Staff Profile Cecilia Vega Britez

Building Futures

Cecilia Vega Britez​: Her Challenging Journey Inspires a Passion to Serve​

As campus manager for the CUNY Service Corps at Queens College, Cecilia Britez (BA, ’12, MA, ’17) helps students acquire valuable experience working for community service and nonprofit organizations. Applying for the CUNY Service Corps is highly competitive. Students who are selected receive 13 hours of pre-service training and monthly personal and professional training throughout their year of paid employment—a real point of difference compared to similar college-based employment programs.

Since its 2012 inception, 506 Queens College students have participated; the current (fifth) cohort numbers 124—an all-time high. Directing the logistics of interviewing every applicant who meets the basic qualifications (24 credits; enrolled full-time; 2.5 minimum GPA) is demanding enough. The Service Corps manager must also help students set goals to build specific skills, monitor their progress in one-on-one meetings, and build relationships with community partners—which all demands administrative and human relations expertise combined with a strong sense of mission.

“The Service Corps speaks volumes to what Queens College is all about,” says Britez, a QC grad who cites the college motto, “We learn so that we may serve.” “This isn’t just a place to get a diploma but to empower students and develop ties that bring us together as a community. That’s why I feel so passionate about my work here.”

Britez’s own journey set a solid foundation for the challenges of her current position. “We were very poor,” she says of her family living in a small town in Paraguay. And yet her parents, who didn’t finish elementary school, eked out the funds needed to send Britez and her brother to private school, even though that meant they couldn’t afford holiday gifts for their children. “My mom and dad are the most intelligent and compassionate people I know,” Britez says proudly. “Education was stressed and my mother, especially, set a high bar for me.”

Married at age 19 to a U.S. citizen from Paraguay, Britez moved to the U.S. while pregnant. Here she faced the language barrier, economic and immigration challenges, and the stress of being a teenage mother. A native speaker of Spanish and the indigenous language Guarani, Britez learned English from watching TV and practicing conversation with her husband. “I’m a people person and wanted to be able to communicate. It took me three years to put myself together, but then I mapped out a plan for the next four-to-five years of my life,” she says.

In fall 2008, Britez began working as a college assistant at the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the following spring, she was admitted to Queens College, her first-choice school. While continuing to work part-time, Britez managed to graduate four years later with a BA, magna cum laude, with a triple major in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Cultural Anthropology, and Latin American Studies. In spring 2017, she earned an MA in Urban Studies.

“QC is family to me,” says Britez, who lives in walking distance of the campus. “I’d never have been able to do this without its support system.” Now the mother of three sons, Britez took advantage of campus child care offered by the Child Development Center and its after-school program for all three boys. “I’m 100 percent a QC person,” she says. “There was a time when I was here 10 am to 10 pm.”

Many CUNY Service Corps participants at Queens College are non-traditional students. “I identify with them,” says Britez. “I’ve experienced their problems.”

As acting manager of the program, Britez strengthened its recruitment, using flyers and emails targeted to specific majors and campus buildings where classes in those fields tend to meet. The CUNY Service Corps focuses on four themes that participants can match to their interests: promoting work to make NYC “more resilient and greener; healthier; better-educated; and economically stronger.” And so, for example, Britez obtained lists of students who had declared Biology or pre-med majors, emailing them about the opportunity to gain experience in a health-oriented work site such as the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Visiting Nurse Service. Her approach paid off. QC, for the first time, closed its registration period with the largest number of applicants among the eight participating CUNY colleges.

She also developed a management system to receive and distribute applications to readers across campus. Using different computer programs, she and her team have been able to increase program efficiency and tapped a squadron of enthusiastic volunteers to assist with the nearly year-long student-selection process.

“The CUNY Service Corps is a pipeline for diverse talent,” says Britez. “The students get practical experience and give back to our city by serving as ambassadors. They and their families, in turn, will someday be served by these same organizations and city agencies. It’s a rich concept, and I’m thrilled that I can give back, too, offering Queens College students the same opportunities that I received from this institution.”