NASBA Center For Public Trust 
Lover of farmers markets and coffee, StudentCPT alumna, Hannah Kraebel, finds herself immersed in the New York City (NYC) culture. Hannah, who graduated from Lipscomb University in 2018 with a degree in entrepreneurship, was known by her peers and instructors as a natural born leader. She served in many leadership positions, including StudentCPT vice president and chapter president. Below, learn more about Hannah’s experience and life in NYC.
What does a day in the life of Hannah look like?
I live in Manhattan (NYC) and work for myself, so my days run the gamut when it comes to pace and location. I’m currently working with a client in the Flatiron district and spend a fair amount of time in their office. I leave my apartment around 8:30 a.m. and grab my second coffee of the morning after getting off the train at 23rd St. My workday activities vary greatly, depending on the project and client, but it almost always involves some amount of writing, which I love. As a content strategist, I focus on three key things: problem, position and promise. The problem reflects the pain point the content will address, the position is the explanation of the problem’s solution, and the promise is how that solution is going to continue resolving the initial pain point going forward. I have found this format to be very helpful when approaching many kinds of writing.
I usually leave that office before 5 p.m. to visit the Union Square Farmers’ Market before it closes. I buy locally sourced produce from small businesses because I want to know where my food comes from, who grew it, and what it cost to get to me. Every dollar I spend on produce outside a grocery store is a vote for what I want the future of food to look like, and I’m pretty pleased with my ballot. I cart my bounty home on the train and cook dinner as eating out in NYC adds up quickly, and I’m lucky enough to have a well-equipped kitchen. I try to read for about half an hour every night before bed, I’m almost done with The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. It’s a fantastic book by Priya Parker on being intentional in the way you gather with the people in your life, and how to get the most out of it.
Describe your StudentCPT experience at Lipscomb University.
I joined the StudentCPT the year it was being ‘re-launched’ at Lipscomb, thanks to an amazing business law professor. I ran for and became secretary when I first joined, vice president the following year, and president my senior year. I’m so thankful for having had this experience of ‘growing up’ with the chapter as I moved through college. Every year, it was a little bigger, a little better, and had a slightly larger impact. During my senior year, we named our first Campus Being a Difference Award winners, participated in the video competition, and sent two representatives to the Student Leadership Conference, but came just short of qualifying as a Gold Star Chapter. This was accomplished by the following year’s StudentCPT leaders and for that, I am so proud of them!
One thing I learned while trying to grow the Lipscomb chapter was that the quality of your members can be far more valuable than the quantity. Nothing deflates a meeting quicker than an unengaged audience. Filling your meeting with students who have genuine questions and an interest in ethics and its societal repercussions are the making of a great (but possibly small) chapter.
What was your favorite chapter meeting?
We held a meeting once titled “The Ethical Interview,” and walked through the kinds of questions potential employers can and can’t ask you, and then recommended potential responses to specific questions. Being a senior myself at that time, interviews weighed heavy on my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me that interviewers might make it more difficult by asking illegal questions, until I was asked one. After an interviewer at a small company asked me if I had wedding plans following my graduation, I stumbled through an answer that was both awkward and incomplete when I shouldn’t have had to provide any information on that at all. During the meeting, we covered questions interviewers could and could not ask, questions that might allude to questions they could not ask, and what a good response to an illegal question might look like. While researching for this presentation, the other StudentCPT leadership and I were surprised by some of the information potential employers could not ask for.
How did the StudentCPT help prepare you for where you are today?
As a contractor, I am responsible for recording, logging and billing for my own hours. Creating all that documentation takes time, time that I can’t bill for in the state of New York, but I didn’t know that until I checked. Being in the StudentCPT taught me a lot of things, the first being to always double-check that ‘you’re doing it right.’ When I say right, I don’t mean right enough to not be noticed or get caught, but really right. The kind of right that makes you feel good inside and would hold up in court. In most of the cases of unethical behavior we examined at StudentCPT meetings, so many things could have been avoided if someone had just double-checked the rules in the first place, so I always make sure I’m up-to-date on how something should be done before I start doing it.
Ashley Metivier
Student Programs Manager