From Backpack to Briefcase: Meet Army Vet and Zicklin Alum Joseph Martin (BBA, ’19)

Zicklin School alumnus Joseph Martin (BBA, ’19) appreciates a challenge. 

As a young newlywed working entry-level jobs as a doorman and a hospital orderly, he joined the Army to improve his employment prospects and see the world—which he did, spending five years as a military police officer in Afghanistan, Hawaii, Texas, and Missouri. Then he returned to his hometown of the Bronx to study business at Hostos Community College. 

“I wanted to do something to help my community,” Joseph says. “I’m a public servant at heart, and I noticed that many folks in my community, the Black community, lacked financial literacy. My dream was to create a nonprofit to address that.”

 After earning his associate’s degree, Joseph planned to transfer to the Zicklin School—”I’d always heard it was the business school in the CUNY system”—and was surprised that none of his Hostos friends wanted to join him: “They said it was too hard, but I wanted the challenge.” 

The discipline and focus his military training gave him were indispensable at Zicklin: “I was always on time or even early to class, with all my tools—paper, pens, fully charged laptop, whatever I needed.” He mapped out his objectives for each day and, most importantly, “when times were challenging, I kept my head down and just pushed through.” That helped him get through difficult coursework, like calculus and econometrics.

Outside of the classroom, Joseph says he “dabbled,” serving as treasurer of the Veterans Club and joining both Hillel and the National Association of Black Accountants. He also learned from observing fellow students: “I remember seeing a classmate who was day trading, and he was only 19 or 20. I thought about how when I was his age, I was thinking about spending money, not making it,” he recalls.

As he headed toward graduation, Joseph applied to hundreds of jobs, maintaining a spreadsheet of the results. He learned about many of the positions through the Veterans Club and eventually accepted an offer from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Then the Internal Revenue Service recruited him for a position in northern California, where he stayed for three years. 

Now he’s based in Atlanta, Georgia, working as a senior budget analyst for the Department of the Treasury. “I decided I wanted to live somewhere with four seasons again,” he explains. “I picked Georgia because we could buy property with at least an acre of land.”

Joseph’s next chapter? This fall, he begins the MBA program at Georgia State University; he also hopes to reactivate his dream of a financial education nonprofit. “My friends and I started a club where we’d read books about personal finance and financial literacy,” he says. “We invited some kids we were mentoring and we’d get together on Saturdays, eat pizza, and discuss what we were reading. I’d like to get this going again and eventually build it into a professional after-school program.”  

Why Zicklin? “There’s prestige to the name,” Joseph replies. “Being a Zicklin BBA holder has stature. When you meet other people with those credentials, it’s like, ‘You graduated from there too? You got through calculus and econometrics?’ Those classes were the gatekeepers to getting into the business program, so it made earning your BBA almost like being in a fraternity.” (Note: As of 2021, calculus is no longer required for admission to the Zicklin School.)   

This article is the first in a series of profiles of Zicklin students and alumni with military backgrounds. 

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