Business Administration Major, Finance and Accounting Concentrations
Langhorne, Pennsylvania
When Evan Gever was 13 years old, he and his father invested a sum of money in the stock market, then watched as the stocks they bought increased in value. "It lights a fire," he says of securities trading. "I've followed the market ever since."
So what drew him to Ithaca College's School of Business? Its trading room. More formally known as the Center for Trading and Analysis of Financial Instruments, the trading room gives students access to the same commercial databases that Wall Street traders depend on. Evan doesn't just use the room to hone his financial skills, however: he heads student organizations that monitor and expand its use. As a member of the Deans' Hosts executive board, for example, he helped retool the program that explains the room's capabilities to visitors; he also trains new presenters. And as president of the Core Trading Consultants group, he leads efforts to generate bigger, more ambitious projects for the trading room. Right now he and his colleagues are exploring the possibility of running a small mutual fund for the campus community.
The College's commitment to building a sustainably designed new home for the business school has given Evan further opportunities to enhance his leadership skills. As a member of the "stakeholders" committee, he's become an ardent advocate of sustainability and sees its critical importance for the future. "It's a great area to know about," he says. "Every corporation is going to have a segment that deals with this." Now he's moved onto the committee's core team and is involved in making major decisions; recently, for example, he helped hire the project's construction manager.
But it's perhaps the school's wide-reaching alumni network that's helped Evan the most. Ithaca's rich list of contacts provided him with a variety of internship possibilities. To learn more about one, he says, "I just picked up the phone and called an alum and talked to him for close to an hour." The internship he completed last summer, at Merrill Lynch in New York City, led to something even better: "I've already been offered a job working as a financial adviser for a brokerage house in midtown Manhattan."
