Jeremy Mullet received his BA in Anthropology from CU-Boulder. He now works as City Year's Recruitment Manager for the Mountain Central Region.

How did you come to work in community service, and why City Year? What do you do for City Year?

I love people (kind of a requirement for an anthropology degree I suppose), and I'm passionate about human rights, specifically those rights we don't commonly consider, such as the right to clean drinking water, healthy food, safe communities, and education. After graduation, I found City Year as an avenue to engage at least one of these issues. 

What is City Year, what does it do, and what kind of employees does it seek?

Every 26 seconds a student in the United States drops out before graduating from high school. This trend results in about 1.2 million students every year who are now four times more likely to be unemployed and eight more likely to be incarcerated. To make matters worse, half of these students live in just 12% of our communities, predominantly urban communities of color, which creates a cyclical system of low-income, under-educated, and high-crime areas. City Year seeks to address this major social and economic issue through hands-on service in the schools of these communities in order to break this cycle, and help students find success.

The way we deliver our service is unique. Instead of placing teachers, revamping curriculum, or providing technology resources, we insert a team of young adults ages 17-24 that work in the school all day, every day for one academic year. These City Year AmeriCorps Members partner with teachers and administration, but more importantly, they build strong relationships with students from a near-peer standpoint. The power of this model is that they are old enough to offer guidance to students, and yet young enough to relate to the students' perspective. This relationship, coupled with the constant presence of our City Year AmeriCorps Members before school, in the classroom, and in after-school programming, allows them to positively influence students' attendance, behavior, and course performance, getting them back on track to graduation.

A City Year AmeriCorps Member only serves for one academic year, so we are constantly looking to hire more. This year, across our 25 sites, we have over 2700 individuals serving, and next year we will have even more as we continue to expand into more schools and more communities. When hiring a City Year AmeriCorps Member, we look for someone who works well on a team, has leadership potential, who we feel can relate well with the students we serve, and who will be committed for the entire term of service. The nature of our service model makes this job extremely challenging, and we want people who can not only make it through the year, but who will also thrive in the leadership and professional development opportunities we provide.

What career options does City Year specifically offer graduate students and why should graduate students consider a job with them?

For those graduate students who will still be within the 17-24 age range, we offer the City Year AmeriCorps Member position described above. Through this position, they will gain skills in teamwork, leadership, executing to results, public speaking, networking, building successful mutually-beneficial relationships, and data tracking and analysis. This position also allows recent graduate students to build a resume with real world experience outside of their graduate work, as well as receive the benefits of City Year's extensive network of alumni, corporate, political, and fellow non-profit supporters who hire straight out of our corps. We also provide a $5,645 scholarship on top of the living stipend and health insurance that can be used to pay student loan debt.

For those graduate students who are beyond the 17-24 age range, City Year hires for staff positions at all of our sites including leading teams in schools, grant writing, government relations, funder relationship management, recruitment and admissions, and operations. We are a large non-profit, that makes a large impact across the country, and our staff members receive competitive salary, full benefits, 401K options, and paid vacation and maternity leave. At the same time, we also have an incredible culture of idealism that encourages personal and professional growth and nurtures an inclusive and fun work environment.

How can community service be a career? What kinds of opportunities does the field offer?

Job seekers often buy into the fallacy that service as a career means working for a non-profit and earning very little money, or people think of service in general and envision a montage of feeding the homeless, tutoring and mentoring "at-risk" youth, or picking up trash in a park all while an uplifting 80s ballad plays in the background. However, when we limit our view of service in this way, we encounter two major misunderstandings about the nature of service, and what a career in service entails.

First, service is not found in the "what" of the job description, but the "why" you are doing it. You do not have to start a non-profit, manage a soup kitchen, or build parks in the projects to have a career in service; you need only ask yourself, "Am I doing this to help others?" Through this lens, literally any career can be a career in service.

The second misunderstanding is that service is simply a "nice" thing to do, when actually it's a necessary thing to do. The social, economic, and environmental issues we face today will not disappear without our engagement, and when we consider service as simply nice then it is easier for us to rationalize our inaction. We find excuses like, "Once I'm better established..." or "As soon as my student debt is paid off..." or "When congress is less divided..." These issues are present every day, so you cannot wait for the "right" time to engage in service. As I said before, any career can be a career in service -- if the answer to your "why" is to help others, why wait? 

The service field offers just about any opportunity one could ask for. You can engage in the more obvious opportunities (City Year, Goodwill, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps NCCC, etc.), or you can engage in the less obvious sectors (Business, Law, Medical, Research, Literature, Art). All that matters is that you do what you do to help others.

What degrees are useful in the non-profit and community service fields? How will they use their degrees with City Year?

Any degree can be great for a career in service, but degrees from the College of Arts and Sciences are the most common. I personally have a degree in anthropology, and we see a lot of City Year AmeriCorps Members with degrees in sociology, political science, psychology, humanities, and history. We also see, though less frequently, degrees in biology, business, mathematics, and engineering. The knowledge from a degree can be used to better facilitate a tutoring/mentoring session, or bring more content knowledge to one's team, or provide more perspective to the behavior of students. The degree won't necessarily be used in the traditional sense, but it will inform the service, and allow each individual City Year AmeriCorps Member to connect with and influence students in a unique way

For a career in service in general, in lieu of what I said earlier, it's just about finding the career where that degree will be able to make the largest impact. It will probably end up being very similar, if not the same career that made you want the degree in the first place!

How can CU-Boulder graduate students and alumni best prepare to interview with City Year and other service organizations?

The best way for any applicant to prepare for an interview with City Year, especially if applying for the City Year AmeriCorps Member position, is to reach out to me and chat about why he or she wants to do this specific kind of service. We can then chat about why they feel they would be a good fit, and what experiences they have that would demonstrate that. I am the recruiter, which in City Year's case means I do not engage in the admissions process. This means that I can help substantially on the application preparation for those who reach out to me for support!

Note: Jeremy and City Year will be available at the Meet Buff Employers Help People & Go Green on Tuesday, October 14th.