lifted a huge financial burden and created a sense of security for my mom and me,” he said. “I have so many opportunities and resources at Fordham, and to have lost those resources because I can’t pay tuition would be heartbreaking.”
The pipeline program prepares students for business school through mentoring, corporate site visits, a class on the Fordham campus, and a business class taught in the high schools by Gabelli School students to prepare the high schoolers for a year-end pitch proposal competition.
Over the past six years, the program has served approximately 300 high schoolers, and nearly 100 Gabelli School students have served in the program. About two dozen of the high schoolers are either enrolled at Fordham or have recently graduated, said Clarence E. Ball III, former director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Gabelli School, who founded and built the pipeline program.
The program has grown dramatically, he said—since beginning in 2018 with 12 students at Cardinal Hayes High School, Cintron’s alma mater, it has expanded to six Catholic high schools in the Bronx and East Harlem. Because of that growth, Cintron was extra busy last year managing other Fordham students who joined the program as mentors and classroom instructors.
Thanks to a spate of alumni donations in recent years, the Gabelli School will soon be able to award scholarship funds to more students who, like Cintron, play leadership roles in the pipeline program, Ball said.
As he looks ahead to his career, Cintron is grateful that being able to attend Fordham helped him land an internship at Citi this past summer. And his experience at the head of a high school classroom should come in handy as well.
“Leading a classroom is very transferable to leading any group, and just understanding how to get through to people, how to get the group back on track,” he said.
Chris Gosier is research news director for Fordham Now. He can be reached at (646) 312-8267 or [email protected].
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