Bruins building a better world, one day at a time

Marian Gabra, senior director of learning and development and strategic partnerships for the Center for Academic Advising in the College, was recently featured in the UCLA College Fall 2025 Magazine for the impact her work makes in the lives of students.

Read the full profile on Gabra below, and learn more about all of the Bruins building a better world on the UCLA College website.

By Michael Agresta | October 27, 2025

While earning her doctorate in comparative literature at UCLA — and later as a lecturer in the same department — Marian Gabra often came across students who needed help navigating the university and making the most of its potential to change their lives. The need was especially acute among those with fewer family resources.

“Because I was a first-generation college student myself, I found that students were really opening up to me,” Gabra says. “I wanted to help, but I didn’t fully know then how to support undergraduate students outside of the classroom.”

Eventually, Gabra discovered UCLA’s academic advising program and the complex field of academic advising — and before long, she had become an advisor herself.

“I was just in awe of how much of an impact that advisors make, as the cultural navigators for students in their education,” she says.

Today, Gabra is senior director for learning and development and strategic partnerships at the Center for Academic Advising in the College. There, in addition to working one-on-one with students, she oversees training and professional development for advisors, as well as supervising and teaching courses in the University Studies Program that support students understand the hidden curriculum of UCLA so they may maximize their journey with intention.

“I feel like I’m living my purpose,” Gabra says. “Being able to see the impact of my work on a daily basis is really rewarding and validating.”

For example, this year, Gabra got to see a student graduate whom she’d first met in 2017. The student was housing insecure and had been raised by a grandmother while both parents were system impacted. The student was academically dismissed from UCLA at one point, but, with Gabra’s support and connections to campus resources, she returned to complete her degree this summer 2025.

Perhaps Gabra’s proudest accomplishment is the culture she’s helped build at the advising center. She points out that other UC campuses now look to UCLA as model of how to develop and implement centralized training and development programs for advisors. In 2018, the Advising Communities of Excellence (ACE) Professional Development Program that she created and leads won an award for advising innovation from the National Academic Advising Association. That spirit of innovation is necessary, Gabra notes, with only 14 advisors for 21,000 undergraduate students — well below the 250:1 ratio recommended by NACADA.

“We do believe that to really support students fully, we need to first support our staff,” Gabra says. “There is a lot to be really proud of and grateful for.”