CCNY President Vincent G. Boudreau in conversation with Braven New York Founding Executive Director Kilsys Payamps-Roure, the 2026 Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholar. (Photo by Brandon Vallejo, BVD Image)
The City College of New York President Vincent G. Boudreau and Braven New York Founding Executive Director Kilsys Payamps-Roure lauded the tangible outcomes of their 2022 partnership in a wide-ranging conversation, “Opportunity by Design: How CCNY and Braven Strengthen the College-to-Career Pipeline,” at the Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture.
The partnership has resulted in “84 percent of CCNY Braven students [being] employed or in graduate school within six months of graduation,” said Boudreau, noting that Braven has served almost 3,000 students at CCNY and Lehman College since launching in 2020.
“Twenty-one percent of those graduates had at least one internship during the undergraduate experience, and they were 30 percentage points higher when it came to networking self-efficacy and eight percentage points higher when it came to job search self-efficacy,” said Payamps-Roure, the 2026 Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholar. “That means that they're going to their employee partners that we're connecting them to more ready with the skills that they're looking for [and] with the soft skills that we're talking about.”
The discussion also considered topics such as what today’s labor market means for recent graduates, how campuses and employers can strengthen the pathway from college to career, and barriers faced by various groups as they start their careers.
Payamps-Roure, a first-generation Dominican-American, launched Braven New York in 2020. The national organization, founded in Chicago in 2013 with the aim of ensuring that every young person in the United States could access a clear path from college graduation to a strong first job, currently has more than 75 employer partners nationwide, including eight colleges and universities. In addition to CCNY and Lehman, Braven New York recently expanded its programs to serve 1,475 students at the University of Mount St. Vincent.
Boudreau said that he had first heard of Braven in 2016. “I liked the idea of an organization bridging the gaps between what we learn on campus and what [students] need to know in the workplace,” he said.
The Braven experience begins with a three-credit course, the Braven Leadership Accelerator. Housed within the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, the Accelerator also provides opportunities for internships. Students in the program, whom Braven calls Fellows, complete weekly online modules on Braven’s online platform, applying that content through weekly virtual learning labs in a cohort of five to eight peers led by a volunteer professional leadership coach. They complete assignments to grow their leadership in five professional competencies and, upon completion, can avail themselves of additional opportunities to develop leadership and career-readiness skills.
To ready these students for their careers, Payamps-Roure defined what Braven considers to be a “a strong first job”: one that is full time and that requires a bachelor’s degree, and that provides a decent salary and benefits, with pathways to promotion that include opportunities to continue to develop soft skills, such as teamwork, management, self-driven leadership, and communication.
“You want a role where you're working on projects where you can actually produce things that you can speak to, that you can put on your resume, that when you're speaking to employers, when you're during an interview, you can speak to that,” she said. “That's really important, because when those things are in place, what you're setting yourself up for is the trajectory of your second and third role.”
A strategic leader dedicated to enhancing economic mobility for students from diverse backgrounds, Payamps-Roure expanded on these concepts as she detailed her own life and career history.
“When I went to my first job, and my jobs all throughout, I was usually one of the only, or the only, Latin in the room,” she said. “I majored in accounting, and I went to work for the big financial institutions of that time. I remember distinctly, my first week in one of those institutions, a managing director stopped in front of my cubicle. He looked at me up and down, and he was like, ‘’well, I doubt you have half a brain, so we'll see what happens.’”
“I do this work because it is deeply personal to me,” she said. “I don't want other students, other young adults, other first-generation low-income students, to go through this. I want to change what that looks like for them. I want them to feel like they belong. I want them to feel empowered to have that seat at the table.
“I do this work because I want to change the narrative of employers about what does talent look like and where does it come from.”
A recording of the event will air on Wednesday, March 25 at 3 p.m., followed by a rebroadcast on Monday, March 30 at 8 a.m., as part of the monthly show, “From City to the World,” hosted by President Boudreau, on WHCR 90.3 FM, CCNY's Harlem community radio station.
About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization Degree Choices ranks CCNY #1 nationally among universities for economic return on investment. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Lightcast puts at $3.2 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers, and society. At City College, more than 16,500 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity, and scholarship. In 2023, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together,” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College's mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic, and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.
Syd Steinhardt
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