For one Deloitte professional, her impact means being one of the first, not the last

Her role at Deloitte: Consultant, Financial Services, Deloitte & Touche LLP, New York. A Bronx native, Jessica attended a commuter college while working part-time. “It wasn’t the college life I had seen in the movies,” she says. “I had to take some time to find my community.” What she found, and immediately felt at home in, was the student chapter of the Association of Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA), a networking and professional outreach organization for Latinos in accounting and finance. “I really felt like the members of the group and I were working toward the same goal: making it out of financial insecurity for ourselves and making an impact for future generations,” she says. In 2019, she attended the ALPFA Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, where the first person she met was a senior manager with Deloitte. “She was wearing her hair naturally, very curly, and I thought, ‘Wherever she works, that’s where I want to be,’” Jessica says. “I was so used to feeling like I needed to tame my own curly hair and censor who I am, and she looked so comfortable rocking her hair naturally. That told me a lot about Deloitte.” Jessica joined Deloitte in 2021 after graduation.

Purpose in action: Quickly after Jessica came to Deloitte, she connected her ALPFA experience to the sense of community and purpose she found here. The first person in her family with corporate experience, she says corporate culture was unfamiliar to her. “I didn’t have that community back home, but I found it in the Hispanic/Latinx and Allies Community at Deloitte,” she says. She was able to attend the 2022 ALPFA convention with Deloitte, organizing a workshop and sharing her own experience with ALPFA in front of 300 Deloitte professionals. Since then, Jessica has led ALPFA New York’s professional mentoring program with another Deloitte professional, helping connect students with professionals. Now, a few years into her career here, Jessica prioritizes working with people new to Deloitte to help them find community. “When someone is first starting out, it’s really nice to help embed that sense of community,” she says.

Her impact: For Jessica, establishing a recruiting connection between her small college in the Bronx and Deloitte has been especially fulfilling. “It’s been very full-circle for me because Deloitte wasn’t recruiting there yet when I was a student,” she says. “But that connection has been strengthened and now Deloitte recruits at a small college in the Bronx. Deloitte saw how passionate I am, not just about my work, but about really giving back.” Jessica is the first person in her family to graduate from college. She’s proud of that, and even prouder that her parents know she’s working to build a path to support future generations. “They pushed so hard for me to get the education they couldn’t have, and now they see me giving back and making an impact however I can,” she says. Her mother, who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic when she was 23, is now working on her GED. “She says I’ve inspired her,” Jessica says. And yes: she now feels empowered to wear her hair naturally. “It’s refreshing for me to see a whole new generation of young professionals doing it,” she says.