However, after graduating from Hunter College and receiving a bachelor’s degree in psychology, he was hired in 2010 at the Center for Teaching and Learning at CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College, where he taught students how to build and develop electronic portfolios — or ePortfolios.
After serving “such a diverse” student population at LaGuardia, Avila realized a growing interest in education and the “complexity of the higher education system” and decided to pursue a master’s degree in educational psychology at Hunter while continuing to work at LaGuardia.
Pablo Avila
In 2016, Avila was appointed as a first-year program and assessment coordinator at the center where he supervised a team of 40 peer mentors who worked with faculty teaching a first-year seminar course across eight disciplines.
A 2007 LaGuardia graduate himself, Avila used his own experiences to help first-year students transition easily to community college and four-year institutions.
Though it didn’t take Avila — an immigrant from Peru — longer than the traditional two years to graduate from LaGuardia and move on to his graduate studies at Hunter, “I still grappled in different challenges in language, adjusting to the curriculum, adjusting to the campus, getting to know the resources,” he says.
