From his first year at Fordham in 2015, Robbie Noeldechen looked upon University Church with admiration, and a distant hope. “I always thought it was so beautiful,” he said. “I thought, I would really love to get married there one day.”
It took roughly 10 years, but Robbie, formerly a student Ram Van driver and now assistant director of transportation at the University, got his wish. Seated in his office at Rose Hill, he recounted how he met and married his wife, Laura Shafer—now Laura Noeldechen—in his dream venue.
The two “were always in each other’s orbit,” he said, through an overlapping circle of friends in their home state of Connecticut. They met online in their second year of college. Robbie was double-majoring in American studies and political science at Fordham (and is now pursuing his MBA at the Gabelli School) and Laura was getting her BFA in fashion design at Pratt. Their first meeting wasn’t a match—“right person, wrong time,” Robbie said. When they reconnected two years later on a different app, things clicked.
The Rose Hill campus played a starring role in their romance.
“Fordham is really where our relationship blossomed, over the second half of our senior year,” said Robbie. Laura came to campus to visit, and to attend events like Senior Ball during their courtship.
“I’ve genuinely fallen in love with Fordham over the last seven years that I’ve been going there to see Robbie,” she said.
Securing the venue was easier than he thought. When touring campus as a high school senior, Robbie remembered a student guide saying there was a years-long wait to get married at University Church. In reality, Fordham books weddings about a year out—and any student, graduate, staff, or faculty member who is Catholic (or marrying one) can have a Catholic wedding at University Church.
But few can say that Ram Van members past and present were a part of the wedding.
“We’ve got a saying here—RV4L: Ram Van for life,” said Robbie, who oversees more than 120 Ram Van drivers and other student workers as well as Fordham’s charter trip program, while pursuing his MBA at the Gabelli School. “A lot of our student workers stay with us for years and there’s a pretty big alumni community. They’re all still friends with each other. At our wedding, there were a lot of former Ram Vanners.”
Current Ram Van student workers attended the ceremony and got everyone to the church on time, in golf carts for older guests and a van for the wedding party. Robbie praised the choir and organist Robert Minotti, director of liturgical music and the Fordham University Choir, both of whom performed at the wedding.
Laura, the director of bridal services at Vera Wang, also wove her work into the wedding. She designed her own wedding dress, a process that took two years, three types of tulle, four styles of lace, and six kinds of beads. After the ceremony, she changed into two different Vera Wang dresses: one for the reception and one for the cake cutting and after-party. Being in the bridal fashion industry for 13 years, she said she spent a long time thinking about what she would wear. “To be able to have several moments of, ‘Here I am, here’s what I’m wearing,’ meant a lot to me,” she said. Especially when her soon-to-be husband saw the dress she’d created for the first time.
“That was where I put most of my energy for the wedding planning—sewing every single piece of lace and every single bead, and thinking, what’s his reaction gonna be?”
That first look moment on their wedding day? Waterworks. “He was very emotional,” she said.
