CUNY BA Alumni Panel and Networking Event
Join the CUNY BA Student Leadership Council (SLC) on Tuesday, April 1, at 6 PM for a panel on career development and professional networking opportunities. The event will be held in person at the Graduate Center, CUNY. The panel is for current CUNY BA students and graduates of the program. Light refreshments will be served.
DATE: Tuesday, April 1, 2025
TIME: 6 PM to 8 PM
Location: The Skylight Room (room 9100) on the ninth floor of the CUNY Graduate Center located at 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016 (Midtown, Manhattan)
Building Entrance Policy: Government-issued picture ID must be presented to Public Safety officers at the main entrance lobby. As per The Graduate Center building entrance policy, guest names must match their government-issued picture ID to enter the building.
REGISTER FOR THE CUNYBA ALUMNI PANEL AND NETWORKING EVENT
CUNY BA PANELISTS:
SIERA JANAÉ:
Siera Janaé is a remarkably creative visionary determined to see more women believing they are powerful, competent, and valuable enough in business, at work, and within their personal lives. She recently founded her start-up, The LIGHTER Society, which is committed to the Liberation of Innovators for Greater Healing, Transformation, Empathy, and Resilience. The mission of the company is to encourage innovators impacted by trauma, grief, and loss to reclaim their power and inner spark so they can emerge stronger, more resilient, and lighter. Siera Janaè graduated magna cum laude from the CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies. She received her B.S. in Business and Content Strategy from her home college, The New York City College of Technology. She is pursuing her M.A. in Trauma-Informed Leadership at Dominican University and her From Grief to Gratitude Grief Coach certification. Outside of her work, Siera Janaé is a dog and plant mommy, mental health advocate, skin and hair product lover, and nerd at heart.
NAFEEUR RAHMAN:
Nafeeur graduated in 2023 from CUNY BA, with Hunter College as his home college, earning dual concentrations in Computer Science and Philosophy. He currently works as a Software Engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, specializing in Over-the-Horizon Radar, while pursuing his master’s in Computer Science part-time at Georgia Tech.
MELISA TEKIN:
Melisa Tekin is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communications at SUNY Farmingdale and is the Founder and Creative Director of M/WBE-certified graphic design studio Neighbors. With a background in Urban Studies, her research is focused primarily on housing and placemaking, using design as a tool to communicate important issues that affect our communities to the public. Melisa’s research examines issues of history, access, affordability, and transparency in housing developments and public housing projects in New York City. She invites citizens to be curious about the spaces constructed around them and to recognize the power of collectivism in dense environments, which also informs her research on placemaking in neighborhoods in New York City and beyond.
Melisa earned an MFA in Design from Rutgers University in 2024, a BFA in Design from Queens College in 2018, and earned dual degrees from Macaulay Honors College and CUNY BA in Urban Economics and Marketing Strategy and Design in 2016.
JOCELYN RAJABALLEY:
Jocelyn earned her degree in Urban Health Geography from CUNY BA in January of 2023. She is currently a Human Services Specialist at New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM), where one of her responsibilities is managing the city’s Cooling Center program in response to extreme heat emergencies. Previously, she was a research assistant at the CUNY Institute for Health Equity (CIHE) at Lehman College, her home college. As a CUNY BA student, she contributed maps to a recently published environmental health textbook. In 2023, she presented research findings at CIHE’s Migration and Health Summit and co-authored the corresponding paper, which was published in 2024.
