McKinsey and Braven develop a career portal, opening doors for underrepresented students

November 8, 2024 Edith Cordova-Zeas knew from an early age that education was the key to her future. As a first-generation Ecuadorian, she said her father would tuck her in every night with a story and a reminder to keep studying. "Even though I didn't know what to do with that, I still got the message, which was 'get an education to get a better life'."

She became the first in her family to attend college. Edith was studying biology at Rutgers University-Newark but said "it was hard to picture what I would do after college because I didn't know anyone working in a particular field that required a college education."

That's when she connected with Braven-a nonprofit that supports first-generation college students, students of color, and those from low-income backgrounds by providing them with career-building and leadership skills to succeed. She didn't know much about Braven's Accelerator program, but she knew it could help her with two critical job skills-resume writing and interviewing.

According to Braven's Impact Report, paid internships are key to achieving higher wages post-graduation. Braven's research has also shown that only about 30 percent of low-income or first-generation college students graduate and secure a strong first job.

Edith credits Braven with giving her the confidence and tools she needed to seek out and land a job at a pathology (COVID) lab in her junior year.

With graduation looming, her future "was very much driven by 'I'm making this amount of money, and I need this amount of money'," she said. Her immediate goal was to land a promotion, but first, she said, she needed to figure out how to navigate the workforce.

Sifting through her emails, one from Braven about a mentorship program caught her attention. With just hours left, she applied and later learned she had not only been accepted into the program but had been paired with Amy Hung, leader of client capabilities for our Life Sciences Practice.

One mentor can change a life

Between working nights at the lab, going to school during the day, and squeezing in sleep, Edith met weekly with Amy, largely discussing how to pursue a promotion. Edith also shared her interest in becoming a physician assistant (PA).

Amy tapped her network to connect Edith with two PAs, all the time feeling she wasn't thinking big enough. "Part of the journey we had together was really opening the aperture of trying to understand what [Edith] truly wanted to do," explained Amy.

Edith ultimately decided she wanted to be a medical doctor (MD). She spent the next year training as an EMT and studying for the MCAT before being accepted into Rutgers New Jersey Medical School's (NJMS) accelerated three-year Primary Care MD Program, with a focus on Pediatrics.

"Braven broadened my scope in terms of my career [in medicine] and what the world had to offer," said Edith, crediting Amy with opening her eyes to the many possibilities.

Amy, who joined Braven's mentor program in 2021, found herself asking: If Braven could change the trajectory for one student, imagine what it could do for thousands of others?

Expanding access to help students build promising careers

Amy approached Charag Krishnan, a partner in McKinsey's Education Practice, and they put together a proposal for a partnership with Braven to support its impact as part of our 10 Actions.

Braven's goal was to roughly double their reach to about 5,000 students per year over the next ten years but we wanted to help them do even more. "To enable the scale, you also need digital tools [and] there was no single student experience portal," said Saurabh Aggarwal, McKinsey director of engineering. "That was the digital piece we said you need if you want to serve 30,000 students a year versus the 3,000 they were reaching."

Braven was all in. "It made a real difference to our product strategy," said Braven CTO Moon Lee. McKinsey held multiple design workshops with the Braven team to understand the current student journey and brainstorm what a digital product could look like.

Out of that collaboration, the teams co-created a blueprint for MyBraven-a digital front door to a portfolio of resources and a digital checklist to help students succeed.

There was a lot of hands-on testing and integrating student feedback into the digital program. Before the McKinsey collaboration, "there was no cohesive map for where students were on their journey," said Moon. Now when students log into MyBraven, they have one-click access to a collection of resources to monitor their progress, including a calendar of events, student connections, a job board and a comprehensive checklist to help students track resume preparation, internship searches, and more.

The pilot of MyBraven was rolled out to more than 300 students this spring, with the aim of reaching more than 2,000 students by the end of 2024.

"We were able to really take a leap forward in terms of our digital portfolio in a short period of time, and that's not something we could do on our own," said Moon.

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