The City Tutors @ TIAA’s Ignite NYC 2026: A day that shifted what felt possible
For the first half of the full-day experience, Nicholas moved through TIAA with the other City Tutors learners, touring the office, listening to professionals speak about the paths they had built, and taking in the company from the inside. By late afternoon, his role would change. He would leave the crowd, take his seat beside Derek Ferguson, TIAA’s chief administrative officer, and co-moderate the fireside chat, carrying into that exchange the excitement, scrutiny, ambition that had animated the room all day.
The fireside began with Ferguson tracing his story back to family: the Bronx, parents who came out of the segregated South, and a household shaped by faith, education, and entrepreneurship. It was the most natural place for him to begin. In the room, family was already intertwined with the future. Many of the first-generation and immigrant learners listening were thinking about school and work through expectation, sacrifice, and the hope that what came next might widen what was possible for others too. So when Ferguson said, “Know you belong,” the line spoke to a quieter fear beneath the day: that lives shaped by so much complexity would meet rooms like this with the suggestion that the distance was too great to cross.
A participant asked what it means to be the only Black man in the room and how to maintain executive presence under that pressure. Ferguson answered by bringing the question back to what remained within a person’s control. “I’m thinking about how do I get in and out of this meeting having added value and driving great results.”
That same emphasis ran through the rest of what he said. Again and again, he returned to the small, chosen acts that shape a working life: preparation, follow-through, attention to detail, the habits that make others trust you with more. When he said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” he was making the same point in larger terms. Plans matter, but habits matter more, and the smallest acts of discipline often decide whether larger ambitions hold. He brought the phrase down to scale through planning, accountability, and small tasks done well enough that people trust you with larger ones. He told a story from early in his career about Xeroxing work papers in public accounting and learning that people notice the details. “If you don’t excel in the little things, it’s very hard for me to feel confident about what you’re going to do with the bigger things.”
Puneet Chawla, one of the City Tutors mentees in the room, was still turning that idea over after the day ended. “He said something I keep coming back to: that excellence is a muscle, and you have to train it. Not just in the big moments, but in the smallest ones. Something as simple as how you walk from point A to point B.” Ferguson had also spoken about being mission-driven, that when you feel unsure, your mission is there to return to. Puneet left carrying that too.
“Life and business is about people,” Ferguson said. “Every interaction is an opportunity.”
Nicholas spent the day in conversation with professionals across finance, HR, and technology, and what began to take shape for him was the same shift unfolding across the room: a clearer sense of how a place like TIAA works from the inside and how a future might begin to take form within it. The conversations did different things for different people, but they moved in the same direction.
Aaron needed only one conversation. Kevin, a relationship manager, helped bring his career thinking into focus. “For the first time ever, I actually figured out exactly what I want to do as a career. He literally does what I do now — he just gets paid to do it.” The two are having lunch together in April.
Nate Yap arrived focused on roles and titles and left thinking more broadly about where he fit in a larger system, particularly in work that combines analysis, strategy, and long-term decision-making. Marissa came with questions about sustainable investing and left having spoken directly with Amy O’Brien and Sarah Wilson, both leaders in Responsible Investing at Nuveen, whose work made that path feel closer and more defined.
Serena Zou, taking in the full event, took the longest view: careers unfold over time, flexibility matters, and relationships often matter most when timing does.
“At TIAA and Nuveen, we believe exposure creates opportunity,” said Karly Ashlock, Senior Director of Community Impact. “Through our Ignite events, we open our doors to give students meaningful, face-to-face access to our leaders and professionals, while shining a light on the wide range of careers available in financial services — because the connections and conversations that happen in moments like these can truly shape the trajectory of a student's career and financial security.”
At the end of the event, the idea had already taken on a fuller life in the room: in the learners measuring their own futures against the lives they had encountered; in the conversations already extending beyond the office; and in Nicholas, who had spent the day moving through TIAA as one of them before taking his place in the closing dialogue, making visible to everyone else that what felt aspirational at the start of the morning could already begin to feel achievable by afternoon.