 |
It's All Relative
Many successful families have graduated from NYIT. How many NYIT alumni are in your family tree?
Most families gather around the dinner table. But at NYIT, relatives often sit side by side in the classroom.
Just ask Eli Wachtel (B.S. '72), who attended NYIT with his dad, Shaul (B.S. '72), before launching a very successful career on Wall Street. "My father and I had an accounting class together," says Eli. "The professor jokingly told me, 'No matter how successful you are in my class, you will never get a better grade than your father.' Looking back, I think we both got an A."
Thirty years later, the Wachtel family still feels right at home at NYIT. Eli's younger brother, Zev Wachtel, M.D., (B.S. '78) and first cousin Eli Greenberg also attended NYIT, and second cousin Noa Evan-Tal is now a student at NYIT.
NYIT Family trees
The Wachtels aren't alone. Scores of families have earned degrees from NYIT. Many spouses met at the college. Some families can even hold their own NYIT reunions. For instance, flip through Kwan Lee Jakobsen's (D.O. '93) family album and you'll find seven degrees from NYIT (see chart, p. 18). Or visit retired IBM engineer Alonzo Wortham (B.S. '64) and you'll hear how NYIT prepared him-and his two sons-to manage life's challenges.
Many families enroll at NYIT to pursue the American Dream. Eli Wachtel, for one, overcame dyslexia to graduate from NYIT in 1972 with a degree in accounting. After graduation, Eli began a career in public accounting, specializing in taxation, and received his CPA certificate. "Most kids in my neighborhood went to Brooklyn College-Brooklyn was our universe," says Eli. "Getting a professional degree was the measurement of success for us."
Eli subsequently applied his public accounting expertise to investment banking, and has never looked back. "Investment banking was definitely not part of our vernacular."
Humble Beginnings
Eli's dad, Shaul, was a civil servant who earned modest wages before graduating from NYIT in 1972. The degree set the stage for several timely promotions within New York's Board of Higher Education, and paved the way for a comfortable retirement. Meanwhile, Eli's brother, Zev, is a board certified anesthesiologist in Tenafly, N.J., and first cousin Eli Greenberg is a successful engineer in Florida. All four are NYIT alumni.
"The smaller class sizes really attracted us to NYIT," says Zev. "Plus, the college provides opportunities for study in so many fields. That's why I'd recommend it to my relatives and friends."
And what about Eli Wachtel? For the past 21 years, he has been at Bear Stearns, where he is a member of the Board of Directors; and for the past 16 years, a Senior Managing Director. He oversees a number of departments and sits on various committees of the firm.
On the September morning we met Eli, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was in a nosedive, plummeting below the 8,000 threshold for the first time in several weeks. Yet Eli was remarkably calm. It was, after all, another day at the office for a 30-year financial veteran.
When prodded, Eli speaks about his success with pride. His office is the size of a small corporate boardroom. At one end, a financial workstation displays a steady stream of stock prices. At the opposite end, talking heads on CNBC fill a television screen.
After scanning the latest financial headlines, Eli points to pictures of his wife and two teenaged children. He also has two grown stepchildren and a grandson. He mentions plans for a family vacation to Australia. Even as he navigates his sixth bear market, Eli remains bullish on life.
Eli's first taste of wealth came in the mid-1970s, when he transformed his career to trading and risk management with the expertise he developed in accounting, taxation and securities law. He joined Bedford Partners, a hedge fund specializing in stock merger arbitrage, as a general partner. The fund was initially funded by Ivan Boesky's family, but dissolved in the early 1980s. Boesky was subsequently linked to the insider trading scandals that rocked Wall Street in the mid-1980s. "Ivan was a very successful risk taker," says Wachtel, "but greed got the better of him."
History Lesson
Eli says the current Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals remind him of the Boesky scandal, where rules were bent and the sense of ethics distorted.
In stark contrast, Eli spoke about his cost accounting professor at NYIT, who demonstrated the intellectual honesty of accounting-how important it is not to distort the truth, just because the rules allow you to. "A lesson well learned," says Wachtel.
Eli prides himself on a reputation based on honesty, integrity and a keen understanding of risk and analytical thinking. By 1981, he joined Bear Stearns as a special assistant to the managing partner. Over time his focus shifted to proprietary trading, international equities and commodities. Eli often manages major transactions that require expertise in taxation, accounting and regulatory rules. "I originally acquired my knowledge in these areas at NYIT," he says.
These days, Eli oversees several major departments within Bear Stearns, including the company's Strategic Structuring and Transactions (SST) Department, a proprietary trading department that uses quantitative and mathematical models to take arbitrage and investment positions in the global capital and commodity markets.
Eli also manages the firm's global trading for non-U.S. equities, oversees a structuring group that serves as a firm-wide resource for new product development and structuring, and a new effort for wealth management.
Eli says he loves the action and the intellectual challenge at Bear Stearns, and thanks NYIT for the opportunity
it provided him.
Like Father, Like Sons
Similar to the Wachtels, Alonzo Wortham was seeking an education that would give him a leg up against the competition. He found it at NYIT-back in 1959.
As an engineer at IBM, Alonzo was part of the early technology revolution. IBM's most popular computer at the time, the model 650, weighed more than 6,000 lbs. and would barely fit in a single-car garage. The systems generated record sales in the 1950s and early 1960s, but IBM's engineers couldn't rest on their laurels.
The transition from vacuum tubes to transistors was revolutionizing the technology sector and microprocessors-the digital brains inside PCs-were just around the corner. Alonzo needed to keep pace with the rapidly evolving market.
"I was working in Peekskill [N.Y.]," recalls Alonzo. "When my job shifted to New York City, I got a room at the local YMCA and decided to take night courses at NYIT."
Alonzo's generation was the first in his family to graduate from college.
His wife, who died about a year ago, graduated from Columbia University. Alonzo's sons, Kendall (B.T. '87) and Darryl (B.T. '88), followed in their father's footsteps by attending NYIT.
"My education helped me do my job better," says Alonzo, who remained with IBM through three more revolutions (minicomputers, microcomputers and PC networks) before retiring in 1993. "And NYIT degrees also helped my sons to succeed in life."
Kendall and Darryl attended NYIT together during the mid-1980s, but are otherwise extreme opposites. While Kendall focuses on family life and a successful criminal justice career in East Brunswick, N.J., Darryl tries to spot emerging technology waves in Silicon Valley.
"My brother's the outgoing guy and I'm the family man," says Kendall, who has a 5-year-old daughter and 18-year-old stepson. "Our parents always stressed the value of education, so it was natural for us to follow dad to NYIT."
Darryl agrees. At NYIT, he was co-president of the National Society of Black Engineers. During his senior year, Darryl attended a conference in Washington, D.C., where he met key recruiters from AT&T's famed Bell Laboratories-birthplace of transistors, lasers and Unix, a popular operating system used across academia, business and the Internet.
"NYIT paid for the trip that ultimately launched my career," says Darryl, who spent 10 years at Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies, before joining Cisco Systems Inc., the $19 billion networking giant.
Despite the sluggish technology market, Darryl maintains a busy schedule. Based in San Francisco, he frequently visits remote customer sites to check on optical networks-which convert data into beams of light for rapid transmission across throughout the world.
Forty-three years after Alonzo came to NYIT, Darryl is set to ride yet another technology revolution, while brother Kendall focuses on family back on the East Coast.
More Family Matters
Graduating from NYIT also is a rite of passage for the Lee family. Just ask Roentgen Lee (D.O. '01), who was only 14 years old when his big sister, Kwan, took him to tour NYIT's New York College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYCOM). "Roentgen was so enlightened and impressed that he changed his dream from being an engineer to being a physician," says Kwan Lee Jakobsen.
Kwan and Roentgen have plenty of NYIT company during family gatherings, including brother Conway Lee (B.S. '95); Conway's wife, Jennifer Cambria Lee (B.S. '95); Jennifer's father, Frank Cambria (A.A.S. '61); and Kwan's husband, Glenn Jakobsen (B.S. '89, D.O. '93).
Holding two degrees from NYIT, Glenn is the bridge between the Lee and Cambria families. "Kwan, Roentgen and I share the NYCOM experience," says Glenn. "But I feel a special bond with Conway, Jennifer and her father, since we are all NYIT graduates."
Most of the Lee family lived in Florida before Kwan discovered NYIT and NYCOM. Kwan first heard about osteopathic medicine from her godfather (a retired D.O. surgeon). Around the same time, her family physician told Kwan that New York was the best place to pursue a graduate and postgraduate education. NYCOM, the only college of osteopathic medicine in New York, emerged as Kwan's top choice for medical school.
More than Classmates
Kwan met her future husband, Glenn, during NYCOM orientation. "We have different ancestry-Glenn is Norwegian and I'm Chinese-but we were united by a common goal to be doctors," says Kwan. "We wanted to live the American Dream that our fathers were seeking when they came to the United States."
Their common dream has been fulfilled. Kwan is now a medical director at a private practice in Westbury, N.Y., and Glenn works in a private physical rehabilitation practice in Forest Hills, N.Y.
Before graduating, Kwan and Glenn both influenced Kwan's younger brother, Conway, to join them at NYIT. "Conway knew that he wanted to be a business major with an emphasis on computers," recalls Kwan. "We told him New York was the place to be. The opportunities seem boundless compared to Florida."
Conway agreed. In addition to enrolling at NYIT, he landed a network-management job in the college's computer labs. "Going to New York was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity-or so I thought," says Conway. "I figured I'd return to Florida after
graduating, but I wound up staying in New York for good."
In retrospect, that's hardly surprising. Conway met his future wife, Jennifer Cambria Lee, during math class in 1994. He now runs a computer consulting company on Long Island and Jennifer manages office operations for a small outsourcing company in Plainview, N.Y.
Another Degree
The Lee's most recent NYIT graduate is Kwan's other brother, Roentgen. "When Roentgen interviewed at NYCOM, he was wearing the same suit that Glenn had worn seven years earlier for his NYCOM interview," says Kwan.
"I considered schools in Florida," adds Roentgen. "But my sister's experience rotating in New York hospitals influenced my decision to attend NYCOM." Roentgen expects to complete his emergency medicine residency in June 2005.
Will the Lees, Wachtels and Worthams send future generations to NYIT? Our crystal ball isn't perfect, but anecdotal evidence is promising. Kwan's 5-year-old daughter, Victorien, has attended various events at NYIT.
Only 13 more years until enrollment.
|
|
