Where it started

The opportunity to start The Rival at Fordham came about when a high school friend put me in contact with the founders of the The Rival HQ — Josh Strupp and Miles Field — two George Washington University graduates looking to launch the brand on college campuses nationwide.

As one of the first Managing Editors to adopt this brand, I, alongside my Director of Communications and friend Taylor Branson, began advertising the Rival at Fordham on social media as an edgy, off the beaten path online publication that was to take Fordham by storm, “rivaling” the traditional and established publications on campus.

Tapping into both of our social spheres, we recruited a team of 20 or so Fordham undergraduates in the living room of my too-small-for-comfort Bronx apartment. That night, after sharing an embarrassing story each to break the ice, we shared an open dialogue about how we all were going to define the mission of this online publication, what role we intended it to play in the Fordham community, and how we were going to go about communicating this to the student body.

We shared a toast to the beginning of something new and, with our ripe (and messy) mission statement, began building a new outlet for creatives on campus.