Inside Deloitte
There are buildings in New York that most people only ever see from the outside. 30 Rockefeller Plaza is one of them. Over sixty floors of limestone that have stood for the center of American ambition since the Depression, the address a television show borrowed to stand in for power itself. You walk past it. You look up. You keep moving.
On the morning of June 5, nearly fifty learners walked in. They rode the elevator to Deloitte's offices high above Midtown, where the whole sprawling machinery of New York opens up beneath the windows. At the tables, you can begin to think about how that machinery works, how a person learns to run it, and what a city becomes when more people know how.
Waiting for them was Kevin Brown, Program Success Manager at The City Tutors, and a cast member of 30 Rock, the show that spent seven seasons making this building feel like it belonged to everyone watching from home.
The learners Kevin welcomed that morning had come from CUNY campuses and from across the city, some finishing degrees, some already working, most of them turning over the same question of how a person actually gets from where they are to somewhere like this. Deloitte gave them the morning. The learners took their seats and the firm's people came around to them, table by table: an auditor, a tax advisor, a consultant, a space industry analyst named Sidney, whose career alone rewrote whatever assumptions anyone had carried in about what an accounting firm does.
Near the end, the room was asked who wanted to share what they had taken from the morning. The learners' hands went up faster than they had all day.
Ana graduated from Lehman College in 2024 with a double major in accounting and business administration and has been job-hunting ever since.
"You can still volunteer," she told the room. "You can still develop skills. You can still do what makes you happy." She paused. "You might not be employed, and still make smart use of your time."
Parker, an operations management student at Baruch, had spent two hours listening for the thread that ran through every conversation. He found one. "The number one thing that kept coming up," he said, "was personability. Being that approachable voice after a really long shift."
Tsering, from LaGuardia Community College, offered the morning's plainest truth. "Build a relationship and ask questions. There are a lot of people outside who want to help you. If you ask them, they'll know that's a strength."
Before the morning broke up, two of the mentors offered something to take home.
"Find somewhere you connect with," she said. "Build a relationship and understand the industry you're working in. Keep your passion. Devote your time on that."
Thomas, who co-organized the event, closed the morning simply:
"It's very rare that any career path is linear," he said. "Every step you take — coming to events like this, having coffee chats with folks in different career paths — every step gets you a little bit closer to where you want to get to."
On the way down, the elevator filled with the sound of people comparing notes: a name, an email, a question someone wished they had asked. They had come in carrying a question about how a person gets somewhere like this. They left carrying the beginnings of an answer, and for some, a changed sense of what might be possible: consulting, a path some had never thought about and others had already written off, now looked like a career they could see themselves entering.
The City Tutors is a free nonprofit offering tutoring and career mentoring across all five boroughs, year-round and open to all. The morning at Deloitte was one of dozens of corporate sessions it runs each year, connecting learners with the people and the rooms that shape the work they hope to do.