Jake Gordon ’19: ‘Driven with a Clear Purpose’

When Jake Gordon came to Lehigh University in fall 2019 as a member of the MS in Management (M2) class, he was driven with a clear purpose: to learn as much as he could about the more quantitative elements of business strategy and land a job at a top tier management consulting firm. Now, roughly 10-months, some long nights of studying and many case interviews later—Jake is proud that he will be working as a Management Consulting Analyst at Accenture—his dream firm. When talking about his M2 experience overall, he says “I definitely grew more with my business acumen and technical skills than I ever would have thought possible. I can’t wait to get out there in the world and apply the many interesting lessons I learned during M2.”

A Los Angeles, CA native originally, Jake graduated from Muhlenberg College in 2018 where he studied Business and Political Science. Out of the classroom he served as two year captain of the wrestling team, was heavily involved in philanthropy through his leadership fraternity, and most of all, fostered a unique passion for entrepreneurship in starting his own business.

Along with a co-founder, Jake founded dressedgps.com, an online e-commerce platform where students could rent or sell their underused outfits (like dresses, suits, or even themed sports jerseys) to other students and make a profit. After working on this business for over a year and growing it to multiple college campuses around the country—Jake realized that there was a lot more he wanted to learn about running and scaling a successful business.

To get that experience, he had the opportunity to work in Tel Aviv, Israel as a Venture Capital Analyst at Viola Growth, the largest VC in Israel with over $3 billion in assets under management. While working on investment deal due-diligence, industry/technology research, and product go-to-market strategies for Viola, he found a passion for the work and knew that he wanted to continue when he started his career. A friend recommended management consulting as an industry where he could do very similar types of projects- and and with that, Jake then became fixed on making it happen.

Returning to campus at Muhlenberg in the fall of 2017, he came to understand that breaking into consulting is incredibly challenging and shifted his focus to find a Masters program that could allow him to stand out as an applicant while also getting a stronger quantitative background.

“I knew that companies are looking for applicants that have strong technical skills and can both understand and use technology to do analysis. When I found Lehigh’s MS in Management program it felt like a perfect fit to launch my career and challenge myself.”

To get consulting experience the summer before the program started, Jake interned at the Lehigh University Small Business Development Center, helping local companies in the Lehigh Valley area with their most pressing strategic challenges.

The combination of his internship experiences, along with both his educational and athletic background with Muhlenberg and Lehigh positioned him as a strong applicant to get into consulting. But just looking good on paper in the highly competitive application process wasn’t going to be enough. Thats where the Lehigh Alumni network, where thousands of alumni occupying jobs at top consulting firms around the world, was leveraged by Jake as a pivotal tool in his candidacy. Using platforms such as LinkedIn and Lehigh Connects to set up calls to get advice on the interview process—multiple alumni personally stepped up to mentor and coach him to success.

“Without the Lehigh network—and particularly the many folks that took extensive time out of their days to mentor me and help with the overwhelming process of breaking into consulting, I don’t think it would have been possible. I am incredible grateful and am certainly in debt to pay it forward to the next wave of students seeking personal or career guidance.”

Jake starts his job at Accenture on July 10th in nearby Philadelphia and will be doing everything he can to make his Mountain Hawk and Muhlenberg families proud.

We’re very excited to welcome the Master’s in #Management Class of 2019 for an intense two-week Orientation designed to prepare our #graduate students for both academic and #professional success for the coming year.  Highlights of the two-week Orientation include building a cohesive cohort through a variety of teamwork challenges, and developing #leadership skills through networking, communication, interviewing, and presentation workshops aimed at enhancing students' executive presence. Learn more about the program: http://ow.ly/KQSp30lr42S.

More Than Just A Hackathon

Lehigh FinTech Group planned, cohosted, and won a hackathon competition against some of the top Universities in the country. This hackathon, however, was more than a traditional coding competition. It encompassed students from all business disciplines to create a well rounded team that collaboratively created effective technology for real world problems and demands within our financial world.

What is Lehigh FinTech Group? Lehigh FinTech Group is a student run organization that strives to promote understanding for the emerging financial technology industry*. It connects students with businesses and institutions for team projects, education seminars, “hackathons,” and a variety of networking conferences. The Group is fairly new, founded by Dean Zimberg (IBE Class of 2020) in 2017. The kickoff event was February 2-4 of this year, co-hosting WUFT Hacks 2018: University of Pennsylvania’s first ever, inter-collegiate FinTech Hackathon.

*Financial technology is the industry known for championing software and technology in the financial sector, including robotic financial advisers, blockchain, peer-to-peer lending (such as Venmo), and crowdfunding. Almost two-thirds of customers across the globe use FinTech products or services. FinTech touches not just the financial services sector, but every business, as those utilizing FinTech are able to innovate more rapidly.

What was WUFT Hacks about? 

 The event ran for 36 hours in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with the sponsorship from TD Bank, Tradeweb and Virtusa. In addition to Lehigh FinTech Group, the event was cohosted by Wharton Undergraduate FinTech Group (WUFT) and Def Hacks Inc., a nation wide, non-profit hackathon organization. The event featured a melting pot distinguished schools, attracting attendees from Cornell, Lehigh, Columbia, Harvard, and New York University, along with local UPenn students. Teams were required to have 4-5 members. Students were accepted to attend the competition based off a mix of criteria ranging from merit and past-experience to demonstrated interest and field of study. 

During the event’s opening ceremony, TD Bank announced the option of two prompts that teams could base their project off of:

After selecting one of the two prompts, teams needed to come up with effective solutions to the problems within the allotted timeframe. Sponsors provided necessary tools, such as anonymized data sets, APIs that mimic integral banking functionality, and sanitized user information from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Using a variety of design and prototyping platforms, students added limitless creativity to their deliverables. The 1st place team, consisting of first-year students from Lehigh, created a fully-functional app that featured transactional network similar to PayPal’s Venmo. Specifically, this winning team’s deliverable showcased a peer-to-peer platform that enables its users to trade interest-bearing loans. However not all deliverables featured advanced code: in fact, another winning team — also representing Lehigh — did not write a single line of code, which is unheard of at traditional hackathons. Rather they presented a beautifully-designed artificial voice assistant concept that was enough to win over the judging panel.

What made this “hackathon” different?

A hackathon is typically an event where a large number of individuals engage in collaborative computer programming over a period of time. Most hackathons consist of only computer programmers, however the average team at WUFT Hacks was extremely diverse, including members ranging from graphic designers to computer scientists to business persons. By integrating students from multiple disciplines, the teams were able to mirror the larger field of financial technology. The hackathon focused more on idea generation and the business professionalism of concepts in relevance to financial technology, rather than strictly coding. At WUFT Hacks only one individual per team was required to know code and the rest of the team consisted of creative business minded people. This allowed the event to be more applicable to multiple majors and interests.

What does Lehigh FinTech Group have to offer to business students?

Lehigh FinTech Group is an excellent group for any student interested in the emerging financial technology markets. Financial technology is rapidly growing and is present within all business fields. Aside from getting hands on experience at this business-oriented hackathon, students obtained real networking connections by showcasing their talents to recruiters, industry professionals, and high-profile executives from sponsors such as TD Bank.

The FinTech club and its activities are supported by the Martindale Center, including sponsoring bringing the large contingent of Lehigh students to the hackathon. To learn more about Lehigh FinTech Group, please visit http://www.lehighfintech.org/.

[Photos provided by Lehigh FinTech Group]

Winter in Peru

The Global Citizenship Program (GCP) is an excellent program for Lehigh students. Today our world is more connected than ever. Therefore, having an understanding about different cultures and more awareness of the world around us allows business students to better prepare for the work force.

The Global Citizenship Program prepares students for engaged living in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. Emphasizing critical analysis and value reflection, the program structures educational experiences through which students learn to negotiate international boundaries and develop their own sense of personal, social, and corporate responsibility to the global community. The program is designed to be flexible so that undergraduate students in any college may participate. Students bring perspectives of their own disciplines to the fore as the group explores questions of what it means to be a global citizen as an engineer, or a businessperson, or an artist or a social or natural scientist. To participate, interested students should enroll in GCP 010 - which is a pre-requisite for application to the program - during the Spring term of their first year at Lehigh.



At the conclusion of the program students receive a Certificate in Global Citizenship. The requirements for the certificate include five core classes, two additional global focused electives, a 12-14 day faculty led intersession abroad, and an additional abroad experience in a non-english speaking country for at least 4 weeks. 

Over the winter break of the 2017-18 school year, the GCP’s most recent cohort visited Peru for 12 days with faculty members Sarah Stanlick and Matt Bush.


Below are the current Lehigh University College of Business and Economics (CBE) students in the Global Citizenship Program cohort that went to Peru. Some have included their own personal reasons for joining the Global Citizenship Program and what they hope it will add to their business profession.

Nathalie Wing // Marketing “GCP really interested me as a marketing major. To effectively market to consumers requires a thorough understanding of people and their cultures, which we analyze in depth in GCP. I love being able to learn more about different ways of life and thought the program would be a fun and unique way to distinguish myself from other marketing majors.”

Angelica Benares // Undecided “I applied for GCP after experiencing the class. I learned a lot about different perspectives on the world and developed a better understanding of how to leave a positive impact in my community.”

Bridget Beyer // Marketing Major & Graphic Design Minor "There were a lot of reasons I applied for GCP, but I think in relation to business it is the connections and networking opportunities that the older GCP cohort talked about. We had the opportunity to meet with a Google Marketing employee which really appealed to my career interests.”

David Owalabi // Accounting “I joined the Global Citizenship Program because the program gives me the opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations with my peers, while also giving me the chance to learn ways to confront the problems that plague the world around us.”

By: Nathalie Wing ’20