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Deloitte’s Mentoring Team

Accounting at NTHS...
A pool of talent: Smart, motivated teenagers.

On the fourth floor of our high school, in the accounting section of our department, sit seven professionals from accounting firm Deloitte & Touche LLP in blue and gray suits.

The troupe from Deloitte spends Friday mornings from 7:25 to 9:25 working as mentors in a program called Virtual Enterprise. For our school, along with 45 other schools in the program, the idea is to invite local businesspeople to help students set up and run virtual businesses, thereby teaching them the work ethic and skills of the working world.

But for Deloitte, there's much more to the effort than good corporate citizenship. Along with nursing and engineering, auditing is one of the hot spots in the economy where demand heavily outstrips supply. According to the Labor Dept., accounting is one of the fastest-growing fields, expected to add 49,000 new jobs a year through 2014. So along with signing bonuses for college grads and hefty raises for current staff, Deloitte's managers hunt for talent one step earlier than they used to: in high school. And our school has become a valuable pipeline to an important pool of talent: smart, motivated teenagers.

Deloitte is far from the only outfit that's busy reaching out to teens. In New York, 79 other companies take part in Virtual Enterprise. However, this is not mere altruism. It is employers with the greatest needs who are putting in the biggest effort. "I've never seen a tougher market for talent," says William C. Freda, a 32-year veteran of Deloitte and its northeast regional managing partner. Freda happily supports the firm's 61 volunteers in New York City, even though he calculates that their time spent on the program equates to more than $1 million over the past four years. "This is a wonderful talent pool," he says. "And this is a business imperative for us."

One example of the return on Deloitte's investment is one of our graduates and he is sitting a few floors below Freda's downtown office. Rayon Piper, 22, first encountered Deloitte when he was a junior at Norman Thomas. The son of Jamaican immigrants, he arrived in the U.S. at the age of 11. By junior high he was already interested in business, but working with Deloitte mentors helped him mold his curiosity into an accounting career.

Piper started at Deloitte as a high school summer intern and stayed on when he entered college, working 20 hours a week. He's doing that while taking a full course load of 15 credits a semester at Pace University, where he's pursuing a bachelor's degree in accounting and an MBA in a special five-year program. "Everyone said accounting is so boring. But me, personally, I didn't find it boring," he says.

Starting in his junior year of college, Piper began working on client accounts, recently finishing some work on the audit of financial giant Lazard Ltd. "I've been here so long people trust me," he says. It's easy to see why. Piper's big smile and enthusiasm pair with a direct, self-assured manner. His long-term goal: to be a Deloitte partner in 10 years or so.

Beyond hard work and energy, our kids can inject creative thinking into an enterprise. This is why community relations managers of a multitude of companies spend so much time looking over contestants at our department. Getting involved with students early means companies can help tailor their educational offerings to their own needs. Norman Thomas High School is proud to provide career opportunities to our students.

Evdoxia Darios
Assistant Principal
Dept. of Career & Technology Education.