CASE STUDY | LEHMAN COLLEGE & WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY
Building bridges between creative talent and professional opportunity.
Lehman College is a Hispanic-Serving Institution in the Bronx and a senior college of the City University of New York system. Its students are talented, motivated, and pursuing creative careers in design, film, media, and the arts. What they lacked was access to the professional networks, mentorship, and industry relationships that students at elite institutions often receive as a matter of course. In fall 2025, Impact Collaborative launched the Career Readiness Accelerator at Lehman with Warner Bros. Discovery as the Industry Partner, bringing that access directly to 12 students for the first time.
CHALLENGE
Half of all jobs in the creative industries are filled through personal connections. For students at broad-access institutions like Lehman, those connections simply don’t exist in the same way they do for students at elite schools. Career services teams are stretched too thin to provide the sustained, industry-specific support students need. And the employer relationships that create genuine hiring pipelines take years to build — time and resources most institutions don’t have. Lehman’s students had the talent. The infrastructure to connect that talent to opportunity hadn’t been built yet.
OUR WORK
We partnered with Lehman College to identify a cohort of 12 design students. Warner Bros. Discovery served as the Industry Partner, providing mentors drawn from Warner Bros., HBO, HBO Max, and BBMG, each matched one-to-one with a student whose discipline aligned with their own.
Over 4-6 virtual sessions per pairing, mentors and students worked together on portfolio and resume critique, interview coaching, job search strategy, and professional narrative. The program was adapted to Lehman’s academic calendar and the schedules of WBD mentors and creative directors. Based on the results of the pilot, the program is expanding in fall 2026 to an additional 15 students and multiple program components.
IMPACT
Portfolio and resume readiness scores jumped from 3.2 to 4.8 out of 5
Job market confidence scores jumped from 2.8 to 4.3 out of 5
100% of students felt more prepared to speak to their work
100% would recommend the program
76% of mentors described being surprised by the sophistication of students’ work
71% of mentors said they would recommend their mentee for a junior-level position
86% of mentors said they would participate again
Within weeks of the pilot’s completion, a VP of Brand Design at HBO Max reached out directly to Lehman faculty to refer program participants for two open roles, bypassing the centralized HR systems that typically screen emerging designers out before a hiring manager ever sees their work
SELECT ACTIVITIES
Career readiness · Community engagement · Corporate engagement strategy · Cross-sector partnership development · Impact measurement · Program design & management
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