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Marge Magner ’69 with students

Walk into a Magner Career Center event, and the energy is palpable. At a recent career fair, the room buzzed as students queued up to talk to company representatives, many of them alumni. Dozens of employers from Fortune 500 firms, nongovernmental agencies, top hospitals, state and city agencies, and more filled the Student Center, offering a bounty of job opportunities. While many students beelined to tables, elevator pitches at the ready, a few appeared apprehensive. But after a pep talk from Magner staff members standing by, these students, too, smiled and made their approaches.

Care runs deep at Magner—and always has. More than 50,000 students over the center’s 20-year history have received the “Magner treatment,” a holistic approach to career planning at the core of the center’s success. The center’s director, Natalia Guarin-Klein, says that this care has been sustained, in great part, by alumni who are the center’s superpower.

Addressing a Need

For the center’s founder, Marge Magner ’69, the idea came to her when she worked in the C-suite at Citigroup. She saw students from what she calls the “fancy colleges” benefiting from internships at her office, but none from her alma mater. She returned to campus to find out how students were planning for their future, and it became clear they needed help accessing the opportunities they deserved.

Magner knew that it would benefit both employers and students if there were a pipeline from campus to companies. So she began recruiting Brooklyn College students as interns who could also earn credit toward their degrees.

Later, in 2004, with funding from Magner, the center bearing her name was opened. It quickly grew into a widely recognized resource offering a range of services. Today, with one-on-one career coaching, stipends for internships, and industry-based programs such as the Tech Talent Pipeline and Future in Finance, it’s no surprise the number of students using the center has tripled over the past 20 years. But it’s the ever-increasing number of alumni who have been involved with the center—more than 1,500 strong and counting—that makes it special.

Someone Who Believes in You

“If you’ve ever heard Marge talk,” says Guarin-Klein, “she’ll say that alumni are ‘aunts and uncles’ to students,” particularly first-generation students and children of immigrants who may not have connections to the people or resources needed to succeed in their chosen field.

“Since its formation,” says Guarin-Klein, “the Magner Career Center has played a critical role in increasing access to essential career opportunities for first-generation, low-income, minority, and immigrant students. Our vision is to level the playing field for students by connecting them with the networks, internships, and opportunities they otherwise may not have had.”

Pawel Walczuk ’10, managing director of data and AI practice at Accenture, says he showed up at the career center’s door his freshman year, asking for help polishing his resume. He knew where he wanted to intern—an NGO that organized conferences at the United Nations. The staff at the center worked with him to win “a phenomenal” internship there.

Walczuk later interned for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, and today, like his mentor Marge Magner, he is a trustee for the Brooklyn College Foundation. He says the support he received at the center went beyond winning internships, “It was great to have someone believe in you. We can succumb to imposter syndrome and ask ourselves, ‘How am I qualified to do this? Surely there are people smarter than I am.’ And Marge and everyone at the center would always be right there saying you are as smart and qualified.”

Filling in the Blanks

In the past 10 years, over 1,500 alumni representing myriad fields have worked with students through the center, filling in the blanks, and providing students entrée into hundreds of businesses and organizations in and beyond New York City.

For Jerome Hayden ’15, relationships made through the center led to a pivotal internship that kicked off his career. Two years into a business major, Hayden felt he was late planning his academic career. He had entered Brooklyn College because he wanted to play basketball, and the school’s athletics program had offered him a place on the team. Still, he knew his future was not in sports but business. Through the Magner Center, he was connected to entertainment and telecommunications entrepreneur Ted Liebowitz ’79 and his program for student entrepreneurs at Brooklyn College.

Hayden went on to win the program’s 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year award. Liebowitz helped Hayden win an internship at the investment firm Skybridge Capital. “That’s how I started my career on Wall Street,” says Hayden, who is now the head of internal sales at Fortress Investment Group.

Relationships for Life

Competitive internships supported by stipends are a cornerstone of the career center. In the past 12 years alone, more than $4 million in donated funds have supported 1,300 internship stipends that support students while they gain valuable work experience. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, Aon, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Kids in the Game, the New York District Attorney’s Office, and Johns Hopkins Medicine are just a few of the employers that have offered internships to Brooklyn College students.

While internships help move students into successful futures, though, it’s the personal connections students make through the center that create truly life-changing experiences.

Simeon Iheagwam ’06 was an early visitor to the center, through which he met Marge Magner. “I wanted a mentor in my field,” says Iheagwam. “I met her at her office at Citigroup, and she gave me great advice my senior year.” He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business management and finance and went on to work for JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, eventually earning an MBA at Cornell University. Today, he is the head of his own venture capital firm, Noemis Ventures, where Magner sits on his advisory board.

Hayden says that his relationship with the center and the college is ongoing. “They took me under their wings early throughout my early career and even today,” says Hayden. In 2022, he was invited to be a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council at the college’s Koppelman School of Business. The council provides students access to industry leaders and real-world support. It is his way of staying connected to his alma mater.

Coming Back to Give Back

Staying connected is key to alumni coming back to give back. Over the years, generations of alumni have reached out to the center to give today’s Brooklyn College students the special recipe of support and guidance that only they, as former students in successful careers, can give.

Shikshya Khatiwada ’07, who goes by Six to her Brooklyn College family, was hired by Marge Magner as a research intern after visiting the center for advice. A native of Nepal who moved to the United States with her family when she was 15, Khatiwada majored in business management and finance. In addition to carrying a full course load and interning for Marge, she was waiting tables at TGI Fridays.  She says, “It took an alumna like Marge Magner, a C-suite executive, to show me what I could ultimately accomplish,” says Khatiwada. She went on to work at Avanade, which provides IT consulting services. During her first years there, while she was running the analytics and data practice, she began mentoring Brooklyn College students.

“I wanted students to understand what it meant to become an analytics consultant and how to show up confidently in front of executives and hiring committees.” Khatiwada helped organize a one-day boot camp at Avanade that included programming, resume prep, and personal-narrative-building workshops.

That was four years ago. Since then, Avanade has hired five Brooklyn College students. One of them, Arielle Watson ’20, is a senior software analyst. She was working on a bachelor’s degree in computer science when she walked into the Magner Center for resume help. There, she learned about an upcoming event for Brooklyn College students at Avanade and quickly got an internship there. She also gained a mentor in Khatiwada.

“Six experienced much of what I did navigating college as a first-generation student trying to juggle a million and one things,” says Watson. “That resonated with me. During my internship, she was great at introducing me to employees at Avanade. It can be daunting for a student to suddenly be at a real business, working with, in my case, actual software engineers. Six helped by breaking down any barriers I might have put up for myself.”

After graduating, Watson was offered a full-time position, and although she and Khatiwada work at two different locations, the former in New York City and the latter in Denver, they maintain a close connection.

Extending the Platform

Since its opening 20 years ago, the Magner Career Center has expanded its reach and impact. In the fall of 2022, the center worked with the Brooklyn College Foundation and the Office of Alumni Engagement to launch the Career Partners and Alumni Champions programs, which provide a comprehensive platform for corporate leaders and alumni to give back and a way for students to jumpstart their careers.

And today’s students? Many of them come to the center not knowing where they might end up, or what is possible; they only know they want more, for themselves and their families.

“It’s a beautiful feeling that comes from watching students go through the process of transformation,” says Guarin-Klein. “From the time they walk through the door seeking help to the day they call us to catch us up on their successes—I wish we could bottle that feeling.”

Looking back on the history of the center, Marge Magner is astounded. “My initial goal for the center was to give back and to help students realize their goals,” Magner said. “To see what has evolved over 20 years as we have welcomed more and more people and partners into this family is both humbling and gratifying.”