Conrad Ciccotello is proudest of the internship program he grew and the fundraising that made it possible
The Ciccotello family has never planted perennials, as the joke goes. It’s the way Conrad Ciccotello prefaces the list of moves he’s made: from Pennsylvania to Texas to Massachusetts to Colorado to Pennsylvania to Georgia to Colorado.
At the Daniels College of Business, he put down some roots. For nine years, Ciccotello led the Reiman School of Finance, sowing a culture that prioritized the student experience, internships, and faculty and staff growth.
This summer, Ciccotello is retiring, leaving behind a legacy of experiential learning and strong career outcomes.
“This has been a really great job,” said Ciccotello, who first took the helm in 2017. “I feel like I’ve been able to change and adapt and improve things in nine years, which is really short in academic time. I’ve always enjoyed the vast majority of my colleagues because I feel like we’ve had a shared mission.”
Learning, experiencing, trusting
Ciccotello has never been one to waste time. He realized as a child in the borough of Portage, Pennsylvania, that he never knew how much he had left.
“My parents were not blessed with health or longevity,” said Ciccotello, noting they were unable to work after he graduated middle school, “and so I always looked at their lives and said, ‘While I’m here, how should I be using the time that I have? How can I leave this place better than I found it—and quickly?’”
First, he had to find a way out of Portage.
Fewer than 10% of his high school classmates attended college, but Ciccotello took advantage of a great guidance counselor and an ROTC scholarship to reach Lehigh University. He earned his materials engineering degree and joined the Air Force.
Straight out of school, the young project officer stared down old planes with a lot of problems. He learned by doing—and by trusting his colleagues.
“The people with the best information to help you were the people putting their hands on the plane, not the generals,” he said. “I learned from them how important decisions work.
“I’m very grateful to the Air Force and I’ve always felt I was going to do everything I can to make sure their investment in me was worth it.”
So, while holding down a full-time maintenance job, he added an MBA (“at night”); while working on radar systems in Massachusetts, he earned a law degree (“at night”). (“What else would I be doing?” he mused.) He went on to teach finance at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
Research for the masses
When he was told the Academy needed someone to get a PhD in three years and supervise all the junior officers at Penn State University, Ciccotello raised his hand.
His reward was another diploma, and a new way of looking at research.
“I got hooked on taking academic work, academic style, academic rigor and analysis, and taking it to practitioners,” Ciccotello said. “We were taught to write an academic paper and then take those insights to a practice or policy audience. I like that people are looking at my work. It’s not for nothing.”
The most prominent example: The U.S. Senate Banking Committee leaned on Ciccotello’s research on mutual fund market timing during a 2003 late trading scandal.
He hasn’t been one to shy away from the news media either. It was rewarding to use his expertise to help everyday people—whether it was advising Weather Channel viewers about travel insurance following the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, or talking to Men’s Health about retirement planning.
“Sometimes you write something in academics that seems obscure,” Ciccotello said, “but then something happens in the real world” that makes it relevant.
Scaling the student experience
After a couple of years at Penn State, Ciccotello settled into a role at Georgia State University, where he would direct the asset and wealth management programs and chair the Department of Risk Management and Insurance.
But then he saw an ad for a job at the Daniels College of Business.
“I always thought of Daniels as a very unique place,” he said. “It had a wide reputation for its ethics and integrated curriculum. That to me was always intriguing. I thought it would be a good fit for me. My scholarly focus is not narrow.”
Neither, as it turned out, were his responsibilities. Ciccotello spent time in the classroom and worked hard to improve student access to internships and job placements. He has personally supervised every internship since he arrived, more than 600 in all, he estimates.
“I’ve done it because it forced me into the data to try to figure out how to streamline the system and get students exposure to these opportunities earlier,” he said. “We need to scale things, scale processes to enable students to find their niche in a rapidly changing demand market for talent.
“We’ve sort of set up a behavioral nudge. When students see other students taking internships earlier in their career, they care about what their peers are doing.”
As a result, the number of student internships has increased from about 20 per year to 100, traced back to 500 different employers.
Ciccotello has also been an eager fundraiser. He counts the establishment of the Ron Rizzuto Student Opportunity Fund, the Mac Clouse Scholarship Fund and the Mac Clouse Signature Student Experience Fund among his proudest accomplishments.
Through it all, Ciccotello has kept his own children in mind. Parenting, he says, can be viewed on a “Four C Model”: caretaker, cop, coach and consultant. His day job has required that balance too.
As he punches out at Daniels for the last time, Ciccotello will be putting that mindset to good use in Atlanta, his retirement destination.
The grandkids are growing up fast. He wants to make sure he’s there to watch them bloom.