When James Madison College students walked into Detroit’s Coleman A. Young Municipal Center on May 5, Charlaine Stevenson recognized why they were there. Exactly 10 years earlier, she had been on the same JMC Career Exposure Program.
Stevenson, now a policy analyst with the City of Detroit, was a first-year student in 2016 when she joined the college’s annual careers program. That year, the destination was her hometown of Detroit, then still emerging from bankruptcy. She remembers meeting JMC alumni building careers in the city, who shared their enthusiasm for their work and the change they were making.
“I had never seen people so excited about Detroit,” she recalled.
Like many incoming JMC students, Stevenson had arrived on campus thinking she would eventually head to Washington, D.C., and become a lawyer. The trip introduced her to people who encouraged her to see what was possible in Detroit and helped point her toward a career in local government.
“Local government is where everything is happening,” she said. “If you want to make a change, or you want to see it tomorrow, the best place to work is the city.”
After graduating from MSU in 2020, working in local government roles in Novi and Berkley, and earning her Master of Public Administration, Stevenson joined Detroit City Council Member Denzel Anton McCampbell’s office as a policy analyst.
A council session was underway when Stevenson saw Karissa Chabot-Purchase, JMC’s director of career services, leading JMC students through the Municipal Center in May. She messaged McCampbell and the council member, who is also an MSU graduate, briefly left the dais to come down and meet with the students.
That impromptu encounter reflects the premise at the heart of the Career Exposure Program: that the JMC alumni network is ready and willing to introduce current students to the wide range of careers open to public affairs graduates.
“Our alumni never lose sight of the people coming after them,” said Chabot-Purchase, who leads the program with JMC Field Experience Coordinator Lauren Michalak. “Their generosity shows up in the way they share their networks, experiences and encouragement with current students, helping them navigate careers and discover opportunities they may never have considered.”
The Detroit trip was the second of two career programs JMC hosted this academic year, following a fall trip to Lansing in October. This year’s Michigan-focused programs were intended to expand access to career programming and to highlight the broad range of in-state opportunities for public affairs graduates.
The college has run Career Exposure Programs since 2014, with previous destinations including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and D.C. During each program, students visit a variety of host organizations, attend industry-specific panels and meet local alumni at networking mixers.
Over their three days in Detroit, students visited alumni and employers across seven sectors:
- Corporate: Ford Motor Company and General Motors
- Philanthropic: Gilbert Family Foundation
- Municipal: City of Detroit
- Federal: U.S. Department of State’s Detroit Resident Office
- Civic: Detroit Regional Chamber
- Legal: American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan
- Labor: Northern Midwest Regional Council of Carpenters
The program also included panels on careers in law and in labor and organizing — the latter featuring alumni from the AFL-CIO, UAW and Teamsters — an alumni board breakfast and an alumni reception at Butzel Long law firm.
For Zion Williams, a junior majoring in Social Relations & Policy and African American & African Studies, Detroit was her second Career Exposure Program (she also traveled to Chicago in May 2025). This year’s trip expanded her sense of where she might end up after graduation.
Williams, who is from Sterling Heights and is preparing to apply to law school, came into the program assuming she would leave Michigan to study civil rights law.
“At first, I was thinking, ‘Chicago is the law hub, I have to go there,’” Williams said. “Now I’m a little more hesitant. I can see myself here — not just because my family’s here, but because of all the other opportunities in the city.”
She pointed to the breadth of the visits as part of what shifted her thinking but said the alumni conversations and the connections they fostered were what stayed with her most. “That was pretty much the consensus among all the alums,” she said. “Please reach out, please talk to us.”
For Williams, the ACLU of Michigan was the visit most directly tied to her interest in civil rights law. She was familiar with the organization’s voting-rights work on campus but hadn’t realized the broader scope of its civil rights advocacy. After meeting with several JMC alumni now on the ACLU’s legal and political staff, she’s planning to apply for an internship with the organization in the fall.
Williams said the program’s format offered her something a course or a job posting could not.
“Without this program, I don’t know if I would even have an idea of what I could be doing,” she said. “Seeing it in real life makes it a lot easier to attain. It’s helpful to know that this is actually something I could do.”