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Photo by William Taufic
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Paddy Reynolds is the youngest finance director ever at New York Medical College. “I earned this position by earning the respect and trust of the departments,” says the 25-year-old. “But I’d be lying if I said there hasn’t been added pressure with the title.”
Reynolds first got a job as a financial analyst at New York Medical College after graduating magna cum laude from SUNY Albany with a degree in business administration. His role was to keep track of day-to-day purchases, mostly handling the IT duties of the finance department.
“It was pretty surreal,” Reynolds admits. “I had a bunch of middle-aged people coming into my office and consulting with me, and I’m a twenty-two-year-old.” But he did a little more than simply keep track of orders—he developed an information system for the college to keep track of its purchasing, to allow employees to go online, enter their purchase order numbers, and find out the status of their orders instead of making countless phone calls.
This past March, he was promoted to finance director. His day-to-day responsibilities now range from greenlighting construction projects to clearing new faculty members for their first day. When one department thought it would take months to get equipment necessary for its research, Reynolds re-jiggered the school’s budget so that the acquisition could be moved up and delivered in time. “Paddy acts as a perfect liaison between the university and school administration,” says Gus Steadman, vice provost and senior associate dean of the School of Medicine at New York Medical College. “The entire medical school has been able to rely on him to make sure that things get done.”
He’s now overseeing a five-month-long renovation of the department of pharmacology, making sure construction is moving along and, more important, that money is well spent. Reynolds also recently was appointed by the president of the college to serve on a subcommittee of its research taskforce. The subcommittee is charged with making recommendations on how to increase the volume of basic and clinical research, and to propose improvements to the research support process.
In addition, Reynolds served as a core member of the college’s chief information officer’s strategic planning committee, helping to develop a five-year plan to improve the college’s infrastructure. Slated upgrades include making the campus completely wireless and updating the accounting systems. Reynolds declares, “I’m like a jack of all trades here.”
—SS
