Meet a new addition to the Hofstra Career Center

Ava Danville
Assistant Director

“Hi everyone, I just wanted to take some time out to introduce myself to you all. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ava Danville, and I’m the new Assistant Director/Zarb Liaison at the Career Center. A little bit about myself; I was born and raised in Washington D.C. and went to Cornell University for undergrad. I graduated from Cornell in 2009, which was a bad time economically speaking and also because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my major. I started my career at Sephora in-store and worked my way up to Operations Manager in only a year and a half, then turned around a store with high inventory loss in only 7 months. While that was a great managerial and leadership experience, I wanted to take my career to the next level and thus I started looking into business schools. My original post-MBA plans were to go into Corporate Brand Management. While attending the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, I had the amazing opportunity to intern with Johnson & Johnson in their Consumer Division. The biggest thing that I learned from this experience was that I didn’t want to do brand management for a career- I missed the one-on-one interactions that I had with my clients when I was working in-store and I also didn’t want to steal market share for a living. This discovery led me to doing some self-reflection and determining what I wanted to do post-MBA. I was a student admissions counselor during my 2nd year at Kelley, which I really enjoyed because I was able to help prospective students through the application process and make recommendations on whether or not they should be admitted. Additionally, I continued to be involved in various mentoring and coaching programs, which I have been doing consistently since my undergrad days. What I realized is that I love helping people achieve their education and career goals and that ultimately, I like marketing people more than I do products. This led me to higher education for full-time work and career services in particular. I’m really excited to be a member of the Hofstra family and I look forward to meeting you all soon!”


Ava Danville, MBA
Assistant Director
The Career Center, Hofstra University