Featured Stories tagged with "mayor's graduate scholarship program"

Vanessa Okonta is a planner. With a calendar jammed with reminders and to-do lists, she maps out her life in years, months, weeks, days and hours. In the spring of 2013, Okonta had a pretty detailed plan. She’d graduated from Pace University and had just landed a job with New York City’s Human Resource Administration as a fraud investigator. The position provided many opportunities for growth and advancement, a chance to make a difference in the lives of others and steady income to help pay off her college debt. She planned to attend graduate school one day and assumed that was far off in her future. And yet, the best laid plans often go awry, especially when opportunity knocks.