You’re from Long Island, the son of a man in the apparel business and a mother who didn’t work outside the home until you were 10. Having attended junior college, your parents insist — without ever really saying so — that you will go further. Absorbing their expectations, you graduate from high school and attend the University of Wisconsin, earning a bachelor’s degree in international relations in four years.
Degree in hand, you return to New York City, but not to Long Island. You land a coveted job with Lazard Asset Management, a leading global financial advisory and asset management firm, with offices in San Francisco and Sao Paulo, Boston and Bogota, Paris, and Panama City. You plug yourself into the high-voltage epicenter of the entire global enterprise: Wall Street.
You spend your days marketing complex financial products and investments to institutional and private investors. You serve clients with billions of dollars under management and you raise tens of millions more. You persuade investors to move large sums of cash into 10-figure hedge funds.
You live on the Upper West Side and work out at Reebok Gym, where comedian and actor Chris Rock goes to break a sweat and dues run to $215 per month (not including facials, $135).
Life is good. So what’s next?
Finding common ground
If you’re Adam Jacobs, you become a mentor to a kid from Brooklyn. You meet him through iMentor, an innovative mentoring program based in New York City. You find common ground with a young man who has no close relative who went to college and who seems unlikely to buck family tradition and earn a four-year degree. You meet with the young man monthly, texting him and talking on the phone between visits. You encourage him to look at himself and his habits, to take the long view, to think about what he wants from his life and how he might attain those goals. You help him to become a better student, and you guide the young man through a college admissions process that for him is bewildering and frightening.
Two years later, it leads to this, a moment on the 44th floor of Morgan Stanley’s offices on Broadway, a financial citadel where on most days you advise high-wealth individuals and families on how to manage their often eye-popping assets. But today your thoughts are elsewhere, and you beam as you share the news that Kevin, your mentee, made the dean’s list in his first semester of college. This isn’t like sharing financial advice. This is visceral. You feel as if you made the honor roll, too.
‘It was hard growing up’
Kevin Wade grew up in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood well before gentrification had smoothed its rough edges. His father did maintenance work for the New York State Board of Education, and his mother was a security guard at the Crown Building in Manhattan. The youngest of five kids, Kevin didn’t know his two oldest brothers all that well because they were away, serving prison sentences for felony convictions. Childhood friends died from gunshots, some of them drug-related. Eventually, his parents divorced. “It was hard growing up. A lot of my friends dropped out of school,” says Kevin, on winter break from Medgar Evers College, where he recently completed his first semester. On a rainy January day, he hangs out in front of the Barclays Center, the Brooklyn Nets’ sparkling new arena that opened in 2012. “Park Slope hasn’t always been like this,” he says.
Despite the distractions of his formative years, Kevin did well in middle school. “I was always a hard worker in my own way,” he says. “People called me a perfectionist.” But something shifted when he began high school at New York’s Secondary School for Law. Basketball became Kevin’s top priority. Not far behind were girls, and then video games, which he often played into the wee hours. Waking up in time for school became a hardship. School attendance slipped; grades suffered. Academically, he fell into the middle of the pack. “When I first got to high school, it was a new environment. I felt like I could play around all day,” Kevin says.
Even as he was compiling an unexceptional resume, Kevin aspired to something better. Like many at-risk youth, he had big dreams. His college of choice was Syracuse University or maybe UCLA. At night, he would scan the cityscape from the 19th floor of his building and gaze on the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the illuminated bridges that connect the outer boroughs to Manhattan.
“It’s beautiful. It made me feel like I was on top of the world,” says Kevin. He envisioned himself going places, but he had no idea how he would get there. Kevin first met Adam Jacobs in September 2011, the beginning of Kevin’s junior year of high school. Outwardly, they made an odd couple, a 16-year-old African American from Brooklyn with a net worth that would barely dent a balance sheet and a white, affluent Manhattanite pushing 40. The differences weren’t strictly superficial. When Jacobs was a teenager, there had been a clear educational direction. “You were expected to go to a good four-year university,” he says. In Kevin’s case, “the expectation wasn’t there.”
Kevin and Jacobs found common ground in common experiences. They talked about their parents’ divorces, and Jacobs shared stories about his younger brother, Ryan. It didn’t take long for them to discover a shared fluency in the lingua franca of many New Yorkers: Knicks basketball. They deconstructed the games of Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire and analyzed how the stars’ ups and downs affected the team. When Kevin smiled, he looked a bit like a young Michael Jordan. Sizing up the young man, Jacobs discovered a “compassionate, thoughtful, sensitive” adolescent who “listens and takes direction. … A great kid … but not necessarily directed.”
Jacobs followed the iMentor program’s curriculum and worked with Kevin to set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) for his junior year of high school. The emphasis was on the college process. Each month, they delved into another topic: applications, financial aid, study skills, entrance exams, stress management and resiliency, creating a college list, identifying college resources, etc. Kevin was an eager student.
“Adam has a solution for everything,” Kevin says. “If he doesn’t have an answer, he’ll find it.”
During Kevin’s final two years of high school, he and Jacobs worked through crises and shared experiences. Recalling those events is like flipping through a family photo album, each image a plot point on an evolving relationship.
When the two were first getting to know each other, they began talking about study habits and the consequences of choices, such as playing Xbox until well past midnight. Jacobs suggested that Kevin set a curfew for himself. “He wasn’t doing well,” says Jacobs, recalling one of their early talks about grades. “I told him, ‘You can’t live your life like that.’”
Kevin heeded the advice, especially the part about impulse control, procrastination and delayed gratification. “He told me to put my priorities first before I try to fool around. It was basically like ‘Cry now and laugh later.’ It was kind of a new way of looking at things,” says Kevin, who had a “C” average when he met Jacobs. A year later, he was a “B” student. When he aced a test, an image of the graded exam would appear, via text message, on his mentor’s phone. “You’ve got to do the little things to do the big things,” Kevin says.
When Kevin discovered, in May 2012, that an unethical lawyer had forged his mother’s signature and taken his savings, $11,000 awarded to him several years earlier in the settlement of a personal injury claim, he sought help from Jacobs. Together, they are working with an organization that helps clients recover funds illegally taken by rogue lawyers. The attorney is in jail. “I was the go-to person,” Jacobs says. “That’s how our relationship has grown.”
Taking the SAT exam became an epic quest for Kevin, one he might not have completed without the help of his mentor. The process started well enough. iMentor emphasizes preparation for entrance exams, and Jacobs bought Kevin an SAT practice book. On test day, overcome with anxiety, Kevin bolted the testing site midway through the exam. “I was overwhelmed,” Kevin says. Jacobs promised him that they would be better prepared next time “so that this doesn’t happen again.”
The second time around, Kevin rode the subway by himself to the exam location, but he arrived a few minutes late. The proctors wouldn’t let him enter the testing area. “Adam, I don’t know what to do,” said Kevin, who called his mentor at 7:45 that Saturday morning. “I was heartbroken for him,” Jacobs recalls. “I told him it was a learning experience. There are certain life events that you have to show up for on time or be early. You cannot bend the rules.”
Afterward, with the next test date approaching, Kevin began to waver. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to make a third attempt. Jacobs was having none of it. On exam day, he showed up at Kevin’s door at 6 a.m., took him out for a pre-test breakfast and “tried to keep him calm. … There are moments in life when you have to face your fears.” A few hours later, Kevin called and said he had finished the test. “That call was worthwhile,” Jacobs says. “I was proud of him.”
Over time the relationship deepened. Kevin was changing; Jacobs, too. “This is our journey together. There’s a lot of learning and growth that goes on for both of us,” Jacobs says. Between Kevin’s junior and senior years of high school, he made plans to attend a summer college fair put on by the State University of New York system. He asked his mentor to join him, which “was his (Kevin’s) way of showing trust,” Jacobs says. “He was saying ‘I’m aware of what my next steps could be and I want you to be a part of that.’ It was meaningful.”
At the college fair, they talked about practical considerations, such as admissions requirements and the number of students served by various campuses. “That’s when you know you’ve gotten through,” says Jacobs, his eyes welling with tears. “It was grounded in reality. With his grades, those SUNY schools were his best chance at continuing to grow as a student. It wasn’t UCLA anymore.”
Before Kevin met Jacobs, the teen’s work experience had been limited to summer jobs toiling in stock rooms. Jacobs suggested that Kevin consider a summer internship that would expose him to an office environment, the kind of experience that “can be an important part of a young person’s life.” Kevin jumped at the opportunity, and Jacobs introduced him to an internship with a friend who runs a recruiting and staffing agency in the city.
Arranging the internship was a big deal for Jacobs; when people make referrals in the business world, he points out, “it’s important how they represent you.” Jacobs had faith that his mentee would “be accountable and work hard;” still, he waited anxiously for confirmation that the first day of Kevin’s internship had gone well. Kevin called that evening, allaying his mentor’s fears and providing a full account of the day. Kevin couldn’t believe that he had his own desk, computer and telephone. “I had never heard him so excited,” Jacobs recalls.
Months passed and Kevin experienced more of Jacobs’ world. On one occasion, mentor and mentee went to the Apple store in Jacobs’ neighborhood to buy a laptop with money Kevin had won in iMentor’s inaugural Caroline Kim Oh Scholarship essay-writing contest. They visited Jacobs’ gym (“It’s like a resort!”), where Kevin spotted Chris Rock, a fellow Brooklynite. (The comedian’s career took off after superstar Eddie Murphy befriended Rock and became his mentor.)
Jacobs brought Kevin to his office and introduced him to colleagues, and they attended a fall benefit for iMentor. On the 42nd floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, guests soaked up the view of Central Park on an October day when the foliage was bursting with color. “It was like artwork to me,” says Kevin. “It was beautiful.”
A year or so into the pair’s relationship, Jacobs changed employers, taking a job that more closely aligned with the way his world view had evolved since becoming a mentor. He left the institutional world of hedge funds to become a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley. Today he consults with individuals and families, doing work that is “more relationship-driven, educational and personally rewarding.”
Asked to consider whether being a mentor to Kevin influenced his career change, Jacobs concedes that “there’s a strong correlation.” In both endeavors, he “wants to have the other individual’s best interest at heart and to make sure they get the best guidance. … It’s very much in line with what I’m doing with Kevin.”
‘We’ll be friends forever’
Life is good. So what’s next?
Kevin plans to continue taking classes at Medgar Evers College, earning college credits for two years before transferring to a SUNY institution. After that, he’s unsure. At the moment, he’s considering a career in software engineering. Wherever he goes, he’ll take with him lessons learned from Jacobs: “Perseverance. Dedication. Determination. Patience. Consideration. … Everything I do now, I put in 100 percent,” he says.
Will he and Jacobs stay in touch? “I think we’ll be friends forever,” Kevin says. “He’s like the big brother I never had.”
For his part, Jacobs says being a mentor to Kevin has been “hands down, one of the best experiences I’ve been involved with. … I’ve helped Kevin grow and become the person he’s meant to be. … He’s much more accountable and focused. … It’s been more rewarding than I ever could have imagined.
“He’s like the little brother who actually listens to me,” Jacobs says.
Helping Kevin has also helped Jacobs. “It’s a two-way street. There’s a lot of learning and growth that goes on for both of us. We both benefit. … Going forward, the commitment to giving back will always be a part of my life.”
