Alumnus Received Excellent Career Preparation at St. John’s
For Whitestone, NY, native Dennis Kirincich ’93CBA, “something just clicked” with St. John’s University when he considered colleges.
“So many people in my community went there,” he recalled. “Several of my brother’s friends attended, as did students from my high school. It’s well-known, respected, and has a great reputation for business, which is exactly what I wanted.”
That lesson goes back to learning how to engage with professors at St. John’s. It’s all about relationship management.
Mr. Kirincich majored in finance in the College of Business Administration (now The Peter J. Tobin College of Business), and quickly made friends on the Queens, NY, campus who were also focused on business. “It was great getting to know like-minded people and learning how they approached classes and studying,” he reflected. “We did not have the technology students have now, so we relied on each other.”
He stressed that building a community with his fellow students was essential to his academic success. “We leveraged each other. We shared notes. We were all navigating how best to approach a class and which professors were the best to engage with and would benefit us the most.”
It took Mr. Kirincich a couple of semesters to hit his stride. “I was taking hard classes like business and finance,” he said. “It was important to create a process on how to prepare and handle each class.”
To that end, he started reading chapters ahead of class so he could acclimate to the material. “If you read the chapter before you go to class, you get so much more out of it,” he said. “You are not hearing about it for the first time in class.”
Entering sophomore year, Mr. Kirincich implemented a strong approach that elevated his grade point average consistently throughout college and led him to graduate cum laude. He began taking summer classes to accelerate the required coursework, which freed time for internships during his junior and senior years. He also met his wife at St. John’s. “So, if it were not for this experience, I wouldn’t have my family,” he said.
Mr. Kirincich added, “St. John’s really delivered. I took advantage of all the career fairs and St. John’s opened up many opportunities in the city. Being so close to Manhattan and financial companies was an amazing experience. Getting my first internship made it easier to get the second.”
Mr. Kirincich is passionate about the internship experience and highly recommends it to current students. “The model hasn’t changed. You need to showcase your abilities and follow through on your commitments. Internships offer a valuable opportunity to connect with organizations, so aim to get as much experience as you can.”
He has high praise for the University’s career fairs. “Thanks to those fairs, I gained invaluable work exposure that ultimately landed me at BlackRock just weeks after graduating, where I have now worked for 32 years.”
Mr. Kirincich joined BlackRock in its early days as a boutique fixed income money manager. “We really evolved,” he explained. That created tremendous opportunities to continually learn and adapt as BlackRock became a global leader in asset management, advisory, and technology services.
“If you want to stay around for the ride, you too must evolve,” he explained, tracing that mindset back to his St. John’s experience of creating process, procedure, and preparation. Spanning a career in data/operations, risk analytics, client service, and business development has been a constant learning experience.
“I describe my BlackRock journey as leading with ‘yes’ raising your hand to help; putting yourself in your clients’ shoes to understand their needs; and working with an emotional attachment and a commercial ownership,” he said. “It was a great aha moment when I started engaging my clients in this way. I never thought I would be doing business development after graduating from St. John’s, but it’s all about understanding clients and bringing the entire company together to provide a solution. That lesson goes back to learning how to engage with professors at St. John’s. It’s all about relationship management.”
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Vincenzo DiMaggio ’96CBA came close to walking away from St. John’s University just months after arriving. The son of Italian immigrants and a first-generation college student, he was juggling a demanding course load and two jobs—and by Thanksgiving break, he was done.
“Not all my friends took the college route after high school—and to be honest, I was on the fence about it, too,” he said. “But it was important to my parents, so I enrolled. Then I told them over Thanksgiving: ‘I’m not going back.’”
A native of Italy, Melania Porteri ’24M.S. dreamt of living and working in the United States. A student of kinesiology, she initially came to the Mount Sinai Health System for thesis research but realized medicine and training others were ultimately not for her.
She found her true path at St. John’s University.
For Charles Driest ’07M.B.A., the allure of Italy brought him to St. John’s University. With his father in the US Marine Corps, Mr. Driest developed an early sense of wanderlust, “seeking out new things, new experiences”—and the ability to study abroad during his M.B.A. program played a major role in his decision to attend St. John’s.
“When I first started to look at M.B.A. options, I put a couple of parameters around what I wanted to do,” he said. “I wanted to be at a program in a metropolitan location, and I was very interested in the opportunity to have a study abroad opportunity,” which is something he had not taken advantage of during his undergraduate years at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.