From Doubt to Determination: Vincenzo DiMaggio’s St. John’s Story

His parents didn’t argue. They told him to go upstairs and think about it.

From the quiet of his childhood bedroom, Mr. DiMaggio took stock. “I thought for a bit and said, ‘I need to do this.’ I went back downstairs and told them, ‘All right—I take it back. I’m going back.’ It was the best decision I ever made.”

Back on campus, one professor changed everything. “Professor Ibrahim Badawi had a gift for taking complex accounting topics and making them click,” Mr. DiMaggio recalled. “Because of him, I enjoyed the material—and I did well. That’s when it hit me: I can do this. I’m going to be an accountant.”

He rounded out his studies with an internship in the tax department of a Manhattan ad agency, and upon graduation landed a position at BDO USA, one of the largest accounting firms in the country. When it came time to choose between the partnership track and the corporate world, he chose the latter—and joined The New York Times Company.

“I really grew up there,” he said of his 13 years at the Times, during which he rose from senior accountant to assistant controller. Among his proudest contributions: the accounting work behind the company’s landmark headquarters, which opened in 2007.

What came next, Mr. DiMaggio calls “another dream job”—a role at Viacom (now Paramount Global). “MTV, Paramount movies—it was so much fun,” he said. He spent five years there, rising to Deputy Controller. 

He then spent seven years at Stagwell Global, a digital-first marketing firm, serving as Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. He has recently been named Chief Accounting Officer at Emerald Holding Inc., a leading US-based B2B event organizer.

Through every role, Mr. DiMaggio says the lesson of those first difficult years at St. John’s has never left him. “I was able to weather those first two years, and by the third year I finally got comfortable, building my confidence until I could say, ‘I’m going to do this.’” 

His most meaningful accomplishment, though, has nothing to do with a title. “I am a first-generation American, and it was very important to my parents for their children to be college graduates,” he said. “St. John’s gave me the foundation to start—and to flourish.”