Changing Systems from the Inside Out

Alexis Pickering ‘26 was ten years old when she decided she would live in New York City. Growing up in Rochester, New York ("about an hour from Canada," she says) she heard a lot of nos. The dream was too big, people told her. The city was too far. She applied anyway, and only to Manhattan schools.

She ended up at Pace. And then she ended up at City Hall.

Now a graduating senior in Pace’s Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, Alexis is completing her final semester as the Intergovernmental Affairs intern in the Office of the Mayor under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a role she landed not through a faculty connection or a formal program, but through sheer persistence and a willingness to take a chance on herself. "I was trigger happy on the Career Services platform, Handshake," she says, laughing. "I just kind of threw an application together." A week after her interview, she had the job.

That was the beginning of what became one of the most consequential chapters of her undergraduate life. Alexis started in the press office during the turbulent final stretch of the Adams administration, fielding press releases, managing the mayor's schedule, attending events, and watching history unfold in real time. “My friends would send me New York Times articles and I'd say, ‘Guys, that's actually not how it went down. I was there.’” When the indictments came, she was in the building—one of many moments that underscored just how close she was to the center of it all. “It's a privilege to be in rooms where things are happening,” she says simply.

 “It's a privilege to be in rooms where things are happening,” says Alexis.

Image

Her ambitions shifted over time. Initially drawn to criminal justice through a deeply personal experience with sexual assault—one that later fueled her work as a resident advisor at Pace supporting students navigating Title IX—Alexis came to Pace as a political science major before switching to criminal justice in pursuit of a career in prosecution. But City Hall broadened her vision. She moved from the press office to the intergovernmental affairs team, where she sat in on prep calls with agencies like the Mayor's Office to End Gender-Based Violence and assisted with city council hearing preparations. "I wanted to see how policy is made," she says. "How does this stuff actually come about?" She's now applying to graduate programs in public policy, something she hadn't considered before the internship. "There are a lot more pieces of the machine than just law and lawyers." This fall, she'll be studying those pieces at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she has been accepted into the MSc in International Social and Public Policy program, a destination she hadn't imagined before City Hall opened the door.

In the classroom, Alexis  found her intellectual home in the Criminal Justice and Security Department's emphasis on practice over theory. Most of her professors have been working professionals, a fact she credits for grounding her education in reality. But it was Professor Kim Collica-Cox, PhD, who she says truly changed her. In Professor Collica-Cox's course, students visit an incarceration facility and engage directly with incarcerated individuals. "It shook me to my core," Alexis says. "My biases, going into that prison, stepping into a cell—it changed how I viewed everything." She now serves as Professor Collica-Cox's intern, co-teaching with incarcerated parents on Tuesdays. Her Honors College thesis, which surveys students who've completed the prison education program, examines how exposure to incarceration reshapes stigma and perception. "Every person who wants to get into criminal justice," she says, "should step into a jail."

"Systems are human made," she says, "and humans are the ones that can change them."

The throughline of Alexis's time at Pace is a belief that systems are not to be passively trusted, but that the most meaningful change happens from within them. "Systems are human made," she says, "and humans are the ones that can change them. Working within them from the inside out is going to make more of a drastic change than just being a critic outside."

As she walks up the steps of City Hall each morning—in the same city she dreamed about as a kid in upstate New York—she thinks about what it would mean to tell her ten-year-old self where she ended up. "I think she would lose it," Alexis says, her voice going quiet. "I don't take a day for granted. It's a privilege and an honor, and I can't describe it any other way."