Bottom Line

Baruch College, Class of 2020

Shaffiou is a senior at Baruch College who has been in Bottom Line’s program since his first year of college. Shaffiou is an economics major who hopes to pursue a career in finance and – eventually – politics.

He says that his Bottom Line advisors have helped him significantly throughout his time in college, particularly in terms of managing his time, doing well in his classes, and finding internship and job opportunities to pursue.

“Because of my experience with Bottom Line, I have a strong foundation and I am ahead of the game.  And I am just one of the thousands of students they coach, mentor and support.”

His college experience has certainly been a busy one. Shaffiou has held multiple internships and leadership roles. He has also been honored recently as a Forbes Under 30 scholar, signifying his strong record of achievement in academics/leadership/etc., and he has been invited to attend the Cox-State Department Diplomacy Seminar, at which he will explore possible careers in politics and diplomacy.

His internship as a financial analyst with Prudential offered him exciting opportunities to stretch himself professionally – he was tasked with re-working one of the systems Prudential Capital Group (PCG) uses for financial modeling, and though he found the job challenging, and did not know how to approach it at first, he persevered and came up with a new system that the company is now using. He gained significant new critical thinking and data analysis skills through the experience and is already planning to return to Prudential for a follow-up internship next summer.

Shaffiou also attended the Summer Venture in Management Program this past summer, designed to give students from communities who are underrepresented at Harvard a crash course in the type of work done at their business school. Shaffiou spent a week engaging with other students on how to solve complicated problems in project management, strategic planning, etc. He gained a great deal from the experience and is currently weighing his options for applying to Harvard Business School directly out of undergrad.