How City Tutors Helps Career Switchers Build a Network Fast

Sadhvi Grover was already well into her professional life when she encountered The City Tutors.

She had spent eight years working in India — shaping how people were hired, how they were supported, how work actually felt to the people doing it — and had carried all of it with her when she moved to New York to start a new life. The professional landscape was unfamiliar, the norms were different, and the task of rebuilding a network from the ground up in a new country while finishing a master's degree in business analytics at Baruch College was one she was navigating largely on her own. By Fall 2025, she was months from graduation and thinking seriously about what she wanted her life here to look like — not just her next job, but the version of herself she was building toward in a place that was still, in many ways, becoming familiar.

She learned about The City Tutors through a campus email shared during a Graduate Career Management Center event, opened the link, and left it sitting in a tab for days. Then one evening she signed up, closed the laptop, and didn't think much more of it. Within weeks, she could barely remember what her semester had looked like before it.

Entering the Room

Sadhvi attended her first City Tutors event in October 2025, a mentorship session hosted by Enstar. When she spoke, the mentors leaned in. They asked what had led her there, what she was working toward, what she had tried. She had been in plenty of professional rooms before. This one felt different.

"They were listening," she said. "They showed real interest in our stories."

When the session ended, the mentors stayed in the room. They pulled chairs around, lingered over questions that people had been holding back all evening, and showed no sign of wrapping up. Sadhvi watched professionals who ran teams and managed budgets and had spent decades building careers give an extra hour to a room full of people they had just met.

Building Rhythm Through Repetition

Over the following months, Sadhvi became a consistent presence at The City Tutors events, moving through sessions that touched insurance, consulting, green technology, finance, and data. Before each one she researched the speakers. During each one she took notes. Afterward she followed up with something that referenced what had actually been said. She had spent years as an interviewer and she brought that discipline into every room — listening for what people meant, asking questions shaped by what she was hearing. Mentors responded back. Each conversation added to her picture of where her background might fit and what she actually wanted to do next.

Among the people she met that winter was Brandon, a co-founder of Equal Access, a talent consulting firm, and a few months later at a February event focused on career pathways in energy, buildings, and operations, his co-founder Eric. She did not know either would matter more than anyone else she had met. She kept attending events, kept following up, and somewhere in that stretch took on a project building a voice agent for The City Tutors itself — adding one more thread to a life that was slowly weaving itself into something new.

Seeing Possibility Up Close

One of the most formative evenings came at a City Tutors event hosted by Slalom Consulting at the World Trade Center, where the program brought together consultants alongside a professional from Goldman Sachs, giving participants a view of the client relationship from both sides. For Sadhvi, who had spent her career in internal enterprise roles, the discussion clarified something she had been circling for months: why organizations bring in external partners, how that expertise gets deployed in practice, and what a career in consulting actually looks like as it develops over time. She left with a clearer framework for evaluating roles and a stronger sense of how her experience translated into new contexts — not just what she could do, but how to talk about it in rooms where the language was different from the one she had been using.

Shifts That Accumulated

The City Tutors gave her somewhere to go and something to build toward, even in December and January when the conventional wisdom says nothing moves and everyone has gone quiet.

"It kept me going," she said. "It helped me mentally, if not otherwise."

She also credited her mentor Zehra, a consultant who gave her structured, consistent feedback over months — helping her sharpen her pitch, narrow her goals, and present her background with precision and confidence. What she practiced in their sessions showed up in the rooms she was walking into, and the two tracks fed each other in ways that were difficult to separate.

"I found The City Tutors at the right time," she said. "It builds confidence and ownership."

The Relationship That Became an Offer

When Eric posted a job opening in May, she recognized his name the moment she saw it. The listing had an unusual instruction attached: just don't apply through the job board — email Eric and explain why you are a strong fit. She sat down that Friday evening and wrote the email. Out of several hundred applicants, roughly twenty did the same. Eric responded the next morning. Within the next week, she had spoken with both co-founders and was sitting across from them in person.

"They both kind of knew me," she said. "I was glad they remembered me."

She had given them every reason to. When the moment came, there was nothing to reconstruct and no ground to make up. A few weeks later, Sadhvi received a full-time offer from Equal Access. She accepted it. She starts on Monday. The path from that open tab on her laptop to a signed offer had run through hundreds of conversations, dozens of rooms, one mentor, two co-founders she had met without knowing they would matter, and an organization that had made all of it possible by simply being there every time she showed up.