Rising Star: How Mentorship Helped Adelisa Music Find Her Wings

November 20, 2025

FWA–Baruch College Mentoring Program Spotlight

Adelisa Music is a rising star with a bright future in finance. A college student at Baruch, she’s built her success through focus, resilience, and a willingness to keep learning. Along the way, the Financial Women’s Association’s Mentoring Program at Baruch College added another dimension to her journey, giving her the guidance and confidence to take her ambitions even further.

“My experience with the FWA Baruch College Mentoring Program was more than transformative,” Adelisa says. “It served as a guide and support throughout college, introducing me to people and opportunities that opened doors I didn’t know existed and helped me learn more about my strengths and weaknesses.”

From the start, she knew she wanted a mentor who could offer both professional insight and genuine guidance. “I recognized the need for someone I could lean on,” she explains. “Importantly, I wanted to learn how to navigate career planning and professional development as a woman.”

That mentor came in the form of Ellen Sills-Levy, President and CEO of ESL Insights, LLC, past FWA President, and a 14-year mentor in the program. Ellen still remembers their very first conversation. “I was struck by Adelisa’s intelligence, curiosity, creativity, and genuine compassion,” she says. “She came ready to learn, but she also brought warmth and perspective beyond her years. Her deep connection to her family and the way she speaks about them has always been an endearing part of who she is.”

Their relationship soon evolved from structured mentoring to something deeper, a partnership built on trust, learning, and encouragement. Over coffee chats and Zoom calls, they discussed everything from professional growth to personal confidence. “Ellen gave me advice that helped me apply for jobs, work on my interview skills, and develop leadership abilities I can use anywhere,” says Adelisa. When she hesitated to apply for a competitive opportunity, Ellen helped her reframe her thinking, and Adelisa landed the position. “Because I had someone to lean on, I was able to feel more confident and get something that I wanted.”

Through that process, Adelisa discovered the power of self-advocacy and persistence. “From my mentor, I gained important skills that include networking, goal-setting, and advocating for myself,” she says. “These lessons helped me embrace a growth mindset.” Ellen adds, “Adelisa continues to inspire me. As she graduates from Baruch and steps into her full-time role at Merrill Lynch, I look forward to seeing her continue to flourish.”

This December, Adelisa will graduate and begin her new position as a Wealth Management Client Associate with Merrill Lynch, a division of Bank of America Wealth Management, a milestone that reflects both her hard work and the mentorship that helped her refine her path. “The guidance and support I received from the FWA Baruch College Mentoring Program have served as a hand when I needed it most,” she says. “Becoming a mentor myself one day would be a great privilege.”

For Ellen, that impact is exactly what makes mentoring so rewarding. “As a past FWA President and a mentor for 14 years, I can say that mentoring has enriched my life in countless ways,” she says. “I’ve learned as much from the women I’ve mentored as I hope they’ve learned from me. Many of these relationships have grown into lasting friendships. This program is one of the FWA’s greatest strengths—a powerful engine for women’s advancement in a world where major challenges persist.”

At a time when some companies are scaling back inclusion and mentoring programs under the banner of “merit,” the FWA–Baruch College Mentoring Program continues to stand for what truly drives progress: access, representation, and belief.

As Adelisa’s story proves, mentorship doesn’t just shape a career—it empowers women to see their own potential and soar.

Get Involved

Are you a professional ready to pay it forward? Or a student seeking guidance? Join us. Learn more about our Mentoring Programs and empower the next generation of women leaders. Connect with our program leads to get started:

Baruch - Betsy Werley ([email protected]) or

Seton Hall - Laura Travers ([email protected]) or Laura Bourgeois ([email protected])

Ellen Sills-Levy (left) and Adelisa Music (right).

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Global Capital Leadership: Rethinking Strategy in an Uncertain World

May 14, 2026

By Sherree DeCovny Back in 1785, Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” The line still resonates today: even the most carefully constructed plans can be disrupted. What ultimately determines success is not perfect foresight, but adaptability and the ability to pivot when conditions change. That lesson was brought into sharp focus for this year’s International Business Conference. Originally planned for the UAE in April, the event had to be completely reimagined when conflict with Iran escalated in February. Months of preparation were set aside, and the format was rebuilt in a matter of weeks. The result was a hybrid approach: a virtual lunch panel on May 5, followed by a half-day in-person gathering in New York City on May 6 — hosted at Akin in partnership with ABANA.co, with hospitality from HE Amna Almheiri and the UAE Consulate in NY — bringing together nearly 100 participants.

Financial Literacy Isn’t Just About Money - It’s About Possibility

April 30, 2026

By Robert Brown The student stayed behind after the workshop. While others filtered out, she walked up quietly and asked for an extra set of materials. Not for herself, but for her mother, who didn’t speak English. She wanted to take the lesson home. That moment says more about financial literacy than any definition ever could. For many young people, the question isn’t just Can I afford this? It’s Do I understand how money works at all? And more importantly, Can I use that knowledge to shape my future? That gap between access and understanding is where confidence is either built or lost. The reality is, most students are never taught these skills in a meaningful way in school. And for many, this is the first time anyone has explained it in a way that actually sticks.

When the World Shifts, You Shift with It

April 23, 2026

For months, FWA Executive Director Alissa Desmarais and I had been building toward something incredible: a six-day International Business Conference in the UAE, complex and high-stakes, the kind of undertaking that requires you to hold a hundred things in your head at once while also holding your team together, your partners together, and yourself together. The FWA has more than 40 years of experience organizing international conferences around the world; what we were doing was not new. But as we stepped into our new roles as the conference organizers, with the support of a great IBC committee, this one felt different. More meaningful, because it was ours. We were proud of what we were creating. And then the world changed around us. I won’t pretend the decision to pivot was easy, because it wasn’t. There is a particular kind of grief that comes not from losing something you already had, but from letting go of something you had worked so hard to build and had not yet gotten to experience. We had to look at the geopolitical reality of the region, at what was happening, at what we could not control, and make a call. The kind of call that no planning document prepares you for. We chose to pivot. On May 5th and 6th, FWA will host the Global Capital and Leadership Forum in New York. A virtual lunch panel, followed by an in-person morning program at Akin, right in the heart of the city. Smaller in scale, yes. But not smaller in purpose. We kept the questions we had always meant to explore: how shifting alliances and energy transitions are redrawing the map of global capital, what resilient leadership looks like in a world that will not hold still, how women are shaping the future of finance across cultures and geographies. Her Excellency Amna Almheiri, Consul General of the United Arab Emirates in New York, will close our forum. The relationship did not end when our plans changed. The dialogue did not stop. It just found a different room. What I have learned from this experience is something I keep coming back to: a pivot is not the opposite of commitment. Done with clarity and care, it is one of commitment’s truest expressions, because it means you care more about the mission than about being right about how you planned to serve it. It means you can look at the people who gave months of real effort to a plan that changed and help them see that nothing they did was wasted, because it wasn’t. It means you can let go of the version of success you had pictured and trust that a different shape can carry the same substance. I think about the women in this community who have had to do this in their own careers and lives. Who had to walk away from something they had built toward for years, not because they failed but because the world shifted and they were honest enough to shift with it. That takes courage. It takes the kind of steadiness that is very easy to admire from the outside and very hard to practice from the inside. The forum is still taking shape. The work continues. And I am proud of what we are making, not in spite of how we got here, but because of it.

SAVE THE DATE: Global Capital & Leadership Forum

April 9, 2026

The MENA Capital Landscape: Risk, Resilience & the Road Ahead May 5–6, 2026 Join the Financial Women's Association for a timely conversation on sovereign capital, energy transition, AI, and the geopolitical forces reshaping global finance. When our UAE trip was cancelled, we immediately looked for ways to bring the experience to our community here in NYC - this forum captures the spirit, substance, and strategic importance of that journey. Registration details coming soon - save the date on your calendar now! Virtual Lunch Panel · Tuesday, May 5 In-Person Morning Program in New York City · Wednesday, May 6 One registration. Two experiences. One conversation.