Gabelli first-year student: From the beach to the Bronx
Undergraduate | Sep 12, 2016 | Gabelli School of Business
Taylor Duffy, BS ’20
Taylor Duffy, BS ’20, has the most enviable summers.
She lifeguards at a beach club in Breezy Point, Queens, and spends her days exactly where she wants to be.
“Getting up and going to the beach — that’s all I do all day,” the 18-year-old joked.
Duffy loves it so much that she even goes back on her days off, spending time with friends in the surf and nearly always being the last one out of the water.
So she’s a little sad her summer has ended, but thrilled to be a freshman studying accounting at the Gabelli School.
What brought her to Fordham?
Duffy grew up and went to high school in North Salem, N.Y., a small town with a lot of horse farms.
“There were only 500 kids in my school,” she said. “In my grade, there were only a hundred. I had the same friends since kindergarten, and I never really met anyone new.”
Being in New York City will change that, she said. Duffy initially looked at a number of different colleges in the city, but Fordham’s Rose Hill campus stood out for both its setting and its urban, diverse environment.
“A lot of the schools in the city didn’t really have a campus, so Fordham was that perfect mixture of the two,” she said.
Duffy is a fan of making things fit together, especially numbers. She started getting good at math in the eighth grade, and her love for solving problems grew from there. Her mother, who originally wanted to be an accountant but moved on to engineering, told Duffy she should consider accounting as a major.
“I actually found an internship [at an accounting firm] in North Salem, with my friend’s mom. I started doing that for a couple of months, and I absolutely loved it,” she said.
That’s the path Duffy is taking for now. Her path also includes getting to know her classmates, meeting people who have different experiences and different backgrounds, and enjoying all that New York City has to offer.
“I’m pretty excited about this year,” she said.
