Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Out & About spends most of its time at black-tie fund-raisers, but that is hard to do in winter, when the charity circuit regulars are off in resort land or hibernating.
For this social scribe, who had her own holiday break at Round Hill in Jamaica, where she shared the beach with Ralph Lauren and Ewan McGregor, the January lull presents opportunities.
On Friday I visited the nonprofit organization Year Up at its offices at 55 Exchange Pl., across from the New York Stock Exchange, where its first class of 18 students have been training since September for careers in information technology. They were working on instructor Marcus Colina’s assignment to design a home and its computer network using Visio, a Microsoft Office program. Their monitors were filled with graphic representations of plants, swimming pools, chairs, and desks with computers.
On January 29, the students start six-month stints in the Information Technology departments of financial service firms including JP Morgan, BlackRock, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Marsh & McLennan, and Citigroup.
“I’m nervous and excited at the same time,” a 23-year-old student from Manhattan, Shavon Becances, said. “I’m looking forward to it and to put what I’ve learned to use.”
The program is tough. “We’ve lost some students along the way. The ones that are here are just stars,” the executive director of the New York Year Up, Lisette Nieves, said.
Instructor Jessica Cogan’s syllabus for the business writing class includes memo writing and group presentations with the greatest amount of time devoted to arguments and grammar.
“They all say ‘well’ now instead of ‘good,'” Ms. Cogan said.
One useful handout is the Corporate Jargon Glossary, which has wellworn expressions such as “blue-sky thinking,” and slang terms, such as “prairie dogging” (“the simultaneous pop-up of several heads when something interesting is happening around cubicles”).
The most-used jargon around Year Up is “RTDT”: “Read the damn thing.”
The students have already started applying their knowledge. “Yesterday my cousin said she didn’t know how to copy and paste a document into her e-mail so she called me and we did that over the phone,” Ms. Becances said.
Part of what makes Year Up work is the intimacy of the program. Instructors offer advice on posture, jewelry, and haircuts. “In my family not too many people are corporate,” Shariyf Muhammad, 19, of Manhattan, said. “I had to figure things out myself, with help from the staff.”
On Friday afternoon, a student, Edder Mella, sat in the kitchen with an orange tie on his lap, practicing a Windsor knot. Class was over but no one was rushing out the door.
Ms. Nieves is convinced that Year Up has the right career-building formula: training, work experience, a professional mentor, and a stipend ($150 during training, $250 during the apprenticeship). In Boston, where the Year Up branch is training its ninth class, at least 80% of those who finish the year have been hired within four months, making $30,000 or more.
The annual budget for the New York Year Up office is $2 million, with more than half coming from corporations. “A lot of people in financial services are self-made and this program appeals to them,” Ms. Nieves said. “They tell us they need young, talented, diverse entry-level staff. We pride ourselves on being screeners for that.”
Year Up hasn’t yet held a fund-raiser in New York, but its founder and chief executive, Gerald Chertavian will be in town tomorrow to accept the 2007 Social Capitalist Award from Fast Company magazine.
