BIG DREAM
makes a Big Impact
The Make It Miami Accountancy Program is designed to introduce top multicultural high school students to the accounting profession and to a college career at Miami University’s Farmer School of Business. The hope is that some of them will chose to come to Miami for college. In Esther Ladipo’s case, it worked perfectly. “I did that program the summer before entering my senior year of high school and I fell in love with the Farmer School of Business, fell in love with Miami,” she recalled. “I applied as an accountancy major, and came to campus super wide-eyed and excited to make a difference in the Farmer School.”
faculty members Jan Taylor and Pat Lindsay gave her a lot of career advice.
By any standard, Esther certainly made a lot of her time at Miami. “I just had a fantastic experience while I was there. I learned a lot. I traveled a lot. I studied abroad twice, once in Cuba, once in Southeast Asia,” she explained. “I was involved with the Multicultural Business Association. I founded the Miami chapter of NABA, which is the National Association of Black Accountants, interned at Ernst and Young twice.”
She also decided to take part in something she’d never done before – Startup Weekend. “I had always seen it when I was at Miami, but I was just like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to do it, I don’t know if I’m going to do it.’ Then it was my senior year. I had changed my major. I had just experienced so much change. I just said ‘Esther, put yourself out there and do it.’ I ended up pitching Connexer, an idea of having a platform that connected people to nonprofits and connected people to social organizations that were doing things in their community,” Ladipo said. “I don’t think we placed, but I got the Rock Star award for having a very compelling pitch.”
But during her senior year, she made some big decisions.“I actually ended up changing my major, entering my senior year, to marketing because I decided I just didn’t want to do accounting full time. I wanted to do something a little bit more creative. So took the leap of faith and changed my major, and it ended up being one of the best things I could have ever done,” she said, noting that marketing
Ladipo said that experience and that idea stuck with her after the weekend ended. “I just couldn’t shake the idea. It just resonated so deeply with me. I saw that there was a need -- I could see in my peers that people wanted to give back, people wanted to volunteer, but there was no way for them to be able to do it easily and straight from their phone.”
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