Building students a ‘rich uncle’ network
Nonprofit group provides mentors for those who are often the first in their family to go to college
SAN JOSE >> Most days, Juan Rocha pulls away from his home 50 miles to the south in Watsonville around 6 a.m. and points his car toward San Jose State University.
“Strawberry fields, that’s it,” he said, of the landscape that surrounds him as the sun creeps up.
It’s a long, solitary slog to the gleaming tech campuses that make up Silicon Valley, but the 26-yearold hopes the drive will pay off. Just a few years ago, he was working as a janitor. Now, the senior finance major is the first in his family to go to college and wants to be a financial analyst or planner.
“I don’t know anybody else in my family who’s done it,” he said. “I want to get an actual career rather than just a labor job.”
Enter Braven. The 4-year-old nonprofit matches Silicon Valley mentors with students who don’t have classic rich-uncle connections. It’s trying to tackle a persistent problem: only about a quarter of the low-income or first-generation students like Rocha who graduate from college get a good first job or go to graduate school. A depressing number wind up back at Starbucks pulling espresso shots.
Getting a foot in the door in corporate America can be an enormously complicated task for people who don’t have family members to help navigate the job search or make introductions. A quick meeting or two at a college career center doesn’t cut it.
So Braven, which operates at San Jose State and Rutgers University’s Newark, N.J., campus and will launch in Chicago in January, guides students through a structured semester-long course where they learn everything from how to write a resume and request an informational interview to how to manage a team and develop a 10year game plan.
“When you talk to high-income kids, the way in which they get jobs is through their parents and their family units and their parents’ friends and broader networks,” said Aimée Eubanks Davis, a former Teach for America executive who launched Braven in 2013. “Why can’t we build a network that happens to also include people from more humble beginnings?”
Last school year, 188 students at San Jose State participated in Braven. Perhaps most importantly, the program pairs students, known as fellows, with mentors who have successfully navigated their postcollege years to good jobs. Those connections give them a chance to visit companies.
“I think it takes support from a lot of different places,” said Shanea Dangerfield, a Braven mentor who works at Google. Dangerfield, who is African-American, said it can be especially helpful for low-income, first-generation students of color to see that people who look like them and come from similar backgrounds are successful profession-
als.
Rocha’s “leadership coach” is Alison Mackay, who works in recruiting at Facebook. Each week, Mackay’s group of about a half-dozen students makes its way to her office, which still throws Rocha for a loop.
“If you told me a couple years ago that I’d be talking to someone who works at Facebook…It seemed so far away from Watsonville, so … unimaginable,” he said.
Alysyn Martinez, another San Jose State Braven fellow who grew up in Sunnyvale, agrees.
“What other opportunity do you have to go there?” the first-generation student said. “It provided another opportunity to say, look, this is where you could be.”
Mackay knows the feeling. Less than a decade ago, during the 2008 recession, she was a San Jose State student working fulltime at Starbucks trying to forge a path forward. She wound up at Target’s leadership program before moving to Facebook several years later.
“I wish I’d had Braven because I feel like I could’ve gotten into a tech company sooner,” she said. She said she loves being able to give students an opportunity to experience that environment before they graduate.
According to the organization’s 2016-17 impact report, the vast majority of fellows stick with the program and 72 percent have a good full-time job or are enrolled full-time in graduate school three months after graduation. That’s compared with a 56 percent national average for all students and 49 percent national average for black and Latino graduates, who are disproportionately likely to be the first in their families to graduate.
“It doesn’t feel like work because it’s getting you somewhere,” Martinez said.
Volunteering for Braven — which gets funding from a variety of foundations — is also a serious commitment for coaches, around 60 hours over a semester. But Mackay says it’s given her a chance to grow her own leadership skills, which her company appreciates. And as a recruiter, it gives her a chance to meet with young people she might not otherwise encounter.
“We’re trying to make the diverse leaders come from everywhere,” she said. “This is my pipeline.”
The fellows are grateful. “The career center has to help thousands of students,” Rocha said, “but with Braven, you get that personal attention.”
Of course, San Jose State has some 30,000 students; providing a Braven-like experience to all of them would require mobilizing hundreds of professionals like Mackay in the area, a tall order when the work is unpaid.
“If you want to scale something that’s intimate, that’s the challenge,” said Anita Manuel, interim associate director of career education at the university.
But Eubanks Davis isn’t deterred and said there’s growing interest among colleges, which are serving an increasingly diverse student body and under intense pressure to make sure graduates succeed.
“How can you not?” she asked. “There’s no shortage of young talent out there in that world, at these companies so … I actually think we can.”