LATROBE, PA – There is a year-old Christmas card tacked to the wall in professor Marti Fusco’s office in Aurelieus Hall. On a recent sunny afternoon, Fusco glanced up from her laptop at that memento from last winter and smiled.

The card was from a graduate student who was in one of Fusco’s accounting classes at Saint Vincent College. The handwritten message was simple and heartfelt: Thank you for a second chance. Thanks for all your support.

“That's why I'm here,” said Fusco, who five years ago pivoted her career from corporate executive to college instructor. “This is what brings me here every day. This is what energizes me.”

Fusco became an instructor of business administration in the McKenna School of Business, Economics and Government in 2019. Before that, she worked eight years as an auditor for Deloitte in Pittsburgh and 15 years for Kennametal, a machinery parts manufacturer in Latrobe. Among her roles at Kennametal were corporate controller, interim chief financial officer and vice president of finance.

“I spent a lot of time in prayer and discernment, asking, ‘What is it, God, that you want me to do, because I feel like this isn’t it,” Fusco said. “In the very early stages of it, I wondered about teaching. But then I thought, ‘I can’t do that. I don't know anything about academics,’ so I stopped thinking about it.”

That changed one afternoon during an office conversation with a Saint Vincent graduate who mentioned the College’s Accounting Department had a few vacancies due to retirements. That led Fusco to seek advice from a Kennametal coworker who also was an adjunct teacher at Saint Vincent. “He told me, ‘Absolutely, you can do this,’” she said.

Fusco’s extensive work experience—she’s a certified public accountant (CPA) in Pennsylvania and a member of the American Institute of CPAs, the Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs and the American Accounting Association—made her a great fit for an adjunct role. To become a full-time instructor, she is pursuing a PhD at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

“I bring a mix of both public experience and corporate experience to the classroom,” Fusco said. “There are different types of accounting, and you have to understand the roles. The exciting part is when you take the financial information, read the trends and predict where you're headed to make your business better. Every day, I’m so thankful for this opportunity to engage with my students. I really feel this is what I was meant to do.”

The transition to academia was a little bumpy at first, and it took Fusco a couple of semesters to find her stride in the classroom. After dealing for so many years with employees, coworkers and customers, Fusco had to figure out how to relate to students. “They're sort of like customers, but they’re more than that because I really care about their well-being,” she said. “I care [for the students] like I care for my own children.”

Fusco and her husband have four kids ages 16 to 20, so she has a sense of what her students like, dislike, wonder and worry about. Being able to connect in that way made her more comfortable in the classroom. It also led Fusco to encourage her students with a phrase that she’s long used with her children.

“I say to my kids every day, ‘Be safe, be kind, be amazing,’” Fusco said. “All I ever ask of my kids is know you are amazing because that's the way God made us.”

The group of 11 accounting majors who graduated in winter 2023 and spring 2024 was special to Fusco because they were the first students she taught, advised and launched into the workaday world beyond the Saint Vincent campus. Each of them is either employed in the field or in graduate school.

In the 2024-2025 academic year, Fusco is teaching an intermediate (sophomores), advanced (seniors) and graduate-level accounting courses. She also teaches Managerial Accounting, which is for non-accounting majors. “I love teaching that class,” Fusco said, “That [Christmas card] is from somebody I taught in that class, just telling me to have a great day. That makes me so happy.”

One student who calls Fusco her “college mom” is a frequent visitor during office hours. “When she's missing home, she’ll plop down in the chair and we’ll talk,” Fusco said. “I tell my husband all the time, I'm here because they need me, and it fills me with joy. Even on days when I wake up tired, there's a voice in my head—maybe it’s the Holy Spirit—that says, ‘Go be amazing. Go make a difference in their day and in their lives.’ It’s so much more than just [teaching about] debits and credits.”

PHOTOS: Marti Fusco