Success Story: Rahul Mepani ’21 interns at Manhattan Venture Partners

Success Stories | Aug 30, 2018 | admin

Freshman year is often a time for students to explore their interests and figure out what career they eventually want to pursue.

For one Gabelli School student, it was time to get to work—literally.

This past spring and summer, Rahul Mepani, BS ’21, interned at Manhattan Venture Partners. As a freshman he was the youngest person in the 30-employee office, but he says it spurred him to “understand what I need to do to succeed.” For him, that meant conducting independent research and talking to other employees.

“Most of my learning is coming from outside of the work I’m doing,” he notes.

Mepani is accustomed to approaching challenges in a focused way. In high school, calculus and geometry were his favorite subjects. He says he was “always interested in business and finance, accounting—just the whole business world.”

The world in general intrigued him as well. “My parents emphasized the idea of a global education,” he says, because they’d grown up in India. Plus, he had friends and family in different parts of the world, which further motivated him to pay attention to international news and events.

Once he got to the Gabelli School and started taking classes at the Lincoln Center campus, Mepani found that finance was “a combination of accounting and using the dynamic skills of being a people person,” so he focused his efforts on landing an internship that would allow him to use all of these skills.

As part of the process, he connected with both current Gabelli School students and alumni whenever he could. He says the key is to approach people without a precise agenda. “I learned that you should always do research or find out more about them. Find some common ground,” he suggests.

After that, it’s about “building a bond, because these are relationships you want to maintain for the rest of your life.”

Now that he has his first internship under his belt, Mepani says he’s looking forward to learning more as vice president of the Fordham Fintech Network and through the Gabelli School’s sophomore-year Consulting Cup. He’s also excited to keep exploring the city; he particularly enjoys getting off at an unplanned subway stop and finding someplace to eat.

Whether expanding his finance skills or trying out new restaurants, the “most important thing I’ve learned,” he shares, “is you always want to continue to be hungry.”