No Wardrobe? No Worries: Texas A&M’s Career Closet Celebrates 10 Years of Dressing Aggies for Professional Success.

When students enter the doors at Career Closet, Owens and other volunteers strive to provide a retail-like experience. Students can peruse the suits, try on as many as they like, and walk out with a clean, professional outfit they can borrow for up to two weeks. At the end of their loan, students use a Career Closet-provided coupon for dry cleaning and return the suit to the center.  

Jasmine Zenn ’19, an assistant director in the Texas A&M Career Center, serves as the Career Closet’s advisor and came to the position by way of using the service herself as a student in 2017. “As a student, I learned about Career Closet from a sign on campus and found it to be such a great resource,” she explained. “I had recently lost weight and didn’t have professional clothing that still fit me. As a student, affording a new suit would have been a stretch.”  

When the university asked Zenn to step in as the program’s advisor, it was a “full-circle moment.”  

Zenn said the Career Closet serves Texas A&M’s diverse array of students, many of whom are first-generation or from other countries. In a given semester, Career Closet typically loans out 150 suits. “Just being a college student is expensive,” she said. “It’s hard to add the need for professional clothing to that cost. The joy this service brings to students means a great deal to me as an advisor.” 
 

According to Owens, the Career Closet currently has about 80 suits, with a 60/40% breakdown between men’s and women’s styles. “Our inventory is based on donations, but we’re running low on popular sizes,” he said. Owens added that, because styles change quickly, it hopes to purchase some more updated suits, as well.

While donated clothing helps, having discretionary funds to purchase the needed suits is even better. To help Career Closet reach those goals, Parish and his wife, Dr. Shannon Parish ’20, an incoming assistant professor in the department of agricultural leadership, education, and communication at Texas A&M, have set a goal of raising $10,000 to bring Career Closet’s endowment up to $50,000 this year—a meaningful way to mark Career Closet’s 10-year anniversary. “We recently met with the team and we were inspired by their vision and leadership,” Parish said. “The mission of Career Closet is very much still needed.”           

To spearhead the initiative, the Parishes recently made a $1,250 contribution toward the endowment, matched by Mason’s employer, in hopes of inspiring other Aggies to follow suit. As an established business professional now on the other side of the hiring table, Parish sees many talented undergrads go through the nerve-racking process and says he’s “thankful there’s an organization like Career Closet that allows students to focus on their contributions instead of worrying about their clothes.”