Something was different about Leo Marin (M.A. ’18) after a two-hour coaching session with TC’s Terry Maltbia. Marin stood on 120th Street amid a winding journey — one that took him from West Point to Iraq and then New York City. A student in the College’s Executive Change Leadership program at the time, his robust career at Google offered him a way to apply his military skillset, but he craved a new mission that still allowed him to build a life beyond his identity as a veteran. 

When Marin returned home from TC that day, even his wife Niki noticed a seismic shift. “[Terry] helped me see beyond this identity I was holding onto so much,” explains Marin, a former captain and platoon leader who felt a “burden lifted as if I was finally stepping into myself a little bit more.”

Now back at TC as a doctoral student in the Social-Organizational Psychology program, Marin has taken significant steps towards fulfilling his purpose. In 2023, Marin and Niki (SIPA ‘24) — also a veteran with “operational excellence, financial acumen and creativity” in her own right — made big moves to “do something positive for the landscape of leadership development and learning.” They established both The Leadership Supply Company, a leadership development firm that helps major global brands such as Google and Pinterest implement research-driven strategies into their workforces, as well as Beneath the Service, a non-profit that uses social-organizational psychology principles to support the veteran community navigate military to civilian reintegration, a process that can take years after the transition from service. To date, the organization has supported more than 500 veterans across the country lead with authenticity and purpose.

Beneath the Service’s name references Marin and Niki’s core belief that “beneath the uniform and beneath the service, there is the core person you are that was called to serve in the first place.” For Marin, his biggest advice for transitioning veterans is to process their experience with core questions: What are you most proud of? What role did your service play in your life? And how can you use your skills and translate them to have impact elsewhere?

“I think the answers to those questions might help people get closure on their military experience, because what we're really talking about is an immediate loss of identity, loss of purpose and loss of community,” explains Marin, who believes that the initial transition out of the military, fraught with the stress of finding work and logistical matters, does not give veterans time to properly address the intrapersonal change.  “[You have to] make sense of the experience, find a meaning in it for yourself, and then leverage that to craft the person that you would like to become next. We like to say, "honor who you are, in service of who you will become.”

In addition to his nonprofit work, Marin is also working on leading with his own purpose as he pursues a lifelong goal of earning his doctorate. 

“All the questions that I had left from 2018 when I graduated from the master’s at TC bothered me. I needed to go deeper to learn more about the process of how leadership development can change a person who can then change others,’” explains Marin, who commutes to the College weekly from Washington, D.C., where he lives with Niki and his two daughters. “My motivation is to contribute to the conversation by way of scholarly research that has practical application in communities and workplaces.” 

Working closely now with his advisor, Debra Noumair — “the embodiment of a true educator, and also a true leader” — Marin is researching the impact of Beneath the Service’s Women Veterans Leadership program on outcomes related to leader self-identity, self-efficacy and social connectedness. Marin and Niki hope that the five-month program, which currently serves cohorts of 40, could help address higher rates of depression and anxiety reported among women veterans more broadly. 

For Marin, it all began in Santa Marta, Colombia, where he was born and his father served in the army. The family moved to New York City in the early 1990s, where Marin attended public school and graduated at the top of his high school class at Thomas A. Edison High School. A school assignment about Marin’s veteran father prompted a teacher to encourage him to look at West Point, where an officer who had immigrated from Mexico reflected a future that resonated with Marin. 

But getting into the military academy is no easy feat. Marin needed a nomination from a member of the U.S. government or military, so he took a Greyhound bus down to D.C. to knock on the office doors of New York representatives. Securing his place at West Point would set the rest of this life in motion. 

Years later, Marin would meet his future wife, also a West Point grad, while they were both stationed in Hawaii. He keeps in touch with those he served with, and when it comes to reflecting on what he’s most proud of and what his service means to him, it's those relationships that remain the most profound. 

“I'm most proud of the lifelong connections with people whom I would have never met. People with differing political views, people with different lifestyles that to me feel like brothers and sisters,” says Marin. “Helping soldiers out and my ability to lend some kind of support is what’s meaningful to me.”