1990s - Inksplot

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@50
UMass Boston’s independent student newspaper
Special Edition, Fall 2015
Alumni
Celebrate
UMass Boston
Years
Art from the Proposal for the Columbia Point Site, An Urban Campus by the Sea, circa 1970, UMB Archives
By Caleb Nelson
A Half Century of Hard Hats and Hard Work
The doors to the hurriedly renovated Consolidated Gas Company
building in Park Square opened to
UMB students on September 9th,
1965. Classes began, and 1,200 students, 75 faculty, and 10 staff commuted to downtown Boston to participate in a new urban mission.
“The urban university must stand
with the city, must serve and lead
where the battle is,” the founders
wrote in their statement of purpose
for this fledgling wing of the UMass
system. “Only by plunging into the
heart of mass technological, urban
society can the university hope to
prepare its students and faculty for
the future.”
Two weeks later, at the first convocation UMB Chancellor John
Ryan told incoming freshman that
they were on the threshold of something great.
“You are not the beanie-bedecked fledglings dotting a thousand campuses throughout the land
this September,” he said. “You wear
hard hats as the student body of a
new, adventurous University with
an urgent, compelling job to do . . .
Your hearts and minds, your energy
and commitment are what we ask,
nothing less.”
Fifty years later, still in the midst
of construction, we take a few moments to consider and celebrate
what this university accomplishes
year in and year out through a series of conversations with former
UMB students.
In celebration of our 50th anniversary, The Student Media Office
contacted fifty alumni and recorded a few of their fonder memories
about this place. Each of these
former students leveraged their
education to different ends, by dif-
ferent means. The one thing that
they have in common is that they
all found inspiration and purpose
through activities and friendships
here on campus.
What follows are profiles in the
broadest sense, really condensed
conversations generally conducted
by phone. A few were in person,
and three were email correspondences. Most of the alumni we contacted for this series responded.
UMass Boston grew out of the
spiking interest in higher education
that followed World War 2, to meet
the needs of a growing class of hard
working people who due to social
and economic inequality would not
otherwise go to college.
Columnists continue to expose
failures in our public education
system, often citing a statistic from
2002, published by the University of
Princeton Press in the book “Crossing the Finish Line”, apparently impressed by the fact that only 33% of
UMB students at that time graduated within 6 years.
In an economics op-ed published
by the New York Times in 2009,
David Leonhardt suggests a reason:
low income students often chose
cheaper universities closer to home
(a key UMB selling point).
“In effect,” Leonhard wrote.
“Well-off students — many of
whom will graduate no matter
where they go — attend the colleges that do the best job of producing graduates. These are the places
where many students live on campus (which raises graduation rates)
and graduation is the norm. Meanwhile, lower-income students —
even when they are better qualified
— often go to colleges that excel in
producing dropouts.”
Many people pass through the
halls of this university, and many
only take a few classes before leaving. Even the latest data shows less
than half of UMB students, 42% in
2014, graduating. Maybe this is not
so much a testament to the quality
of a UMB education, as to the overwhelming odds stacked agaistent
the unprivileged in Boston society,
most of whom have never been
“better qualified.”
Mystery writer Dennis Lehane,
a UMB dropout, talked about the
value of having a public university
in every community in his 2004
commencement speech at UMass
Boston.
“Public education is a form of
public assistance. The great and
wise once decided that it was the
duty of every great city or state to
provide education for their citizenry, and not just so-so education,
solid, even exemplary education
that you get here.”
Lehane spoke from a stage in the
Bayside Expo Center, a recent UMB
acquisition now used primarily for
parking, but a place of speculation
that will probably extend construction beyond the current 25 year
plan. Lehane called for empathy.
“Sympathy is easy,” he said. “It’s
always given for someone, the
starving child in the late night infomercial, the person who lost their
trailer in a tornado, whoever the
hell is on American Idol this week,
but when you have empathy you
empathize with a person. You put
yourself on the same footing.”
Walking the halls of UMB, with
people from places all over the
globe, citizens of Boston have the
unique experience of being on an
equal social strata.
Two themes that repeat in these
profiles are praise of the diversity
on campus and protests against
state funding cuts. Our tuition goes
into state coffers, and has not always returned in full, which is why
fees continue to rise while tuition
remains relatively low.
Whenever the state faces a budget gap, higher education lands
on the chopping block. Increasingly UMB relies on fees and the
good will of its graduates. This year
UMass modulated its state funding cut with record donations from
alumni, and another fee increase.
Funding has always been a source
of stress, but one achievement in 50
years worth celebrating is a permanent and sustainable student press.
An optional student media fee
now keeps us printing. For $15 a
semester the Student Media Office
produces a newspaper, a literary
journal, an honors magazine, and
digital media platforms for students
to publish videos and podcasts. Every matriculated student can get
their voice published and promoted
to the community at large.
The student life and experience
on campus is primarily documented in back issues of student media,
which is not always generous in its
appraisal or coverage of Student
Activities.
While putting together a book on
the history of UMB, the 50th Anniversary Committee found a wealth
of documents, but too few stories or
anecdotes from students.
For the 50th, UMB’s Communications Office and Archive created a
website to collect student, staff and
faculty experiences.
Share your story on UMB’s memory website (blogs.umb.edu/umbmemories/share-your-stories).
Your story can affirm UMB’s ambition to be a portal for students of
all backgrounds to new careers and
opportunities, a place where serious people find serious passions.
Dan Rae
Pat Monteith
Robert P. Connolly
Michael Coleman
Dr. Carole Hughes
Laura L. Montgomery
Laura Delaney George
Ken Tangvik
Robert George
Margot Backus
Richard Rooney
Dr. Thanh Nguyen
Wayne Miller
Sheri McLeish
Beth Pratt
Kathleen Bitetti
Genesia Eddins
Michele McPhee
Bethany Hyland Brown
Mara Klein-Clarke
David Loh
Charlotte Corbett
Sean Skahan
Leila Kholer
Lauren Craig Redmond
Heather Dawood
Seith Bedard
Jason Campos
Michael Herbert
Joyce Linnehan
Michael Hogan
David Facada
Eliza Wilson
Erica Mena-Landry
Samantha Rincon-Thomas
Ryan Thomas
Deanna Elliot
Michael Metzger
Reynolds Graves
Edson Bueno
Baris Mumjakmaz
Neil MacInnes-Barker
Joane Etienne
Andrew Otovik
Rima Mahmoud
Alexander Bercerra
Brianna Reyes
Amanda Huff
Junior Pena
Jesse Wright
Felix Arroyo
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1970s
2
From Boston State to UMB
Dan Rae, English, 1970
As a city kid who grew up in the
Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston, Dan Rae applied to two colleges: UMass Boston, then located
downtown in Park Square, and
Boston State College.
“It was the best education that
my family could have afforded at
the time, and I was very proud to go
to Boston State,” Rae says. “We had
great coaches and athletes at Boston
State College back at that time, and
I played a little bit of varsity baseball. It was a great school for young
men and women who were looking
to further their education and who
grew up in the city of Boston.”
Rae graduated from Boston Latin
High School in 1966. The Boston
State campus was on Huntington
Avenue, with Boston Latin on one
side and Longwood Avenue on the
other, now the location of the Massachusetts College of Art. It was a
small cluster of buildings next door
to The Gardener Museum.
“It probably was 5 or 6 acres,”
Rae says. “I’d be guessing when I
say that, but North Hall was a science building, and there was the
administrative building, and there
was a quadrangle, which was sort
of a center of activity at the school.”
Boston State was convenient,
and he had friends who were going
there, but Rae says his decision to
attend Boston State over UMB was
little more than a flip of a coin.
“UMass Boston had only opened
in 1965, so it was still at the campus
in Park Square, and it wasn’t what
it is today.”
At Boston State, Rae played
freshman hockey and varsity baseball. He also joined a conservative
political organization called Young
Americans for Freedom. Rae’s most
vivid memories of the school in-
volve his professors and teachers.
“I can name a lot of professors
there,” he says. “Maureen Connolly was a great English professor
there. Bill Keene was a great English professor. Mrs. Marnell, John
Woodland, Barry Colt. I remember
the coaches, Jim Luscituft, the great
basketball coach. Jim Nance, the
former New England Patriot was
the wrestling coach. Eddy Barry
was the legendary hockey coach
who had played for the Boston Bruins. Frank Murphy was the Baseball
coach. He was also a teacher at the
school.”
In terms of classmates, Rae
forged friendships that are still lasting.
“It was a smaller institution,” Rae
says. “I was able to begin to put
together a network of friends and
colleagues at Boston State College.
Many of those friendships have
lasted or my entire life. It was just
a relatively smaller campus than say
a Boston College, but everybody
there was from for the most part
from greater Boston, and I still keep
in touch with many of them.”
Rae spent most of his time on
the Boston State campus in classes.
There was a student lounge, but it
was a commuter school.
“When classes were over you
could hang around, or you could
go home and many people had jobs
while they were going to college,
so it wasn’t the sort of place where
you’d hang.”
He took one journalism class at
Boston State.
“It was taught by a professor
named John Lerch, and it turned
out that that one communications
class laid a little bit of the foundation for what I’ve done as a career
as a journalist, so I in many respects
owe my career to Boston State College.”
After graduation, Rae spent
some time in the military, and then
went on to Boston University Law
School. While there he wrote for
the Boston Globe, and did a Saturday night program on WBZ radio
form 1974 to 1976. Meanwhile he
graduated from law school, passed
the bar, and practiced law. In 1976
he got a job as a staff reporter for
WBZ TV, and he worked there are a
reporter and occasional anchor until July 2007, when he moved over
to Nightside with Dan Ray, Monday
through Friday, 8pm to midnight.
“I think a lot of times you make
the mistake of focusing on the
courses that you major in, and you
take the other courses because your
have to. If you’re a science major
you don’t particularly care about
history. If you’re a History major,
you don’t particularly care about
foreign language. If you’re a foreign
language major, you might not care
about civics, and I think that the
basis of a great liberal arts education is to really immerse yourself as
much as you can in all of those subjects, including things like art history and music appreciation, which
we had at Boston State College in
those days. I probably should have
put more effort into the subjects
that were not necessarily my major.”
Rae did what he needed to do,
and passed all the required science,
math and history subjects as well
as his major subjects, though he
wishes he would have paid more attention in all of his classes.
“Every one of those subjects become important at some point,
whether you travel, and maybe you
get a chance to really use a foreign
language, or whether you sit back
as a citizen and better understand
the political process and the history
of the country, or whether you understand science better. Every subject in college and high school, you
should take it as seriously as you
can, and that would be one regret
that I would have, that I probably
marginalized the subjects that were
not my major subjects.”
Still, he excelled in his major, excelled in his career, and in 2009 Rae
received an honorary doctorate degree from UMass Boston.
“I’ve been very supportive of the
university, including great support
for Keith Motley, who I think is a
fabulous chancellor, and if I had
been the governor he would have
been elected the new president of
the entire Massachusetts system.
I’ve been very much involved with
UMass Boston, not as a student, but
as an alumnus.”
Though he initially resisted the
merger of Boston State and UMass
Boston in 1982, and actually voted
against it as a member of the Boston
State College Board of Trustees at
the time, he now embraces UMass
Boston as his alma mater, and not
just because he has no other choice.
“I hope that in the next years
UMass Boston can grow and prosper as it has in its first 50 years,” Rae
says. “You can look at any numbers
you want, students enrolled, faculty, acreage, participating in extra
programs and activities, I think that
the future’s bright for UMass Boston. I’d like to see a bigger, better,
stronger university.”
Publish Your Creativity on Campus
Calling all writers, artists, designers, videographers, podcasters, etc. We publish regular content online and in print from our cubicles on the 3rd floor
of the Campus Center, at the back of the Student Activities Office. Email an editor if you want to help us create stories about this campus and community.
the
massmedia
With tips, or to write something newsworthy,
news@umassmedia.com
To cover events and write about UMB culture,
arts@umassmedia.com
For athletics enthusiests and Beacons fans,
sports@umassmedia.com
Share your opionions and comments,
opinions@umassmedia.com
Photos and illustratons welcome,
photos@umassmedia.com
Video and podcast submissions accepted,
webmaster@umassmedia.com
With thoughts or complains about content,
editor@umassmedia.com
Produced by Caleb Nelson, inksplot.com
and Donna Neal, Student Media Advisor
Published by The Student Media Office,
October 6, 2015
Art from the Proposal for the Columbia Point Site, An Urban Campus by the Sea, circa 1970, UMB Archives
1970s
www.umassmedia.com
Radio Station Takes Off Like a Rocket
3
Pat Monteith, Math, 1973
WUMB began as a notice on a
giant bulletin board in the lobby of
the main campus building at 100
Arlington Street in Park Square,
where students posted advertisements for groups, meet ups, hangouts, and hookups.
“I remember seeing a sign on the
bulletin board that said there was a
bunch of students looking to start a
radio station, and for some reason
that fascinated me, and I went up to
the meeting, and the rest is history.”
About 25 students showed up,
gathered on Halloween, October
31st, 1968, to figure out how to start
a radio station.
“There was a lot of passion in the
room. Even from that very first day
the interest was to do something
that did not exist on the radio dial
at that point. We weren’t quite certain what we wanted to do, but we
knew that what existed on the radio
dial wasn’t something that satisfied
us.”
They formed a committee, and
went around to the many local stations looking for advice.
“Everybody laughed at us because they said the radio dial in
Boston is closed down. You’ll never
put another radio station on the air,
and so we were discouraged, and
for a while and we let that be.”
Disheartened they put together
a closed circuit radio station in the
basement cafeteria of the Sawyer
building in the downtown campus,
and got Bose to donate some equipment.
“Every single morning we would
climb up and stand on the tables,
throw chains over the pipes, and
hookup four 901 speakers, which
were connected to an amp that we
got from another local company,
and we played radio. We basically
replaced the jukebox in the cafeteria.”
Student DJs brought their own
records, and played their music all
day long.
“If we played something the students didn’t like, they would throw
food at the window. That’s called instantaneous response. It was fun. It
was also scary sometimes.”
After a few semesters they made a
deal with WBCN, across the street,
to get the news off of their Associated Press wire service. One of the
DJs there suggested that they contact record companies for music.
“Somehow I got assigned the responsibility to do it, and that made
a huge change in the operation. It
made a huge change with me too.
It opened me up, being a very shy
person, to naturally talking with
people, or negotiating with people,
and we ended up getting record
service from just about every record company in town.”
As a math major, Monteith had
been the radio committee treasurer
and book keeper. She still has the
original sign up sheet from the first
meeting. With the newest releases
delivered regularly to student activities, the student radio station
became a stalwart in campus life,
and Monteith became its Music Director.
“Even from the beginning we
had a lot of support from the faculty and staff on campus,” she says.
“There was a Physics professor by
the name of Hal Mahon, and it was
great because he knew how to get
things done. He knew the right
people to talk with, and kept sending us in that direction. We became
friends with the folks in facilities.
The chancellors and vice chancellors were very supportive, so it really didn’t take a lot of convincing.”
After graduation, Monteith continued working at the radio station
while studying at Emerson, where
she got her Masters in Communications. Meanwhile, she convinced
facilities to pull wires through the
brand new campus on Columbia Point, which opened in 1974.
The wires ran from a studio in the
basement of the Healey Library
throughout the campus, into the
cafeterias, student activities, and a
few of the hallways.
“If you wanted something, and
you convinced people that you really wanted something, everybody
rallied around you. Whenever I
came up with an idea no matter
how crazy it was, there were faculty
and staff to rally around it and try
to make it happen.”
She worked at WUMB for $35
week, overseeing the station as it
transitioned onto the harbor campus. She kept working on the application for their FM license, which
took 14 years to process. The FCC
finally put WUMB on the air in
1982.
“Even in the beginning, back in
68, we had three or four folk shows.
Folk was part of the counter culture
back then. Not only in the Cambridge area in particular, but also
across the country.
We were influenced by everything that happened at Kent State
(the campus shootings in 1969). I
remember that day so vividly. We
were in class. They ended up letting school out because it had such
an impact on everybody in the institution, and I remember walking
down Arlington Street with a bunch
of students and we didn’t know how
to react to it.”
WUMB became one of the nation’s biggest and best folk stations
now online @wumb.org and 91.9 in
Boston and eastern Massachusetts
on the FM dial. After 44 years of
working to build the station, Monteith found a new outlet for her creativity through mentoring kids.
“That campus opened so many
doors for me in so many ways and
people were so helpful. If you had
an idea, people wanted to help you
succeed with it, and that stuck with
me. You just don’t find that. Most
people want to squelch ideas. The
faculty there (at UMass Boston)
and the staff there were so supportive.”
Shortly before she left the campus, she heard an interview on the
station’s Commonwealth Journal
program with Jean Rhodes about
the importance of mentoring urban
youth in particular, and how much
of a difference it makes.
“I’ve had a life long interest in
science, and been involved in volunteering for local science fairs,
and so I went to the president of
the Boston NAACP, and I said hey
I’d love to help re-estabilsh their
program . . . I started working with
mentoring some of the science students for a local competition, and
eventually a national competition,
and it was the single most rewarding experience that I’ve had pretty
much in my life. Absolutely amazing to see how the students that I
worked with developed, and grew
and gained trust in me and the
whole idea of success, and so now
I’ve sort of developed that in a lot of
other areas.”
When Monteith started college,
her dream was to work in mission
control for NASA. Now she’s in the
final stages of writing a children’s
book about the International space
station, which is coming out in the
spring. All of this she traces back to
her time as a student at UMB.
“I always kept saying this place
is a diamond in the rough. One of
these days it’s finally going to get its
due, and that’s happening now. It’s
wonderful to see success, and the
success needs to continue, and it
needs to no longer be a diamond in
the rough. It needs to be thought of
as the jewel of Massachusetts.”
paign on busses and planes, and
really got a ringside seat to a presidential campaign. So that was great,
and after then-Governor Dukakis
lost that race, was assigned to the
Herald’s statehouse bureau where I
stayed as a reporter, and then ultimately the bureau chief until coming to UMass in 1996.”
Now he is the Vice President of
Communications in the UMass
President’s Office, coordinating
media relations for all five campuses.
“It’s great to have been able to
come back to UMass, which is of
course my alma mater, and where
my kids have gone or are going to
school. One of my three children
now is a student at UMass Boston,
which is kind of great.”
Reflecting on the classes he took,
Connolly particularly remembers
an American detective fiction class
taught by Lee Grove, in the English
department.
“It isn’t a genre that you always
see represented in English departments across the United States,” he
says. “But the best of detective fiction really is very legitimate literature, and I know it’s a course that a
lot of people remember.”
At the moment Connolly is facilitating a series of videos about
alumni from all five campuses for
the UMass President’s office. Two
of the people interviewed for that
series, Thomas O’Malley and Doug
Purdy, co-authored a novel called
Serpents in the Cold, and they’re
graduates of UMass Boston.
“They met in Lee’s class some
years after I took it,” Connolly says.
“They remember it fondly, as do I.
I remember lots of people from the
English department, and lots of the
courses had an impact.”
The one thing Connolly remembers most about the professors is
their commitment to the concept of
public education, and UMass Boston’s urban mission.
“Now and then you’ll see written that the goal for UMass Boston
was to make it a Berkeley East,” he
says. “To be a great urban public institution -- and you really felt that.
You had at that time a lot of young,
brilliant, highly committed faculty
members, and it was a great experience. You felt fortunate to have
the opportunity to learn from such
people, and in terms of students, to
be able to be exposed to people, veterans back from Vietnam, people
who had children, who were coming back to school after some time
of being away, and people who were
traditional 18-22 year old students
as well. That was the great mosaic
that is UMass Boston.”
The diversity, and focus of the
student body at UMB inspired
Connolly to find his calling.
“I learned what I wanted to do,”
he says. “I developed skills in terms
of writing, in terms of a connection
with literature, and I learned a lot of
self-confidence as well . . . It really
was a transformative experience,
and everything I’ve done in my career, I can directly trace back to my
experience at UMass Boston.”
Lessons from an Audacious Phone Call
Robert P. Connolly, English, 1978
It took one awkward phone call
for Robert Connolly bag an interview with folk-rock guitarist Stephen Stills.
“I remember being 20-something
years old, with a tape recorder and
a notebook, and representing the
Mass Media of UMass Boston, but
still wanting to be taken seriously,”
Connolly says. “I don’t even know
why he did it, and I can’t remember
how I arranged it.”
The article, printed in September of 1976, explains. The Stills and
Young Band was on tour and preforming in Boston, and Connolly
called their manager the afternoon
before the concert.
“Stephen isn’t doing any interviews on this tour,” the manager
said. “But for a student newspaper,
well Stephen would probably do
something like that.”
The day of the concert, after a
tense wait at the bar, Connolly
found himself interviewing the
rock legend in the lounge of the
Hotel Sonesta in Kendall square.
Stills’ on-and-off musical partner,
Neil Young, pulled up a chair and
listened for a while before heading
off with the words, “Excuse me, but
I’m going to try and find myself a
wife and family here in Boston, before we have to leave tomorrow.”
After that, Stills “regaled” Connolly with rock n’ roll war stories
and gossip.
“It was a pretty stunning thing
to be a young kid and interviewing one of the reigning rock music
superstars at the time,” Connolly
says. “But it also gave you the sense
that you could get things done . . .
I think it’s a certain audacity that
you have to have, that you can call
people up, and tell them you want
to talk to them, which was a good
lesson to learn . . . You can call up,
and ask to speak to the Governor or
the Senator. Or I wrote a lot about
Northern Ireland when I was at the
(Boston) Herald, and you can say
that you want to talk to the Prime
Minister, or the head of this political party or that political party, and
more often than not … people will
say fine. I guess it was a good lesson that there’s no harm in asking.
Sometimes people are like, ‘Sure,
tomorrow at noon.’”
As a student Connolly started
writing cultural interest pieces for
the Mass Media, became the deputy
features editor in his second year,
and then Editor in Chief in his final
year before graduation.
“Journalism appealed to me, but
there was always something intimidating about it as well, putting your
name to a story, having it published
and read by people, and so that was
both intriguing and a little intimidating as well.”
The lure of the pen, and an audience, was enforced by the community of student media.
“There’s nothing like a student
newspaper in the sense of a small
number of people banding together
and making it happen -- you know
the long hours of it, but then seeing
the product, seeing the impact of it,
being involved in really every aspect of its production, it was a great
experience.”
Connolly delved into journalism at UMB for the experience,
and by the end of it he had decided
he wanted to do it professionally.
After graduating, he worked as a
freelancer for the Patriot Ledger in
Quincy, and soon got a full time job
at the Worcester Telegram.
“I wanted to take a shot at the
newspaper business, which even
then as now was a tough business
to break into, maybe even tougher
today I suppose, but I had a series
of newspaper jobs.”
After a few years at the Telegram,
he wanted to position himself as a
political reporter, covering politics
and government, and did a one year
mid-career master’s program at the
Kennedy School of Government.
After that he found himself covering the Dukakis for president campaign for the Boston Herald.
“I spent the next 20 months or so
covering the 1988 presidential cam-
4
1980s
Struggling Med Student Stumbles into Radio Production Carreer
Michael Coleman, English and Sociology, 1982
After a dismal semester of premed classes, Colman walked out of
his math final certain of two things.
He failed, and he was never going
to be an optometrist. He ambled
into the the catwalk, looking for a
stairway to the garage. At the library
he turned in through the automatic
doors, trying out a new route down
through to the lower level, where he
parked. Instead he found WUMB,
UMass Boston’s radio station.
“They were really nice to me, and
it was cool, so I decided to hang out
there, and before you know it, two
or three years later I was running
the place, and then I ended up
teaching a class there. So I figured
radio, this is it,” He says. “It was
fun.”
Coleman promptly changed his
major from pre-med to English, and
spent most of his time as a student
in the WUMB studios. After
graduation, WATD in Marshfield
hired him, and soon after that he
moved to WRKO in Boston, and
also WBCN.
“Then a new station came
onboard in 1985 or 6, WZLX classic
rock, and I worked there for seven
years.”
He hit the road doing stand up
for 8 or 9 months, living from hotel
to hotel to couch, until he got a call
from one of his old ZLX bosses,
now working at PBS. A position
was open at WBZ.
“I went over not being serious
about it, thinking I’ll just stay
around here for a month and take
their money, and then build my
own studios, and do my own thing.”
He started his own production
company, Cole Cuts, but never left
WBZ. His work there never stopped
inspiring his creativity.
“I get excited,” Colman says.
“I don’t sit up in bed thinking, oh
geez, I gotta be good in this meeting
this client, or this presentation or
anything like that.”
“What’s great is I’m the guy
behind the curtain,” He says. “Since
I got into this business, nobody ever
asked me, or cares where I went to
school. They only care about what I
can do for them right now.”
Now producing audio bits, and
still doing stand up comedy on
the side, Coleman feels fulfilled,
applying the skills he accrued in
college.
“You go to school, you learn,
and you apply it,” He says. “I was
the 17/18 year old kid coming
out of high school, going into this
University. Everybody else in my
classes were like ten years older.
They were the hippies who dropped
out and realized, oh, I need my
college education. Then there were
the Vietnam vets who had come
back, and used the GI Bill, and they
were in a lot of classes, so I was
always the youngest kid. In every
class I was taking there were older
people. They had careers already.
That, for me, was great, because
that established a work ethic more
than, ‘Ok let’s go to class and then
go party.’ The whole commuter
thing, when I look at it, prepared
me for the work environment.”
Coleman applied early to UMB,
during his last year of high school,
and got in six months before any
other schools accepted him. The
idea of going to a public university
slowly grew on him, not least
because it was the cheapest option.
“I figured I’ll go for a year or so,
and then if I don’t like it I’ll transfer,
or I’ll go to Amherst,” He says. “I
started making friends, and the
only tough thing was the commute,
taking the train and doing all of
that, but then I ended up buying a
little jalopy, the size of a shoe, and
commuted back and forth. I figured
one of these days I’m going to
transfer, and I never did.”
Working at WUMB kept
Coleman on campus and involved in
various student activities including
the Social Events Committee. He
spent most of his time in the studio,
or in the Pub Club, which had its
own bar in the Wheatley Hall for
about a decade. It closed soon
after he graduated. Mid-reminisce
Coleman says he would go back
to UMass Boston over any other
school, if he had another life to live.
“I was given the ability to try
it and fail, and then try it again,
succeed, try the next thing and step
up, and I had access to a really great
place.”
Coleman would do his own radio
show if he wanted, or he could sit
in a production studio and create
audio mixes. Soon after his first
visit to WUMB he started taking
classes on writing and journalism
to improve his radio work.
“They didn’t really have a
communications major back then,
but that was fine, because it didn’t
handcuff me,” He says. “When
you’re going into that business,
theoretically you can kind of
paint yourself into a corner by
just learning one specific thing. I
thought I would be more worldly,
take many different classes.”
Neil Bruss taught one of
Coleman’s favorite classes, History
Passion for Education
Dr. Carole Hughes, Management, 1983
By Manuel Castro
In 1983, Carole Hughes graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston and began an
expansive career in education. She
graduated with a B.S. from the College of Management and has dedicated many of her professional accomplishments to the University.
Currently, Carole Hughes holds a
Ph.D and is serving as the Senior
Associate Dean of Students at Boston College.
At UMass Boston, Hughes was
involved with several extracurriculars on campus, including holding
the title of Student Activities Committee President at one point in
time.
Hughes has attributed some of
her fondest memories of UMass
Boston to when she worked Student Government; helping host
social events, provide funding for
cultural and recognized student
groups, and making the campus even greater during her time
here. According to Hughes, “Back
then, Student Government was in
charge of some of the priorities that
SAEC is now responsible for. Undergraduate Student Government
was where I made lifelong friends
and really developed my interest in
serving others and truly honed my
leadership abilities.”
“I highly encourage everyone
who wants to make the most out
of their college experience to get
involved with at least one activity
on campus whether that’s a student
organization, club, sport, or cultural center. This will make the university feel more like home to you
and you will make great contacts.”
Hughes added.
Upon speaking with Hughes, she
mentioned that one of her favorite
professors at UMass Boston was
her freshman writing professor,
Mark Schlesinger. She mentions
that she still keeps in contact with
him through email and occasional
meetings. Hughes urges students
to, “Really get to know your professors! They are there to help guide
you both academically and career
wise.”
According to Hughes, “I’ve now
been a part of many different institutions in the Boston area, both
as a student and staff member, and
I will say that while each had its
strengths, UMass was really what
ignited my career and passions.”
According to Hughes, “You
need to do what you can to have
a job lined up before you graduate. Whether that is through an
internship or filling out plenty of
job applications. You should not
be searching for a job when you
graduate. You need to do your best
to secure one before you do.”
When Hughes graduated, she
had already secured a job at a bank
and she began working there full
time only two weeks after her graduation date. “It was great because I
had a steady income and I felt secure in knowing that I could support myself. However, I ultimately
realized that the job was not for me
and I actually wanted to go into
student affairs and education. So I
chose to have a temp agency help
me and I landed a job at Boston
University as a staff member.”
According to Hughes, having a
job when she graduated afforded
her the ability to financially support herself before embarking on
a journey to realize what she really
wanted to do with her life.
“Don’t get trapped into thinking
that your major will always directly
correlate with what you decide to
pursue as a career,” Hughes said.
“Explore your interests and don’t
lock yourself into a box. If you keep
your mind open and remain involved and work hard you will end
up where you want to be.”
Carole Hughes is just one of many
successful alumni that UMass Boston has helped reach their dreams.
of the English Language, in the
English department.
“He’s the one name that I
remember,” Coleman says. “He
stood out.”
More valuable than classwork,
UMB gave Coleman free access
to recording equipment and the
WUMB studios whenever he
wanted to use them.
“I would lock myself into a room,
and spend hours just teaching
myself editing, and tape. They were
reel to reels, just editing tape, and
then mixing, and then playing with
reverb and special effects. It was all
basic, learning just to cue records
up, and from there at the time you
could be a DJ.”
He made a ton of friends through
his work in the studio, and DJed
parties to make money on the side.
Pat Monteith, who ran the station at
the time, would let him rent some
of the equipment.
“It was a huge advantage and I
thought wow, how lucky I am to
literally get lost and stumble into
that place. It was divine intervention
from the university gods.”
He found his niche at UMB, and
made the most of the experience.
“It taught me to be organized
too,” he says, emphasizing,
“Organized. Once you’re out of
there, you are your own instructor,
your own teacher, your own sensei,
whatever the word will be. You’re
your own governor, and it’s ok to
fail, because every day we fail. We
have to. It’s ridiculous. I’ve never
met anybody who’s batted 1000
in life. It’s impossible, and it’s also
impossible to give 110 percent. I
hate that term, even 100 percent. It’s
impossible, because for you to give
100 percent means that you never
will leave work, and you will never
sleep. You’ll never eat, because
that’s taking away from your work,
and you’ll die. Your 100 percent
will be different from mine, so you
know what, you put your attention
and intention into whatever you do,
and you’ll succeed.”
Section
1980s
www.umassmedia.com
www.umassmedia.com
Art Gallery Director Explores Boston with Photography
5
Laura L. Montgomery, Art, 1982
A torn open briefcase, a weathered sign that reads, “Out,” images
of a demolished hotel, and only one
portrait, an aging man behind a
desk, looking out a window, in high
contrast, black and white, these are
a few of the photos Laura Montgomery took as a student at UMass
Boston.
The Archives preserves her photography project, “Vanishing Boston,” in a cool concrete room on the
fifth floor of the Healey Library. The
63 pieces offer a survey of dilapidation in Boston, showcasing the effects of aging in crisp focus and
with special attention to the angles
and shadows of the scenes she captured.
After graduation, Montgomery
pursued a career in the arts. She
has been involved in art displays all
around Boston.
Montgomery specializes in fine
art photography & history and Boston-area African American & Diaspora artists. Right now she works
as the Art Gallery Director of the
Mary L. Fifield Art Gallery at Bunker Hill Community College.
“I’m a creative economy, higher
education sector public servant,”
she said. “I received solid training
in public service and the arts at
UMB.”
Montgomery is also an Adjunct
Professor of Art History in the
BHCC Visual and Media Arts Department and has taught a variety
of arts and media courses at colleges in the Boston area.
She looks back fondly on her
days as a student at UMass Boston.
“I’ll never forget being on the last
shuttle, then the last train, and then
the last green line trolley and having to walk two miles up Commonwealth Ave. from Kenmore Square
to get home in the Blizzard of 1978!
And who would forget hearing
Teddy Kennedy speak on campus!”
She started taking classes part
time in 1977 with the quasi-intention of being a psychology major.
“So many of my classes were
damn good! From each I learned
and benefitted tremendously. With
the low cost and luxury to take
classes for the sake of learning—as
opposed to the high-stakes educational costs and constraints faced
by students today, the need to get
into career tracts early.”
She enrolled in an eclectic array
of courses from African Civilization to Communications, Media
and Cinema Studies to Botany and
Nutrition. Between classes, she got
involved in the arts on campus. She
volunteered in the Harbor Art Gallery, and later got a work-study position there.
“I left UMass Boston with so
much more than I arrived with,”
she says. “Chiefly I left with a mindset to continue and think of myself
as a perennial student, a life-long
learner and for this I have always
been grateful.”
Shortly after starting classes, she
joined the Women’s Center, eventually becoming its student director,
where she began to program feminist arts and cultural events. With
encouragement from friends she
ran and won the chair of Registered
Student Organizations.
“I ran my campaign on roller
skates with my slogan—Vote Montgomery: She wants to Keeps the
Works Rolling Smoothly at UMB!”
Montgomery also worked at the
Mass Media and the campus magazine, Wavelength, as an editor. She
liked to have a base of operation. In
her first year, she spent a lot of time
in the Women’s Center, and shot
pool with students at the Veterans
Center. Then she began to spend
a lot of time in Student Activities,
and later at the Mass Media, Wavelength and Point Press offices and
darkroom.
“The Ryan Lounge was always a
nice space and I did a lot of tutoring
and mentoring in that area enjoying the view of the Blue Hills,” she
says. “I shot photographs from one
end of that campus to the other, but
not nearly as many as Harry Brett!”
When she was on the Student
Activities Committee, she helped
create a campus pub.
“We actually had a student-run
pub on campus,” she says. “Originally serving beer and wine, and
later as I recall, some pretty good
vegetarian food. Can you imagine
beer and wine on campus mid-afternoon! There were some fantastic
BEER BLASTS. Yes, we called them
BEER BLASTS, held in the Wheatley Cafeteria and out on the fields.
Big fun, good times, and no one got
hurt, although I recall an unfortunate incident with a piano.”
She returns to campus occasionally for events, and attended the
2014 UMB Commencement with
two of her former students, Linda
Cheng and Jessica Clarke, who
were graduating.
“It was a splendid day, a really
grand event. I hadn’t been to a UMB
commencement since my own in
1982. It revived many memories,
good times and an enormous sense
of pride seeing so many students
moving-on, much like myself some
30 odd years ago, into a new phase
of their life’s journey.
She attended Professor Paul
Tucker’s retirement on campus just
after commencement and had kept
in touch with him over the years,
enjoying his public art program,
“Arts on the Point,” immensely.
Montgomery goes on, naming
paragraphs of people from UMB
who influenced her.
“Who could forget the campus
poet laureate Duncan Nelson?” She
says. “Really bright, very talented
people, all adding to the great mix
that was UMB back in the late 70ies
and early 80ies. Students just out of
high school from Mass. suburbs,
like myself, who were the first in
their families to go to college, adultreturning-students, (as they were
called, but the average age of UMB
student then was 26), single moms,
Vietnam-era veterans, inner-city
students from every Boston neighborhood, and a world-wide international cohort.”
“It’s an exciting time for the campus built-upon a former garbage
dump that got a bum-deal on much
of the scandalous original construction,” she says. “My hope is for the
Boston campus to continue to grow
and evolve on the bedrock that has
been its first 50 years. I want to be
able to continue to be connected
with what has always felt like home,
and proudly say, ‘I went to UMass
Boston, and it was the single best
investment that I made in myself
because in doing so, I found myself
and the returns have been great.’”
Dual Threat Thrilled to Enter UMB Hall of Fame
Laura Delaney George, College of Management, 1983
By Jon Mael
When Laura Delaney George
played softball at the University
of Massachusetts Boston, she
and the rest of the Beacons had
to ride shuttle buses -- with all of
their equipment -- to JFK station
before walking to Columbia Park,
which is where they played their
home games. When she began
her volleyball career, they had to
play in McCormack Hall, which is
where the original gymnasium was
located, before they moved into the
Clark Center.
While the athletic department has
undergone major improvements
since then, they are also making
sure that their humble beginnings
are remembered, and that’s a partial
reason that Delaney George was
inducted into the Beacons Hall of
Fame.
For the class of 1983 Management
graduate, the honor is both
exhilarating and humbling.
“I felt honored. I was so excited,”
said Delaney George. “I have very
fond memories of my years at
UMass Boston so I’m very happy
about the whole situation.”
“It gives you some recognition
for all of the hard work that you
put in, just being on teams. There’s
a good feeling knowing that we
helped build the foundation of the
sports at UMass Boston.”
Delaney George certainly helped
build the Athletic Department
into what it is today. There was
no volleyball on campus when
she arrived, but by the time she
graduated the program was 14-5
and playing in regional postseason
tournaments. Had it not been for
an assist from Athletic Director,
Charlie Titus, it’s quite possible that
she, nor any other players, would
have had a team to be a part of.
“When I started in my first year,
volleyball was a club sport and
Charlie [Titus] had to step in and
be our coach,” said Delaney George.
“He stepped in and said ‘if you
guys are interested in playing, we
can help you with the equipment
that we have on hand and we’ll help
you form this team and get you
started.’”
Delaney George added, “I think
that what you learn is if you want
something badly enough, you can
make it happen. Charlie’s backing
at the time was really important to
get this team started.”
Delaney George was a true twosport star. She will be the first Hall
of Fame inductee that played both
softball and volleyball. As a softball
player, she still peppers the Beacon
record books.
She has 164 strikeouts, which is
still good enough for number three
on the all time list. She is tied for
fourth all time with 17 career wins
and the 205 innings pitched were
at one time a program record. All
of this was accomplished without
playing a single game on campus.
Delaney George is very pleased
that UMass Boston has remained
committed to improving the
athletic facilities and setting up
the Beacons for success, but she’s
not the least bit jealous of today’s
athletes, who have modern facilities
to compete in.
“I think you learn to make do at
the time, you didn’t know what you
didn’t have. [Improving the Clark
Center] is great for the teams: it will
only make them stronger.”
After a successful athletic
career, Delaney George made sure
to continue her involvement in
athletics by coaching and cheering
on her four daughters as they
competed in softball, basketball,
volleyball, and track. She is a
staunch advocate for athletic
involvement in young people and
she made sure that her family
would have similar experiences that
she had when she was young.
“I think that [sports] just hone
those skills in communication and
leadership, and being able to get
along.” Delaney George added, “I
really think that if everybody has a
chance to play a sport it helps, even
in business when they get older.”
“You have to rely on people to
get the job done. We all have our
strengths and weaknesses and we
have to pull from them, and I think
you really hone those skills when
you play.”
For someone who graduated
more than 30 years ago, it was
thrilling for Delaney George to
get the nod for the Hall of Fame,
especially as a member of the 50th
Anniversary Class. The two-sport
star had some very heartfelt wellwishes for UMass Boston as it
celebrates its 50th birthday.
“I wish them success for the next
50 years. When I went, and still
now, it was an affordable, current
education. It kept education in
reach for people and I want it to
stay that way so that people can
afford it.”
For more info on Delaney George,
go to www.beaconsathletics.com
The Hall of Fame induction
ceremony was on October 9, 2014.
6
Section
1980s
Sandinista Revolutionaries Rally Support on Campus
Ken Tangvik, English, 1984
Brick buttressed, stain glassed,
pinnacled with a minaret of oxidized green brass, the church has
been bought, and Ken Tangvik
has the keys. Two Tuscan columns
in front reach up at least twice the
height of the wooden entry, framing a large compass design that
probably once held a stained glass
window, but now is neatly fit with
plywood. This is the hulking centerpiece of the Latin Quarter in
Jamaica Plain, vacant since 2004.
Tangvik gestures toward the building.
“We want to build the church
into an arts and cultural center, so
we just bought it, and now we gotta
raise a whole bunch of money to fix
it up.”
Behind the church are the offices
of The Hyde Square Task Force,
which Tangvik helped establish.
Their mission is to help youth who
have disengaged from the school
system. Now about 100 neighborhood teens do theater, dance, or
music in their community programs.
“We have specialists in all of
those areas teaching the kids. Then
the kids perform all over Boston,
but they also give back to the community. Like, the dance group will
give free dance classes to different
after school programs around the
neighborhood.”
Tangvik also teaches full time at
Roxbury Community College. He
has worked at RCC (almost) since
graduating with an MA in English
from UMass Boston.
In 2011 he published a collection of short stories, “Don’t Mess
With Tanya: Stories Emerging from
Boston’s Barrios,” inspired in part
by his experience teaching diverse
groups about writing.
“I basically wrote a book that
could be used in a community col-
lege classroom,” Tangvik says. “I’m
spending a lot of time marketing,
and visiting colleges where the
book is being used, and doing those
types of things.”
After two years of classes at the
University of Rhode Island, and
a hiatus traveling across Europe
and the Americas, Tangvik visited
UMass in late 1979.
“I got a nice feeling from the
campus,” he says. “I loved the ocean
and so I started taking some courses.”
He started as a psychology major,
and then got interested in English
literature.
“I took some English Lit courses,
and really liked the English faculty.
I liked the courses, so I stayed on
and got a Masters degree in English
as well.”
He did some writing for the Mass
Media, but he was also the editor of
the student magazine, Wavelength.
At its peak the magazine printed
twice a semester with social commentary as well as fiction and poetry.
“We were a different staff than
the Mass Media, but we were very
friendly with each other. The Mass
Media editors would write stuff for
our magazine and we often would
write for the Mass Media, so we had
a good relationship back and forth .
. . You had to literally cut with those
razors. You had to actually use glue
to paste up the paper in the magazine, and make copies. We shared
some of the same resources to put
our publications together.”
Working with the English Department as a tutor, and then as a
teaching assistant as a graduate student, Tangvik can name a host of
professors who influenced him.
“I’d say my favorite class was
Linda Didmar’s Literature and the
Political Imagination, because she
kind of merged together two of my
passions, which were politics and
literature.”
UMB’s politically active student
body inspired Tangvik’s studies and
writing.
“We had the three mile island
meltdown right around then, and
there was a huge student movement
there against nuclear power. There
was also a lot of US intervention in
Central America, Ronald Reagan,
El Salvador, Nicaragua. There was a
lot of political activism around US
foreign policy in Latin America. I
remember that the Sandinistas were
a rebel group who had overthrown
a right wing dictator in Nicaragua.
They had overthrown the Samosa
Regime that had been supported
by the US government for decades,
and these were young, radical, gorilla fighters, and their leadership
came to UMass.”
The Wavelength invited the rebel
group to speak at UMB, and held a
press conference with them.
“They had just taken power of
a Central American country, and
they actually were in Boston cause
they had to negotiate some debt
with the Bank of Boston, so they
stopped into UMass, and that was
a really big moment for all of the
political activists to meet the Sandinistas at that time.”
The political awareness, and engagement of the campus community in international affairs prompted
Tangvik’s community activism.
“You would have young intellectuals from the Dominican Republic
who were probably here illegally or
on a visa, and then you had some
Canbridge leftists, and then you had
some 19 or 20 year old kids from
South Boston who had brothers in
the Marines and you’d be debating
political issues,” he says. “You had
single moms taking classes in all
the classrooms. It was fascinating to
get all these different perspectives.”
Many activists hung out in the
second floor lobby of the McCormack building between classes.
There were a lot of different places
to hang out, including the Wavelength office and the cafeterias.
“You could always walk into the
cafeteria and find a group of people
that you could talk to,” Tangvik
says, recalling his first encounter
with hippies.
“I went to the Earth Foods Organic restaurant where they served
all this food like lentils and hummus, and all that kind of stuff,
vegetarian restaurant,” he says. “I
remember people rolling joints at
the tables, and someone introduced
me, they said oh this is so and so,
and he’s gay and I was like oh my
god I’m sitting at a table with a gay
person and it was the first place I
had ever been where people openly
said you know, I’m gay. They would
look you in the eye and say that so
that was a huge eye-opener for me
and I’m someone who considers
myself very progressive now, but
as a 23 year old it was pretty mind
expanding.”
Get a Definitive History of UMB
UMass Boston at 50, by Michael Feldberg, published by UMass Press
Available at the bookstore or online for $29.95
UMass Boston News
Excerpts from article published on umb.edu/news
by the Communications Office
UMass Boston at 50: A Fiftieth-Anniversary History of the University of
Massachusetts Boston tells the story of
Boston’s public research university, from
its humble beginnings at a half-renovated gas company building in Park Square
to its current home on Columbia Point,
where an ambitious 25-year master plan
is underway.
It also includes the story of “charter
student” Audrey Taub, who was admitted to UMass Boston before anyone
knew where the school would be built.
Taub’s story prompted a Boston Globe
headline that read “Girl Accepted to
College, Doesn’t Know Where.”
Subsequent chapters focus on various
stages in UMass Boston’s growth, from
the move to Columbia Point in 1974 to
the opening of the Integrated Sciences
Complex in 2015.
About UMass Boston:
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the University of Massachusetts Boston
is deeply rooted in the city’s history, yet poised to address the challenges of
the future. Recognized for innovative research, metropolitan Boston’s public
university offers its diverse student population both an intimate learning
environment and the rich experience of a great American city. UMass Boston’s 11 colleges and graduate schools serve nearly 17,000 students while engaging local and global constituents through academic programs, research
centers, and public service. To learn more, visit www.umb.edu.
www.umassmedia.com
www.umassmedia.com
Section
1980s
7
My Work is a Zoo, Literally
Robert George, Management, 1987
It was the fall of 1985 when student government reformed its constitution under Robert George.
“Being a part of that group,”
George says, “on that committee
charged with coming up with a new
governing structure, and working
alongside the faculty and the staff
and the professors, and working
closely with the administration,
and learning to integrate the skills
of managing an academic institution, that was an eyeopener.”
In his second year as a student
government representative, George
was elected chairman of the Student Activity Committee, and oversaw its metamorphosis into the Student Senate.
“The extracurricular activities
were helpful in focusing me,” he
says. “Being responsible for over a
million dollars of Student Activities funds and working along with
the administration was a wonderful learning experience. My favorite activity was being involved in
student government. That was extremely exciting.”
The experiences George had
while helping to shape the student
government were most memorable
because they offered practical lessons in developing the skills he
needed to become comfortable as a
senior manager.
“One of the most important
things that I learned,” George says,
“there are no permanent enemies in
the world of politics, and compromise is important. You always have
to show dignity and respect. One
of the things that I do remember is
having all of these various factions
and different organizations who
sometimes you may not agree 100
percent with what they stand for,
but you have to acknowledge that
they do exist and treat them fairly
in terms of funding and opportunities.”
As a leader in student government, George especially appreciated the encouragement he got from
seeing African Americans in lead-
ership roles around him, like the
Director of Student Financial Aid.
“I recall her stopping me one day
in the hallway and complementing
the way I carried myself as a young
man on campus at functions,”
George says. “Individuals who really didn’t have to would stop and
complement you for the things that
you’re doing on campus, and I still
remember them to this day.”
Though some names escape his
memory, the faces of those who inspired his studies stick in George’s
mind. He remembers Professor
Beard, from the John McCormack
Institute, for his dynamic teaching style. John Corrigan, the UMB
chancellor, would make a point of
having conversations with those
involved with student leadership.
Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs,
Charles Desmond, also helped
shape George’s ideas and goals.
“Being involved in student activities was extremely helpful in terms
of multi-tasking and dealing with
different individuals and different
personalities. One of the most exciting things we did was when Reverend Jesse Jackson was running for
president, we were able to work in
conjunction with the McCormack
Institute and have him come to
UMass on his tour and speak to the
student population.”
George chose to attend UMB
after high school because it was
affordable and convenient. He
lived in the Boston area, and UMB
seemed like the best option for the
degree he wanted.
“UMass had a reputation of having a good school of management,”
he says. “I did my research around
the greater Boston area. It was affordable, and most importantly I
thought I could get a good education there, which I did.”
George also had an office in the
Wheatley Hall, where he did extra
curricular work for Student Activities. He was also a part of the Black
Student Center, and in the fall he
would spend his evenings on the
practice field with UMass Boston’s
division three football team. He
played defensive tackle, and place
kicker.
“That was phenomenal,” He says.
“We had a lot of heart and a lot of
fun. We didn’t have a winning team,
but we built relationships with each
other and with the coaching staff.
Because we weren’t a full fledged,
sanctioned program with a lot of
money, you just had to find the
time to do it on your own, so you
had to build up a lot of discipline,
and develop relationships with individuals on campus you would
not otherwise know. When we had
away games, if we had to travel out
of state to play, you spend a weekend with these guys, and the coach,
so you develop long lasting relationships.”
As a student, George sensed a
unique focus among his classmates.
Everyone he met went to UMB of
their own volition, not just because
their parents or society told them,
but because they wanted a successful college experience. For George
UMB was a pitstop on the way to
something greater.
As a student leader at UMass
Boston, George caught the attention of administrators at the Boston
Zoological Society, after the folks
at the UMass Boston career offices
gave him a recommendation.
“They happened to recommend
that I contact them about the availability of an internship over here. I
saw several plans for large indoor
tropical forests and other exhibitory that was not close to anything we
had anywhere in Boston. I bought
into the position, and worked hard
to obtain the position, and upon
graduation I was hired full time.”
After graduating he became the
Manger of Community Relations
and Events at the Franklin Park
Zoo. Now he is the Executive Vice
President, and responsible for the
entire business operations of the
zoo. He manages all aspects of administration from the front office
operation, to human resources, to
admissions and memberships department, as well as the IT department.
“When I came here the zoos in
Boston were relatively unsuccessful,” George says. “Over the years
I’ve seen us grow to where we have
some national credibility. Zoo New
England has an opportunity to
change individuals’ behaviors by
teaching about wildlife and conservation in an engaging way. We have
an impact upon the world’s environment. I’m very excited about
what I do, and I hope to continue to
do it for a long time.”
When Robert George thinks
back on his time at UMass Boston,
he feels proud.
“You’re at an institution that continues to grow and you should take
every advantage of the learning opportunities that they have,” George
says. “I just wish that UMass continues to grow and be around another fifty, a hundred years, and
most importantly that the students
there get what I know I received
was a wonderful learning opportunity to use throughout my life. I got
a wonderful education from being
at UMass Boston.”
Lit Enthusiast Founds Arts Publication in the Panopticon
Margot Backus, English, 1988
As a columnist for the Mass Media in 1986, Margot Backus watched
the Metropolitan Opera perform
Tosca from a press box at the Wang
Theater, and observed the patrons.
Backus whisked two columns out
that night.
“It was impossible not to wonder
whether the wealthy aristocracy
who attended were not struck by
the similarities between the occupation of Rome by the Bourbons,”
she wrote, “and the repression in,
say South Africa, the site of origin
of 90 percent of the diamonds that
were present in such staggering
quantities on the necks and wrists
of the city’s most influential women.”
She published both columns together. One in the vein of literary
social critique , and the other was
a straight review in honor of her
mother’s love of opera.
“I would sometimes get little fan
letters from the faculty,” Backus
says. “I had a pretty strong op-ed
column going on in the Mass Media. I wrote a number of things that
I enjoyed writing, and people did
respond. It was fun.”
Out of high school, Backus wanted to become a veterinarian. She
started college, majored in zoology,
but wasn’t ready, so she stopped going to school and did other things.
She planted trees in Montana,
worked for an Acorn affiliate in San
Francisco and in Berkley. Finally
she settled into a job shelving books
at the Boston Public Library.
“I remember finding Lillian
Fodderman’s Surpassing the Love
of Men, which was a cultural history of woman-woman bonding,
prior to Freud, during a time when
people didn’t think of women as
having any kind of sexual drive
of their own,” Backus said. “I was
completely intrigued. I remember
cultural studies stuff about comic
books, a Freudian reading of the
American Revolution, so I would
see these amazing books, and I
thought, ‘Where are these coming from? Who does this?’ That
was this glimpse into this alternate
world that there were people who
could spend their time thinking
about these incredibly cool things
that I was completely interested in,
so I took some night classes at Harvard. I took a folklore and mythology class at night school, and made
a decision that I was going to go
back to college.”
Backus majored in French at
UMass Boston, at first. She wanted
to become a medievalist, to learn to
read folklore in Middle French and
discover how folk legends became
literature.
“I wanted to do this thing on
middle ages folklore and goddess
worship and how it moves into
literature, and the English people
said, Great! You sound great, so
that’s where I camped out.”
She contacted the student newspaper, and found out that they are
always looking for stuff to print.
“I got to do some early trials on
the kind of literary and film criticism, and the kinds of political and
social analysis that I now do professionally. The Mass Media is where I
got started as much as in my classes,
learning how to have a public voice
and to make arguments.”
Backus particularly remembers
the “horrible” buildings, designed
like prisons.
“It had bad functuay, the whole
mentality of it being this kind of
Foucauldian control thing of if the
students try to rise up, how can
we shut the whole campus down
by seizing control of a few strategic passageways . . . so much of the
United States after the sixties was
retrofitted to make sure that the sixties never happened again. It feels
very different than being on a campus that caters to the children of the
elite, where there’s no such fear that
they’re going to rise up and attack
you.”
There was a little pub that served
coffee, beer, wine and vegetarian
food in the back of the Wheatley
Building. They had a balcony.
“Any part of UMass at that time
that could exploit how beautiful
the exteriors were, immediately became much more beautiful because
you’re looking out onto the harbor,”
she says. “I spent most of my afternoons hanging out over there, and
then in the Mass Media office where
I wrote up all of my essays, all my
assignments for class. I did those
sitting around in the Mass Media,
which I made my office.”
Backus also helped start Howth
Castle, a literary arts magazine. She
helped fundraise for it, and they
went to Donna Neal who was running an in-shop printing facility for
student publications.
“Another thing I learned was
how feasible it is to do things, that
I could type something up and get
it into print,” she says. “I learned a
lot about seeing the world as a place
that it was possible to get my voice
out.”
Earlier this year she lived in Belfast, Ireland, where she was teaching a class on Anglophone Irish
literature at Queens University, she
reflected on her lifelong love of literature and drama.
“I grew up with a mother who
had been educated in opera, and
I grew up in the 60s so she and I
grew up very much at odds,” Backus says. “She’d yell at me turn that
stuff down, because I was listening
to Patty Smith or David Bowie, and
I would yell at her to turn down
Verite. Each one of us regarded the
music that the other was listening
to as just noise, valueless noise.”
As an academic, Backus explores many strange tendrils of life
through literature. In 2013 Backus
finished a book called “Scandal
Work,” on James Joyce and late 19th
century sex scandals used as political weapons in Ireland’s struggle
to become independent from the
United Kingdom. Now she is coauthoring a book about children
and sex scandal in Ireland.
“Ireland has all of these novels
and short stories that take what
are recognizably sex scandals, and
retell them as they’d be seen by
children,” Backus says. “Showing
these scandals through the eyes of
children who don’t know what it is
they’re doing, forces the reader to
slow down and say well what are we
seeing, what can we tell is actually
happening? Is it bad? How bad is it?
Who’s doing the bad thing?”
Backus graduated from UMass
Boston with honors, Summa Cum
Laude, and went on to get an MA
and PhD from the University of
Texas. It took her five years, and
after graduating she got a teaching
job at another large urban working
class university, the University of
Houston.
“I took a job at a place that was
as close to UMass as I could find,”
Backus says. “I work with students
who haven’t been groomed to go to
college their whole lives, but who
happen to be really bright and have
the drive, so that’s how I got here.
UMass launched me into exactly
what I do.”
8
Section
1990s
Busses Bring Thousands of Protesters to the State House
Richard Rooney, Economics and Philosophy, 1990
Walking down the isle at graduation, paired with Robert Redford,
cameras flashing everywhere, video
cameras stuck in front of his face,
Richard Rooney smiled till his ears
ached.
“They’re all bypassing me, and
going straight for Robert,” he says.
“We chuckled on the stage about
that.”
Redford got an honorary doctorate with the first graduating class
from Environmental Sciences program. Rooney was giving the graduation speech as UMass Boston’s
Student Trustee.
“There were maybe about 100
or more faculty members on one
side, all in their university gowns,”
Rooney says. “I was, five years
before, sitting on the fence in
Homerock, wondering what the
heck I’m going to do with my life.
Now here I am giving my graduation speech.”
He spoke about the fight for public higher education funding that
had propelled him to the stage. The
UMass system fended off massive
budget cuts at the end of the 80s
and early 90s, and Richard Rooney
took a vocal role in preventing fee
hikes.
“We’re talking about 200 million
out of 700 million dollar budget,” he
says. “It was devastating, and that’s
what prompted outrage statewide.
It was a very loud, chaotic period in
higher ed.”
Rooney grew up in the Humarock section of Marshfield, a seaside
community on the South Shore. He
was a bit of a wayward youth and
didn’t have much interest in high
school.
“UMass Boston was a universe
away from where I was, both socially and intellectually. By the age
of twenty-nine (my graduation)
I was an entirely different person
from when I started.”
When he was 25 a friend of his
who attended UMass Boston recommended college life.
“When I first approached the
university for admission I was denied,” he says. “The Admission Office looked at my failing transcripts
and recommended that I attend a
community college and demonstrate that I could perform at a collegiate level.”
He enrolled in Fisher Junior College and took a semester of English,
Algebra and Business Law classes.
When he presented the results to
the Admissions Office they accepted him as a conditional student.
“Receiving the acceptance letter
was life changing and brought me
to tears,” he says. “When I got to the
campus it was a bit overwhelming.
A lot of self advocacy was required.
There were no dorms . . . I didn’t
know a soul at the time, and so it
was a bit intimidating, but it was an
effort I knew I had to make, so I just
keep pushing myself.”
It was a commuter school, with
an older population that suited
Rooney’s determination to take the
most out of college that he could.
“I took it very seriously,” he says.
“I didn’t party, didn’t go to bars,
didn’t smoke or drink. I took it
very seriously, and what I came to
realize was that anything that you
want to do in life is just right there,
right next to you, and that all you
have to do is to go out and just get
it, and that was a prospect that was
not open to me until I went there,
and started to engage in these small
victories.”
He took several work-study jobs,
and started working as counter help
in the Financial Aid Office in his
sophomore year. He served as the
first-line interaction with students
attempting to resolve financial aid
issues. He began writing a brief
column for the Mass Media about
scholarships available for students.
This introduced him to the Student
Activities area of the university and
the Student Senate.
“I wanted to start a competing student newspaper,” he says. “I
petitioned the Student Senate for
funding and was ultimately denied.
However, during that process the
Senate offered me a proposal to
revive the failing campus literary
magazine, Howth Castle.”
He took on the project of resuscitating the campus arts journal, and
recruited a team. That’s how he met
Beth Pratt and Matt Duggan.
“I was provided with funding for
one year to succeed or fail,” he says.
“If I did not accept, the magazine
would be ended and the annual line
item funding would be returned to
the Student Activities Trust Fund
for allocation to other groups . . .
as far as Beth and Matt, we’re still
friends.”
In the late eighties UMass confronted the economic realities of
the of the so called “Mass Miracle,”
when the biotech boom entered recession. This brought tremendous
financial burdens on the state, and
Governor Michael Dukakis wanted
to slash the UMass budget.
“Budget cutting by the state
government was swift and brutal,”
Rooney says.
He joined an advocacy group
called the State Student Association of Massachusetts (SSAM), and
soon found himself serving on the
statewide executive committee,
nominated to serve as the Legislative Chair.
“We crafted several legislative
bills that became law during that
time,” he says. “During the financial
turmoil, my role in statewide politics became more visible and my
work with the Student Senate more
common. I met the then-Student
Trustee Alex Walker who asked me
to testify at the State House in front
of the Massachusetts legislature in
support of UMass Boston.”
Rooney describes the testimony
he gave in the Gardiner Auditorium
as one of the highlights of his college experience.
“The forum was a large open
room with the legislatures up high
above you, looking down upon you
like some Roman effect, and at the
table, myself and other people from
the academic community, all waiting our turns to tell these legislators, these people who controlled
our future why we needed what we
needed . . . I recall even to this day
sitting there thinking that I cannot
believe that I am here doing this.”
Soon after that Alex Walker
asked Rooney to run for the Office
of Student Trustee and be his successor. Elected to the Board of the
Trustees as Student Trustee in the
1989/90 academic year, Rooney
became an outspoken advocate for
education funding.
“Great political forces were
pressing against the university from
both the legislative and executive
branches. It is with this backdrop
that I and other student trustees
across the state began a campaign
of support for higher education in
Massachusetts.
He worked with student trustees from Dartmouth and Amherst,
and politically active students from
state colleges all over the state.
“We had all the schools go back
to their student senates and appropriate funds for busses, and there
were school strikes out in Amherst.”
The student advocacy groups of
SSAM, the Student Trustees, and
other student groups all across the
state were mobilizing, culminat-
ing with a massive rally at the State
House where more than 20,000 students bussed in from all across the
state, protested the budget cuts to
our campuses.
“Our collective efforts successfully forced candidates in the Governor’s race to make higher education funding one of the top three
platform points of every candidate’s campaign. If you weren’t taking about higher education, if you
didn’t have a plan – you were not a
credible candidate for Governor in
1990.”
Rooney was on the front lines
of the protests, hyper-actively testifying to legislative committees,
appearing on local television news
programs and protesting on the
campuses and the streets of Boston.
Meanwhile, the Boards of Trustees
across the Commonwealth were
working with the Massachusetts
Board of Regents and the legislature to re-organize the entire higher
education system into the system
we now have today. This unified
voters from the ‘four points of the
compass’ to act as one group to defend the interests of higher education in Massachusetts.
“Ultimately, we were successful
in fending off the horrific budgets
cuts – the scale of which would
have devastated the Boston campus
and would have forced the closing
of entire colleges on the campus,
such as the Schools of Education
and Nursing.”
After graduating, Rooney moved
to Martha’s Vineyard to work on a
wooden boatbuilding project. There
he met his wife, married and they
had a daughter. Later he worked for
the Martha’s Vineyard Commission
as transportation planner, coordinating with the six island towns.
Today he owns a brokerage,
and studies the historic titles to
properties on Martha’s Vineyard,
particularly in the Town of Aquinnah, which is the native land of the
Wampanoag Tribe.
“At first gloss, for the uninitiated,
it sounds rather flimsy, the mission,
but looking back with the benefit of
25 years hindsight, and seeing what
we had to do to protect the mission,
I now understand more about the
mission, and the mission is to provide opportunity to people like me,
because I could never have afforded
to go to any other university. UMass
was the inexpensive alternative.”
Bridgewater Professor Empowers Online Learners
Thanh Nguyen, Political Science and Computer Science, 1990
Now designing curriculums for
Information Age learners at Bridgewater State University as a tenured
professor, Dr. Thanh Nguyen began
her studies in pedagogy at UMass
Boston. After outstanding undergraduate success she went on to
get her doctorate at Harvard University, and has been involved in a
long list of education initiatives including the Urban Educator Corps
Partnership Institute and the Technology in Education Committee at
UMass Boston Graduate College of
Education.
Dr. Nguyen encourages teachers
to design curriculums for the Internet age, when communication
across continents can be almost
instantaneous. Her profile on the
Bridgewater website says, “Teachers
need to redefine the requirements
and skills for the global community
and its marketplace in the twentyfirst century.” In her Facebook pro-
file she writes, “My interest is to design curriculum that will empower
learners to take ownership of their
own learning, and take what they
learn to empower others.”
Q: Why did you decide go to
UMB?
A: It’s the only public affordable
four year university in Boston.
Q: Were you involved in any
clubs or student activities?
A: Student Senator, Chair of Academic and Administrative Affairs
Committee of Student Senate, Director of Asian Center, Adviser for
the Vietnamese Students Association
Q: What was your favorite class
or activity that you did at UMB?
A: My favorite classes were in Political Science, and my favorite activities were in Student Senate and
in Asian Center
Q: Do you remember any of your
professors or fellow students?
A: Many of them such as Professor Watanabe, Professor Kathy
Hartfort - In fact, she looked me up
and connected on LinkedIn.
Q: What are the most important
things you learned at UMB?
A: To fight for your rights as citizens. With Professor Kiang’s advocating for Southeast Asian refugees
and his Oral history project, we
learned to speak up and to demand
for services for students with English as a Second Language.
Q: Have you been to campus
since you were a student? Any
thoughts on how the campus has
matured?
A: I came back couple years ago,
and the campus looks amazing with
the new Student Center. I wish we
had this then.
Q: What’s one thing that you did
at UMass that you couldn’t have
done somewhere else?
A: Students could mobilize other
students to demand administrators
to change their policies and to provide support for students.
Q: Where did you spend most of
your time on campus?
A: Wheatley Hall.
Q: What was your path from
UMB to what you are doing now?
A: I went on earning my master’s
and doctoral degrees from Harvard
Graduate School of Education, and
was the Commencement Speaker
there in 2000. I’m now a tenured
full-professor at Bridgewater State
University.
Q: What are you doing now
that you’re particularly passionate
about?
A: I continue to train my
student-teachers to stand up
to social justice and to advocate for their at-risk students.
Q: Do you have any 50th Anniversary wishes for UMB?
A: We have many great professors and administrators who listen,
care, and support their students. For its 50th anniversary, let’s keep
up with this tradition.
www.umassmedia.com
www.umassmedia.com
Section
1990s
For the Love of Music
9
Wayne Miller, Sociology, 1990
Super senior Wayne Miller needs
six classes to graduate as a Sociology major, with a Spanish minor.
“Waving my finger in the air, I’ll
be back,” Miller says. “I’m not going
to let 112 credits go to waste, I can
tell you that. I intend to put a bow
on it and wrap it up into a degree.”
It’s been difficult for him to find
time to finish his final few requirements because he has been touring
around the world and singing with
Herb Reed’s group, The Platters, for
the past 23 years. Reed, an original
member of the group that preforms
Great Pretender, the 360th greatest
song of all time according to Rolling Stone, died in 2012 and passed
the rights to the name on to his
group, of which Miller is now a senior member.
“I’ve been traveling around with
the group, and I guess I’ve run out
of financial aid options according to
what I’m being told from the financial aid office, so I gotta figure out a
way of getting in there financially.”
As a student at UMB, Miller was
hyper engaged. He was a leader on
the Student Senate, and Associate
Director of the Black Student Center among other things.
“It certainly was not a waste. It
was a very enlightening experience for me. The people that I met,
and the professors that I had, i just
learned so much.”
After graduating from high
school in 1977, Miller worked for
7 years as a bank teller, and then
cashiered at Brigham’s before following his sister, who graduated in
1979, to UMass Boston.
He matriculated in January of
1984, and the last class he took ended in June of 1990.
“I really can’t say enough about
the professors. There were really
some top notch people doing instruction in that place, so that can’t
be underscored enough.”
He particularly enjoyed his Span-
ish classes, and studying music with
Professor Samantha Spencer.
“The Professors were always accessible. If I ever had any issues
with anything, I could always go to
the head of that particular department and sit down with somebody,
and they were very helpful. They
wanted their students to succeed.”
Miller studied abroad three times
as a student, first to Spain.
“I wanted to be conversational in
Spanish, so when I found out that
my second year Spanish teacher
was the director of this program
that convened in Salamanca Spain,
and I applied and I got accepted. I
had to pick myself off the floor.”
He flew to Salamanca in 1987.
”I had never been on an airplane,” he says. “I never used my
Spanish outside of the classroom,
so that was enlightening for me to
actually get on a plane and go to
Spain and study Spanish.”
Now addicted to world travel, he
spent an entire semester abroad at
Universidad Argentina de la Empresa in Buenos Ares, Argentina,
and the next year he got to be a student delegate at a conference that
convened in Japan.
“I learned about a lot of different nationalities, the differences
and the similarities that I shared
with people of different races, because there was a lot of diversity at
UMass. It’s like a melting pot.”
Before the Student Senate existed, Miller worked with Robert
George on the Budget and Finance
Committee for Student Activities.
On his way out George recommended that Miller take over leadership of the committee.
“I was horrified. I didn’t think I
could do it, but he had a lot of faith
in me, and I guess I had some support among the student population,
because when I went to run for it,
I won in a landslide. I got a lot of
votes.”
“As a freshman I essentially had
my own office, until I was a junior,
and I only stepped down when I
went to study abroad in Argentina.”
Miller also swam on the swim
team, and guided campus tours for
the Student Activities Office.
“I was like a brick in the university.”
On the Student Senate, Miller remembers seeing plans for a student
union building as far back at 1985.
He remembers protesting at the
statehouse to try to get new buildings.
“I’m happy to see that the student
union got built, not where we had
planned for it to be,” he says.
Originally it was going to be
next to the Quinn Administration
Building, where the Integrated Science Complex is located now.
“Having it back there where the
Wheatley Hall is, that works out
too,” Miller says. “The first time I
went into that building it was emotional. I had feelings about it because I remember a time when we
were trying to get that to happen,
and now there it was. Things are
going in leaps and bounds.”
Working with the Budget and Finance Committee, Miller remembers one meeting where someone
asked what happened to the revenue from a game room.
“We all looked at each other and
we’re like I don’t know. We thought,
well aren’t those student generated
funds?
They asked Vice Chancellor
Charlie Desmond.
“After a lot of back and forth
and putting pressure on them, we
got those funds, and we used them
to have an end of the year student
party. We had Lisa Lisa and the Cult
Jam.”
They put on a big end of the semester party for students.
“That was an amazing experience for me, just trying to figure
Wayne Miller, in the capacity of chair of Budget & Finance, stands over the
Senate Speaker Jeff Krumrine, watching him sign off on the 1987 budget.
out, going over all of these proposals that the clubs were submitting,
and deciding how money should
be allocated, and who deserves
what. Attending the senate meetings, and the minutes, and the kind
of infighting that you might have if
somebody doesn’t agree on something and trying to round up votes
for this, and seeing who’s going to
support that.”
Within reach of his degree 1990
music gigs started interfering with
his classes, and he made the choice
to pursue music.
“I was in the middle of a Motown
review production, and that just
was starting to take off, so I ended
up taking a little leave.”
A few years after he stopped taking classes, in 1993 he got an opportunity to audition for an open
tenor position in Herb Reed’s spin
off group of The Platters.
“They were the first black group
to have international fame, and
kind of opened up that door for
Black artists to be accepted world
wide.”
A friend called Miller, and in-
vited him to Reed’s condo in Arlington for a tryout. Over the next
few weeks he filled in with them on
a few gigs, and soon he was touring, and a permanent member of
the group.
“In UMass and outside music
was always in my mix,” Miller says.
“I was in the Jazz Ensemble pretty
much for the whole time that I was
there.”
He might have taken enough
music credits to be a music minor
as well. If he can make it work financially, Miller plans to finish his
degree at UMB.
“There’s a commitment there
that I think is unique,” Miller says.
“You’re working with children and
family, and you’re still trying to get
a higher education. It’s tough, but
people at UMass do it.”
“I’m happy with the growth. I
would like to see the tuition come
down. I would like to see it easier
for people to pay back their student
loans. It’s a struggle. I want to see
more support for financial aid, and
just making it easier to get an education there.”
Search for Cool Fonts Leads to Love
Sheri McLeish, English, 1991
Through a room full of desks,
past ping pong and pool tables,
stepping over a small pile of 2’ by
4’s arranged in a neat pile on the
carpet, Sheri McLeish led the way
into a small work room. A collage
of plans for the new website of a
popular clothing retailer covered
one wall, and scraps of paper from
the same project littered a sturdy
white table. She cleared them to the
side.
“It’s a really laid back place,”
McLeish says. “We basically help
our clients develop their marketing
strategy.”
As a student at UMass Boston,
McLeish became the News Editor
of the Mass Media. After graduation
she worked as a journalist for several years before transitioning into
marketing research. She worked for
a series of marketing companies on
trademarks and new products for
the Internet, social media, apps.
Now she works for SapientNitro,
creating marketing campaigns in
rooms like the one where she sits
now reminiscing on her UMass
Boston experience.
“It all gets back to the Mass Media,” McLeish says. “The opportunity to be the Editor of the newspaper, and to manage it end-to-end,
from coming up with story ideas,
assignments, to the coordination of
all the resources was the foundation
of everything since. There couldn’t
have been a better education for me
than to be the Editor of the newspaper, because in some ways this is all
I’m still doing. What are we writing
about? What’s the issue or challenge
we’re going to tackle? Who do we
need to do it? What type of talent
and skill set is most appropriate?
Who do we need to talk to? I owe
everything to the Mass Media, and
UMass Boston.”
In the 80s and 90s the student
newspaper was located in the back
of Wheatley Hall, on the 4th floor,
in the midst of the student activities office, next to a few racquetball
courts.
“They had big windows, and you
could watch. I used to play racquetball. I actually had my own office,
which is amazing to consider. Next
to me were the copy editors. We had
three folks in there. Then we had a
big newsroom with enough space
for about half a dozen desks, and a
production room. So it was a much
bigger space for the newspaper. I
won’t go as far to say it was nice,
but it was a good place to hang out,
and when you commute it’s nice to
have a place to just be on campus
and have all your friends there. You
couldn’t beat it.”
The office was right above a student run cafe called Wits Ends, a
popular hang out until the Campus
Center opened in 2004.
“I still have my Wits End mug at
home. I use it, yes, frequently. We
would often on production nights
go down and get the last of their
coffee.”
“When I was the Editor there was
a lot more manual work involved in
producing the paper. We were using Apple 2s. You’d print on a piece
of paper, and you had an X-Acto
knife. You actually had to cut out
the article. That’s where your actual
inches of story came from, and we
would lay it out on flats. The printer
would pick it up that night and deliver it the next day, and I would deliver the paper, and push it around.
It was a great experience, and we
would do that every week.”
McLeish remembers buying a
Smith Corona typewriter, state of
the art for a few months, to help
with her work on the paper.
“It had a little window of digital
where you could see your words
first. It quickly became obsolete,
and I was able to learn computer
technology at UMass.”
It was through computer technology at UMass Boston that McLeish
found her husband.
“Computers were very new, so
we didn’t have a lot of fonts. We had
our mailboxes outside and the Arts
and Features Editor had his name
in a funky font. I was like, ‘Where’d
you get the font?’ He’s like, ‘Steve
has them.’ So I met this guy Steve,
and he had all these fonts because
he was an early technophile. He had
one of those brick cellphones.”
They fell in love slowly.
“We hung out all summer, and
we got along well, and I kind of
liked him. I’ll never forget because
once school started he had school
work to do, and he wasn’t really doing his job, and I remember coming
and saying, ‘Yo Steve, I think I’m
going to have to let you go.’ And he’s
like, ‘Oh, good. I’m glad, because
I didn’t want to quit.’ Schoolwork
came first. I understood that, so
I basically fired him, but he didn’t
stop coming around the Mass Media. We never dated while I was at
school there, but he would come
around. He was a musician, so he’d
play guitar in the newsroom. We
just ended up keeping in touch, and
eventually we started dating.”
She worked at the paper for two
years, becoming editor in her first
year, and EIC in her second and final year at UMB.
“It was a fun time in my life.
Some of the best memories were
those late production nights. The
folks you hang out with in those
wee hours of the morning, those are
bonds that can’t really be broken.”
The Kinks played on campus the
year that McLeish edited the Mass
Media.
“They set their dressing rooms up
right next to where our offices were.
I wasn’t paying much attention, and
I came out of the newsroom saw
Ray Davies in his underwear. They
played outside in the back where
there was a grassy field. So we had
lots of great times.”
Though she loved her classes,
and learned a ton from professors
like Mary Shaner, John Brereton
and Meg Mansfield, she found
her career working for the student
newspaper.
“I could sit and take classes all
day and be content, but my education was really at the newspaper.
My coursework was a required effort in order to do that.”
10
1990s
Wildlife Enthusiast Promotes Cohabitation with Lions
Beth Pratt, Management and Anthropology, 1991
A mountain lion roams Griffith
Park. Trapped in the semi-wilderness surrounding the iconic Hollywood sign, his skulking presence
sparked Beth Pratt’s imagination.
She says the cougar, P-22, traveled
east from the Santa Monica Mountains when he was two years old.
He crossed interstate 405, one of
the busiest highways in the US, and
ventured through Bel Air, passing a
few miles north of the Sunset Strip
before climbing into the Hollywood
Hills.
“The future of conservation is in
the urban areas,” Pratt says. “The
mountain lion—that’s the poster
child for our campaign—P-22, is
living in the middle of LA. That’s
unprecedented.”
In order to reach his paved off
island of relative wild, P-22 braved
suburban sprawl. He prowled
past some of the richest houses in
America. Maybe he found his way
to the park by following deer paths
between 405 and 101.
“He might have stood on the
Mulholland Overlook at night,
gazed at the city lights of downtown to the south, and the lack of
lights on the landscape due east,”
Pratt wrote in a preview chapter of
her new book, When Mountain Lions are Neighbors. Maybe he rested
for a day or two before braving the
sleepless traffic on route 101. After
crossing he probably drank from
the Hollywood Reservoir, which he
now frequents, then ambled into
the park, 8 square miles of conflictfree habitat, with abundant deer.
“P-22 is stuck now. He can’t go
any further, and he probably won’t
make it back alive, so he’s been
hanging out in this park for two
and a half years now.”
After reading about P-22 in the
LA Times, she called a group of
researchers who were tracking the
cat. With their input she coordinated an effort to build what could be
the largest wildlife crossing on the
planet. Pratt envisions a continuous greenway, stretching across the
north corner of LA, a safe passage
between the Angeles National Forest and the Santa Monica Mountains for restless cougars like P-22
to cross over the roads without even
being noticed.
“He’ll probably be dead by the
time it’s built, but it will make sure
that other cats don’t have to make
the same journey he did. They will
have access to greener pastures up
north, because mountain lions are
very territorial.”
As California Director for the
National Wildlife Federation, Pratt
identifies conflicts between the wild
and civilization. She helps animals
adapt to their rapidly changing
habitats, and teaches humans how
to co-exist in the animal kingdom.
Wild creatures fascinated Pratt
as a child. “We had frogs and toads
coming in the yard,” She says. “I
would collect them and put them in
my pocket, and then set them loose
at night after I studied them.”
Pratt grew up in Billerica, and
graduated from UMass Boston in
1991 with a degree in management
and biological anthropology, on
a full academic scholarship from
UMass.
“In my first semester I decided I
need to pursue my love of science,
and the environment as well, so I
picked up a double major,” She says.
“After graduation my friend Jack
Leech, who was the photographer
and provocateur at the Mass Media,
he got a teaching job in Stockton
California, and he said why don’t
you come out and hike for a few
months, so I did and then ended
up getting a great job as an environmental manager.”
Matriculating
into
college
straight out of high school, the
main reason that Pratt applied to
UMB was affordability.
“My Dad, I remember the relief
on his face when he didn’t have to
second mortgage the house. But
also, when I toured the campuses—
I got into BU, BC, and a few others—I just loved the UMass campus. I loved the energy there. It’s a
unique place.”
Even without dormitories, Pratt
found her cohort in the student
activities office. She managed Richard Rooney’s campaign for student
trustee, and also got herself elected
to the Student Senate as Vice President.
“This was at a time when budget
cuts were devastating. The library
couldn’t order books. They couldn’t
have heat in some of the buildings.
It was eye opening for me to finally
be a participant in politics. We had
20,000 kids at the statehouse protesting for the right to funding for
the public education. We were really happy about that, except the
headlines were about how we trampled the flowers, which was unfortunate because it was a peaceful
protest. We ended up meeting with
our representatives that day.”
For classes she managed to get
into Lee Grove’s famous detective
fiction class.
“He was an amazing creative
writing teacher,” she says. “My anthropology professor, Michael Gibbons, wonderful professor, had a
Tasmanian devil stuffed animal in
his classroom and a real skeleton
he would dress up in weird clothes.
I took many courses with him. He
was just delightful, just really en-
couraged our love of learning. My
study pal in those classes was Diane
D’Arrigo.”
Every professor Pratt had emphasized the importance of critical thinking and asking questions.
Outside of class, through student
activities, Pratt learned the importance of working within a community, with people who you may not
agree with you, to achieve a goal.
“In wildlife conservation I’m involved in some pretty big projects,”
she says. “It takes a lot of community organizing and working with
groups. Especially at the student
center that experience helped, because it wasn’t without its controversy there too. We had controversies when I was on the Student
Senate about funding, so it taught
me how to work with groups and
how to get everybody on the same
page when you’re managing a project.”
Pratt also worked at the Mass Media as a staff writer for editor Sheri
McLeish, and she helped revive
Howth Castle one year.
“I remember signing up at the
table with Matthew Dougin, another student senator, and that was
a blast. We got the first issue out in a
few years, because it just hadn’t had
the support.”
She hopes that UMB continues
to offer untraditional opportunities
for future students to pursue their
interests and passions
“The student center, under Donna Neal and others, was such a
wonderful place for someone who
was on the younger side of the student body to hangout and just get
exposure to a lot of ideas and people that you wouldn’t normally get
in a traditional college.”
When Politics and Art Collide You Get a Beautiful Canvas
Kathleen Bitetti, Economics and Art, 1992
Self-described policy nerd, Kathleen Bitetti makes art and policy
from a compact office on a back
road near Harvard Square. As a
student at UMB she ran the Harbor
Art Gallery in the early 1990s, and
curated innovative art exhibits that
brought attention to the HIV/AIDS
crisis at its peak. To her art is all
about policy.
“We did the first show ever of
people living with HIV/AIDS in
Massachusetts,” she says. “It was
intense because people couldn’t
put their name on it, because there
was nothing protecting folks from
losing their housing, so it was a
very intense show. They used to do
shows after people died, so that was
a really important show we did.”
As a part of ACT UP, working
with the AIDS Action Committee,
she wanted to honor people who
were still alive.
“People were dying. It was the
plague. It was really scary times.
There were no protections. If somebody thought that you were HIV
positive you could loose you job
and your housing. There was nothing to protect folks.”
Taking a slew of art classes on
campus, Bitetti studied with the late
Jerry Burndt, an AP, Magnum and
UPI photographer. His photo work
changed how homelessness was
dealt with in Boston. She curated
shows in the gallery that would get
people thinking about how to fix
inequality and injustice.
“We did a whole show around
censorship, a couple of shows
around censorship cause that was
what was going on at that time with
Jesse Helms, and so it was a really
intense time period. A lot of colleges were under siege. Funding for
the arts and humanities was being
cut back, and that was when we lost
the fellowships for artists. Karen
Finley. The NEA Four. It was a very
intense time. That’s the backdrop I
remember.”
She ran the gallery for about five
years, so she put on a lot of shows.
“We did some solo shows of important artists like Allan Rohan
Crite, the late Allan Rohan Crite,
who’s an incredible African-American artist, one of the most important that ever lived.”
Most of her professors incorporated social justice into their lessons.
“At UMass, when they did policy
it wasn’t abstract, the professors
were actually implementing the
policy and working with the populations they were doing it for. Other
places could be more abstract and
not really actually talking to people
they were doing policy for, which is
why there is a lot of problems with
policy because policy makers have
no clue on who they’re making
policy for or interacting with those
populations. UMass McCormack
School, and the economics department particularly, those folks were
very involved.”
Though UMB was not her first
choice, transferring out of Brandies
with the intention of just taking a
few transitional classes, she wound
up loving the atmosphere at UMB.
“You learn just as much from the
folks in your class as you do the
professors,” she says. “I don’t think
any school where everyone was
the same age would have worked
for me. This was a place where no
one asked if your friends were teen
mothers, why you were dressed
the way you were. To me the other
schools were high school all over
again, and I didn’t like high school
really. I didn’t want to pay to go to
high school again. This was a school
that really was about learning.”
After graduating from UMB she
created and curated exhibits all
over Boston and became a facet of
the Massachusetts art scene. Most
recently, in the spring of 2014, her
study for a new installation appeared in the Distillery Gallery in
Boston. In addition to her work as
an artist, she shapes legislation.
“Most artists don’t get paid for
their work no matter what line
they’re in,” Bitetti said. “It’s what
you would call in economics a dual
labor market structure.”
Museums, theaters, and increasingly companies like Google lobby
legislators on arts issues, both for
funding and copyright issues. Often the interests of artists, acting as
independent contractors, get overlooked.
“I work with people that make
things from nothing,” Bitetti said.
“It’s beyond arts funding for us.”
Bitetti co-founded Massachusetts
Artists Leaders Coalition (MALC),
with the mission “to ensure that artists are at the policy making table,”
and Artists Under the Dome (artistsunderthedome.org), a website
that tracks legislation that effects
artists in Massachusetts. Her work
influenced how the Affordable Care
Act treats artists.
“A lot of it has to do with unintended consequences because people don’t understand stuff,” Bitetti
said. “For the healthcare law, it’s
hard for us to figure out our income.”
Outside of her office on a large
brick terrace surrounded by young
trees, their green crowns turning gold, Bitetti beams as she talks
about UMass Boston. She’s a big fan
of Chancellor Motley.
“He’s someone who really likes
students,” she said. “It’s not a career
step for him. He really cares about
what’s there . . . He’s making UMass
be more and more a part of the dialogue in Boston, particularly with
the new mayor.”
As a UMB student Bitetti learned
the importance of fostering a positive community.
“Nothing is impossible, and how
to build long-term connections
and relationships in a sincere way,
and that social justice issues are the
most important thing you could
ever work on and they should guide
everything that you do.”
Psyched to see the upgrades on
campus, Bitetti is looking forward
to seeing where UMB goes in the
next 50 years.
“Chancellor Motley has done a
wonderful job with building it out
to be a first class university, to be
on par with the folks who actually
have more money, the Harvards
and MITs, to physically have it be
like that.”
Section
1990s
www.umassmedia.com
www.umassmedia.com
Queen of Beacons Track and Field
11
Genesia Eddins, Management, 1992
Genesia Eddins was one of the
best athletes UMass Boston has
ever seen.
“It was track that kept me here,”
she says. “The woman’s track team
was phenomenal. I can say that now
with the biggest smile. I still get a
charge out of holding the record for
something like 25 years in certain
events. I’m highly competitive, so
a couple of weeks ago Charlie Titus, the Vice Chancellor [of Athletics], was telling me, ‘We have this
really awesome girl. Her name is
Hillary, and she’s really doing well.’
And I said, ‘ooo I’m so thrilled, I’m
so happy,’ because it’s going to put
the university back on the map for
track and field. He said, ‘Yeah she’s
coming to get your records.’ In my
mind I was thinking, ‘Come and
get it.’”
Eddins still holds records in the
women’s 800 and 400 meters at the
division three NCAA championships, and her team holds the 4 by
400 relay record.
“At UMass as a student athlete,
track was certainly the anchor that
held me here. We had such good
camaraderie amongst the women
on the team. When we would go to
these meets, even though we were
division three, division one and division two schools knew we were a
force to be reckoned with.”
With the support of each other,
in competitions they would always
prevail.
“We were about 18 deep, always.
Many of us had competed together
prior to coming to UMass on a club
team, although we all attended different high schools, so there was
already that sense of camaraderie.
Don’t get me wrong. We were not
always in love with each other.
We had our moments. But when
it came time to compete we were
there.”
They made a merry group of
fierce competitors.
“It was a great experience. There
is nothing I would change about it.
We were so loud. I remember other
teams telling us, ‘You guys are great.
We don’t know if you’re great because you’re so loud or so talented.’”
Eddies ran her first track meet in
the third grade. By the time she was
in the 5th grade she was faster than
any 7th grade boy. Then in junior
high she joined a track team, the
Cooper Striders. She was 14.
“I grew up in the South End, so
I’m a native Bostonian. I attended
West Roxbury High School. I had
some very different options in
terms of where I went to school.”
After six months on her first
track team she went to the junior
Olympics in Lincoln Nebraska and
placed third in the girl’s 400. The
following year she won the 400,
and by the time she graduated from
high school she was ranked number
one in the quarter-miler in the US.
At the end of that last triumphant
year, she contracted a respiratory
infection that left her bed ridden
for a number of months, so UMass
became the best choice for her. It
was close to home, and her former
high school coach, Sherman Hart,
had just secured the job as head
woman’s coach at UMB, so it was a
natural transition.
“Even though I was dealing with
health challenges, at least I had the
security of knowing that I was not
going to take on the transition of
going out of state to another university. Medically I could not have
done it. It was the best choice at the
time.”
She sat out most of the first season, cheering on her team mates,
red shirted because of the illness.
Late in the spring of that freshman
year she ran in a few meets to find
her feet, just to remind everyone
she could still run.
“Physically my body was depleted. I had gone from my heaviest weight ever, 115, to 86 pounds
in three weeks. I was hurting but
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sports medicine team at the
time that was under Brian Fitzgerald’s leadership. Brian and his team
were phenomenal. They helped
me put myself physically back together, and in terms of the support
that they provided on a daily basis
they were so proactive. They were
coming in doing massages, icings,
preventative things that seem like
every day stuff now but it wasn’t
then. They went above and beyond,
and because of their proactive efforts we had very minimal injuries,
which allowed us to maintain that
level of consistency, it allowed us to
continue training at that high level,
and most importantly to continue
winning.”
The women’s track and field team
of the late 80s blew competition
out of the water, winning four consecutive NCAA titles and produced
thirteen All Americans. Eddins
alone earned All-American status
in 15 events, and won eight NCAA
individual championships.
“The wins? Are they all a blur?
Nothing in particular sticks out. It
always felt good. Well, you know
what, there is one win—our second national team win—because
the first time we won the buzz was,
“Oh, they’re a fluke, they’re a fluke,
they’re a fluke.” But by our second,
third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and sev-
enth win, we weren’t a fluke. We
were the real deal.”
“We had nationals in Wisconsin, and that stuck out because
we ended up getting second as a
team, and we knew it was going to
be tight. We were competing with
Christopher Newport Virginia.
We won practically every running
event. Where we lost points was in
the field events. There were 15 or
so women who went, and we cried
all the way from Wisconsin on that
flight back to Boston. The poor
flight attendants didn’t know what
to do. It was so disheartening. I can
laugh about it now, but we were
crushed. Crushed. But it was good
competition. We just weren’t accustomed to losing.”
After graduating from UMass
Boston, she went on to run for
Nike, Adidas and Reebok.
Blood, Guts and Journalism
Michele McPhee, English, 1993
It began with the Steak Tips Massacre. Four men dead, one wounded, in an argument that escalated
into a gunfight at the 99 Restaurant
in Charlestown, 1995—this premise set Michele McPhee’s journalism career in motion.
“I was on the city desk for the
Boston Globe, and that was back
when newspapers had money, so
you could write. You could run
around the city and just find little
quirky stories, and make money.”
As a student at UMass Boston,
McPhee landed a six-month internship at the Boston Globe, which she
was able to extend by commandeering a disused desk in the newsroom.
She wrote incessantly.
“I urge everyone at UMass especially people who are into journalism to write. Write often. Write for
free,” McPhee says.
With single-minded tenacity,
McPhee wrote a series of articles
about the murder investigation for
the Globe, and finally an in depth
article for Boston Magazine.
“That story that came out in
Boston Magazine launched my career,” She says. “When it came out it
caught the attention of an editor at
the New York Daily News, so I went
directly to New York.”
Now her byline appears in newspapers, and magazines from all
over the world. After writing for the
Globe, McPhee worked for a variety
of magazines in New York, including the New York Daily News, where
she was the Police Bureau Chief.
“I was there for 9/11,” She says.
“Because I had covered police and
fire for the last decade, I knew a lot
of the people personally who were
affected. There were 343 fire fight-
ers that were killed that day, another 23 New York City cops, and 32
Port Authority Police Officers, and
among them were my friends, because I had been there for so long,
and that was my beat, and my beat
was my life essentially.”
She moved home to Boston in
2006, and worked for the Boston
Herald as a columnist and police
reporter.
“I stayed after 9/11 working for
about five years, and it just became
so difficult and sad. Writing about
the devastating losses people suffered made me realize that I was
living in New York, and my nieces
and nephews were growing up in
Boston without me.”
Now she works at ABC News as a
producer for the Brian Ross Investigative Unit.
“I worked at the Mass Media
when I first started. That was my
very first job in journalism, and
loved it,” she says. “Now I work
for Brian Ross. His team is stellar,
so I’m grateful to be working with
such unbelievable journalists, and
it’s nice in this business to still be
able to learn with your colleagues,
and become better.”
McPhee also freelances, and
has written five true crime novels.
Lately she has been investigating
the Boston Marathon Bombings. In
October, 2014, an article she wrote
about the lives of the Tsarnaev
woman—Tamerlan’s wife, mother
and two sisters—appeared on the
cover of Newsweek. That article
evolved into a further investigation
into Tamerlan’s relationship with
the FBI, which is McPhee’s latest
obsession. The terror that kept her
writing in New York, and ultimately
drove her home to Boston, returned
and she wants to know the story.
“Once again I find myself on a
blood splattered street in a place
that is sacred to me,” she says. “It’s
important to me to figure out what
went wrong this time.”
The path that lead McPhee to a
life of writing began with a class at
UMB called The City as a Hero. It
was the only class she took in her
first semester, and it hooked her.
She continued classes, and started
writing for the student newspaper.
“I loved it there. You are around
every walk of life at UMass Boston. This is not just an extension of
high school, which is what a lot of
college campuses are, live-in high
school. This is really like being part
of a city.”
She became a full time student,
paying tuition by waiting tables at
the Comedy Connection in Faneuil
Hall, and at Destinations, which
was a nightclub at Haymarket.
“We used to call it Lacerations
because there were so many fights
and stabbings in there, and Bobby
Brown could be found smoking
crack in the bathroom. It was one
of those nightclubs. I worked a lot,
and I also worked at the co-op [internship], at the State House for the
Globe.”
Living in a ramshackle North
End apartment for 400 bucks a
month, she made ends meet.
Reminiscing on her work for the
Mass Media with excitement, she
calls it, “One of the great college
newspapers.”
“I never was more excited than
when I first saw my name in print.
It was something I had always
dreamed of. I took the long way
around to get into college, because I
was an incorrigible high school student. When I saw my byline in the
Mass Media, I actually saw I could
acquire that dream I always had of
being a reporter, and from there I
wouldn’t give up. That first byline in
the Mass Media is what catapulted
my determination to become a reporter.”
She hung out at the Wits End on
campus, writing, doing homework,
and chatting with a group of friends
she found through the Mass Media.
“If I was in between classes, that’s
where you could find me always. So
that’s where we would always meet
up, me and Rob Vickerman, my
best friend there, and we would talk
about boys, and work, and school.”
At UMB McPhee learned the value of community, and what makes a
good citizen.
“Being at UMass is like being part
of a tight knit neighborhood. It’s
like living in an eclectic city. You’re
surrounded by people who have an
appreciation for what they’re doing
there. I just loved looking around
and seeing people that come from
everywhere going to such completely different places. The people
there were determined. That’s the
word I always thought about when
I was at UMass. They’ve got people
who are determined, just like me, to
make their lives phenomenal.”
1990s
12
Student Senator Falls in Love with Budgeting
Bethany Hyland Brown, Political Science, 1994
One of the hardest decisions
Bethany Hyland Brown had to
make as a Student Senator was to
shut down the Mass Media.
A headline in the Boston Globe
read, “Student Newspaper Shut
Down at UMass Boston.” It was
April, 1993: “Students say that administrators changed the door
locks on the student newspaper
office late last Thursday to prevent
publication of a news story detailing a $256,176 deficit in the student
activities trust fund.”
It all started during the 92/93
school year when Brown ran for
student government, and won.
“I signed up to run on a whim,
and was the top vote getter,” she
says. “Of course, I didn’t look and
see they didn’t have enough people
running for the slots available.”
After a brief and exciting campaign that she won by default,
Brown joined the finance committee, and found herself in the midst
of a budget crisis. The Student Senate had a huge deficit, and the student newspaper had an issue with
advertisers not paying.
“We got notice from the administration that they had one week’s
salary left in their account,” Brown
says. “We had to make the unpopular decision and told them until
they had money in their account
to pay for the salaries, or agreed to
work for free, they couldn’t operate.”
In the early 90s the Student Senate handled the cost of printing the
Mass Media, and ad revenue paid
the staff.
“We felt strongly because we were
facing a deficit of a quarter if a million dollars,” Brown says. “We had
to unencumber money, cut costs
ourselves. If we had allowed them
to continue to operate, we would
have been responsible for that debt
as well.”
After some finagling, and loud
protest from students, administrators were able to get the newspaper
back on a regular printing schedule.
“Through that I got a lot of practical crisis management experience,” Brown says.
In student government Brown
learned to do the right thing,
whether or not it’s popular. It was
a trial by fire, and the budget crisis taught her to be clear about expectations. “You know, this is the
agreement we’ve made, and this is
what we expect.”
“Being on student senate was really rewarding and gave me a lot
of experience and self-confidence,
and leadership skills that I still use.”
After graduating from UMass,
Brown went on to Suffolk University, the Sawyer School of Management, to get a Masters in public administration with a concentration
in disability studies. Now she is a
disability law paralegal in the Attorney General’s office in the civil
rights division. She works to ensure
that services are accessible to people with disabilities.
“I helped the attorneys that sued
Apple over accessibility of iTunes,”
Brown said. “iTunes was not accessible to people who use screenreader software, so we settled with
them. We settled with Monster.
com over accessibility, and we have
a fairness hearing in progress over
Cardtronics ATMs, about their accessibility to people with vision
impairment. I’m doing a lot of fair
housing app work, and disability
discrimination work.”
Brown attended UMass Boston
partially because it was close to her
home, and could accommodate her
learning difficulties.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to move
away for school, and I had an IEP
[Individualized Educational Program] in high school, and a lot of
stuff that now technology resolves.
I had a scribe in high school because I have dysgraphia from neurological problems, and I looked at
what the school offered in terms of
accommodations and education,
and it’s the only place I applied.”
She did the honors curriculum,
and also joined the student center
for learning disabilities and several other clubs, some officially and
some unofficially. Student government by far became her favorite
activity.
“I still have friends from student
government,” she says. “A few years
ago I was at an engagement party
for a friend in student government,
and another friend from student
government was like, ‘Did you see
the Fox News report about the conditions of the garage?’ Evidently
student government was asked why
this wasn’t taken this more seriously. Then they went back to their
records and they said, ‘Well, Senator Bethany Hyland, mentioned it
back in whatever date. Here are the
minutes.’”
The most important things she
learned at UMB were self-confidence and leadership skills.
“When I was a student there,
there was a lot of student activism,
trying to convince the legislature
to give the school more money. We
would all, in mass, go to the statehouse. My freshman year everybody went on strike and had classes
at the statehouse, and everybody
lobbied their legislators for money
for the school.”
“I remember one year I had done
a couple of internships at the state
house, and my senior year we were
delivering annual packets of letters to legislators saying you’ve
gotta give UMass money, and my
friend Steve Shuman and I were
there representing student government, doing our thing. We passed
the printing office for the House
of Representatives. The door was
closed and there was a line. I’m
like, “Oh my god Steve, let’s get in
line.” He’s just like, “Do you even
know what the line is for?” I said,
“No, but there’s a huge line and the
printing office is closed. We should
just stand here and find out what it
is.” It turns out they were releasing
the state budget. This was before
the Internet was big. We were big
men on campus because we actually got printed copies of the entire
state budget.”
Spending most of her time on the
4th floor of Wheatley Hall, where
the student clubs were, she remembers feeling claustrophobic.
“It’s nice to see an actual student
union building there. It’s a com-
muter school, and it really needed
a place for students to hang out.
That was lacking when I went. We
all hung out on the 4th floor of
Wheatley, but there really wasn’t
enough space. I was there when we
had the downtown campus as well,
and when they closed that we kind
of had space wars. There wasn’t
enough space for the amount of
stuff that was going on.”
Despite the space issues, and the
relatively dull campus buildings,
she loved all of her classes, and professors always had time to talk.
“You had reasonably sized classes
with professors that were the actual doctorates who did the work,
who could have taught someplace
else for more money. I had lots of
classes with Dr. Watanabe. You’d be
talking with him about the same
stuff that he was consulting news
media about. It was interesting to
see how class conversations were
part of what was on the local news.”
English Lit Enthusiast Fights for Woman’s Rights in Ireland
As the founder and director of
the Abortion Support Network,
Mara Klein Clarke raises money to
help women in Ireland and Northern Ireland get safe, legal abortions.
Abortions are completely against
the law in Ireland.
“When you restrict access, people with money have options, and
people without money are put into
these really desperate circumstances. We’ve heard from women who
have drunk bleach or tried to crash
their cars. Money opens doors, and
a lot of times people with money
don’t understand that the people
without money don’t have the same
doors even to knock on, let alone
open. To me that’s what UMass
Boston’s always represented.”
After graduating from UMB,
Clarke worked in the Office of Institutional Development on campus, and then moved to New York
where she worked in corporate
public relations throughout the dot
com boom and bust. She lived in
Sweden for awhile, continuing her
work in PR, and then moved back
to New York City where she started
volunteering with a local group
helping to ensure that women had
access to safe and legal abortions.
“I discovered that all across
America women were unable to
access abortions where they lived,
usually because of money and also
because of restrictive laws.”
In 2005 she moved to England,
and held a variety of roles, including working for the Mayor of
London, and in 2009 founded the
Abortion Support Network.
“My time at UMass, and the path
that brought me to UMass were
both instrumental in my commitment to this sort of work.”
Growing up in an upper middle
class town outside of Chicago, she
managed to get a music scholarship to go to Eastern Illinois University. Despite working she ran out
of money, and wound up moving to
Connecticut to be a nanny. She also
worked as a truck stop waitress on
the 3rd shift, and nursed a sense of
discontent.
“I needed to get a degree, because
that’s what we were told. Those were
different times. If you got a degree
everything was going to be ok.”
She had some family in Boston,
and UMass Boston seemed the perfect fit for her to finish her degree.
“When I went there something
like 80 percent of the student body
worked. There weren’t dorms. It was
the right place for me because I was
working my way through school,
and I was able to take classes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, and waitress the other five days of the week
for twelve hours, and it just seemed
like a good fit.”
She joined the Jazz band, and
played in the pit orchestra for a
student performance of West Side
Story. She also edited the Yearbook,
and was a copy editor for the student literary magazine Watermark
and the Mass Media.
“I signed on to be a writer on
the Yearbook, and then because
Mara Klein-Clarke, English, 1997
the staff at the time was like five
photographers and me I wound up
learning graphic design.”
The Student Media Advisor,
Donna Neal, was one of her favorite
things about UMass, and she remembers particularly a class taught
by Lee Grove.
“I took his American Detective
fiction course, and I still remember
the course description. It was like,
they wore trench coats that were
never Burberrys. They keep a bottle
of hooch in the back drawer and
they seldom carry guns. I loved that
class.”
Recalling classes with Duncan
Nelson and Chet Fredrick that
opened her mind to whole new
universes of literature, and odd
moments like when one woman
had a panic attack in an exam and
stripped naked, Clarke found great
inspiration and guidance from the
people she met at UMB.
“At UMass Boston you had the
opportunity to learn in a different way than you do at some other
universities,” she says. “Back then
the average age was around 28,
and I had the experience of being
in a class with a World War 2 vet, a
young man who’d come over from
Cambodia on a raft, someone who
was the first in their family to go
to university, and somebody who’d
just gotten off of drugs after ten
years of addiction and was charting
a new path. It taught me that everybody has a story, and everybody has
a perspective, and that you should
always be open to other people’s experiences, and not so much in your
own head.”
Her favorite class was called The
Political Novel.
“It’s really fascinating to not just
read the books, but to also know
the context of communism, and the
cold war, and whatever was going
on at the time when the books were
written.”
They read books by Monroe,
Kafka, Remark, and Camus. The
class inspired her to read everything written by Don DeLillo.
“Your education is the one thing
that people can’t take away from
you,” she says. “Make sure that no
matter what you’re taking for your
degree that you take at least one
class that totally pushes your comfort level and takes you outside
your boundaries.”
Through student activities, hanging out at the Wits End in Wheatley, drinking coffee and doing
homework, she made a small group
of friends—Brian Prudy, Jolene
Westerdale, Laura Whelan, Marcie
Quinlan, Richard Chase and Phil
Flixler (d. May 2013) — who became her support network.
“We didn’t spend so much time
hanging out because we always
running to class and then heading
to work. But it was comforting to
know that there was a group, that
we belonged there, that we were all
trying for the same thing - a diploma - which for some of us seemed
like an impossible achievement.”
While taking classes, she waitressed to pay tuition and fees.
“Students at UMass, and the students who I used to wait on from
BU and BC and Harvard and the
other places, they seemed like different species. I had a lot of bitterness back then.”
Growing up in a chaotic family
situation, where she’d been thrown
out of her childhood home, and
watched some of the people she
grew up around make it through
ivy league or quasi-ivy collages, she
sometimes felt like a failure.
“UMass was a place where I
didn’t feel like an alien, and especially in Boston. I could get an
amazing education that, firstly, I
could afford, and secondly, where
I didn’t feel completely different
from the other students there. Despite having such a diverse student
population, UMass was somewhere
I could get a great education without feeling poor.”
1990s
www.umassmedia.com
13
Student Trustee Burns Effigy of Governor w/ UMB Chancellor in Pocket
David Loh, Political Science, 1994
“I consider UMass Boston to
be a school of redemption,” David
Loh says sitting in a massive glass
walled conference room in a brick
factory building from the industrial
era with original wooden floors
and beams, sanded and stained,
supporting the steel ductwork that
wafts cool scents of coffee, quality
paper and ink toner throughout the
offices of Chu, Ring & Hazel LLP.
“I had gone to an ivy league
school, Cornell, straight from high
school,” Loh says. “I hated that
place, so after 6 months I quit and
then I came to Boston because my
sister was going to school here,
and I started working for fast food
places. I drove a cab. I was bike
messenger. People would say you
need to go back to school, so I actually looked around and I said,
hey UMass Boston’s a pretty decent
school.”
Loh figured he had to restart
somewhere, and he didn’t want to
go to a community college. To him
UMB was a step up.
“I went to UMass Boston thinking I’ll go there for a year, transfer out to a quote on quote better
school, and then I ended up really
liking it.”
He got involved in student activities, made some friends, and stuck
around.
“That was a time of huge budget
cuts, so we were organizing protests
literally every week. We had marches throughout the campus. We had
sit ins at the chancellor’s office, and
we had marches to the statehouse,
and in fact even burned an effigy of
the governor, and the chancellor at
one point.”
Though he didn’t consider himself an activist, Loh lead many of
the protests.
“I thought that tripling our tuition and fees over a four year period was just wrong. I was born in
Korea, and I was always raised to
believe, and I still do believe that
education is the most important
thing in any society, period. Education allows you to advance in life.”
The agitation with budget cuts
and fee hikes came to a head one
day in the plaza with campus police
watching tensely.
“I learned that you could literally
lead a crowd to burn things down,”
Loh says. “I think that was a culmination of our frustration. Other
people took it further, and they
started doing marches, interrupting
classes. I was against that because
my point was, damn it we’re here
for education.”
He felt that students shouldn’t
be solely responsible for requesting
state support for public education.
“The effigy was of Governor
Weld, and Chancellor Penny was in
his pocket.”
Becoming vocal about school
funding allowed Loh to rise in the
student government. He became
chair of the budget and finance
committee. At the same time he
worked in the Student Life office
and copy edited for the Mass Media.
Then in his junior year he was elected to be the Student Trustee, and he
got reelected in his senior year.
“I thought that education should
never be cut, period, and I still believe that. It is the thing that you
have to invest in the state, otherwise we’ll become Louisiana, or
Mississippi. The reason why they
don’t advance is because they don’t
invest in education. You look at all
the data on how much people spend
per child, there’s a direct correlation
among all the states.”
When he started taking classes
at UMB, Loh made the most of his
education.
“One thing about UMass Boston
is we’re really serious students,” Loh
says. “No one went to UMass Boston to party. Now I know people
partied, sure, but if you wanted to
party, you went to UMass Amherst,
ZooMass, and then those who went
to UMass Boston, they were for the
most part very serious students.”
Deeply involved with student
life, Loh found a group of friends
with a similar work ethic.
“Some of my best friends are
from UMass Boston,” Loh says.
“Each one of us were all returning
students, a little bit older. I think
that’s why we clicked, but we were
also involved in student government, so that also helped, so we
were the three sort of rabble rousers.”
As a student Loh also played on
a softball team with a group of veterans.
“There were guys who were fifty
years old, going back to school, and
it was great just hanging out with
them, talking to them, so there’s
a lot there, so don’t forget to learn
from those people too.”
He also remembers his professors being really dedicated, and he
especially enjoyed studying with
Winston Langley, who is now the
provost.
“He’s the one who set me on this
path,” Loh says. “His international
relations class, I just remember it
being so interesting, because we
were reading case law about specific
instances and also you start thinking about how would you establish
law on the moon, because that’s international law, because the moon
is shared in some sense.”
After that class Winston Langley
became Loh’s advisor.
“I owe a debt to that guy,” he says.
““He was the one who said, ‘Hey,
have you thought about going to
law school.’”
At UMB, Loh learned to raise his
expectations of himself.
“I’m not necessarily saying we’re
walking around with our heads
down, but I think there’s this idea
that UMass Boston is not really a
premier school, but we knew that
we work hard, do the best we can
under the circumstances we find
ourselves.”
If you ever go back and read
some of the Mass Media articles
Loh wrote, he was very critical of
the administrators.
“You could say I was young and
a little bit bitter, and maybe even
angry that here I am trying to go to
school, and they’re making it as dif-
ficult as possible by keep doubling
or tripping my tuition and fees,
making it so difficult that I have to
use credit cards.”
Loh would like to see administrators focusing on keeping, and even
raising more state funding, rather
than looking to raise fees, because
investments in education yield
great returns over time.
As a UMB student, Loh also
learned how much of a positive difference state and local government
could make on people’s lives.
“I got a opportunity to represent
the entire campus at the UMass
Trustee Board, and I said a few
things in a way that probably was
more angry than anything else, but
I was still youthful, and I did not
know better, but at least I got an
opportunity to stand up for something in a way that maybe made a
little difference.”
In one meeting he actually convinced the board to not raise the
tuition.
“It eventually went up, but at
least I got one person to change
her mind, and prevented them for
at least about a week, maybe two
weeks from voting on a tuition increase in the magnitude that they
were considering, so I felt like I was
able to accomplish something at
least in the short term, and maybe
some other legislators read that
newspaper article, and then said
you know these students are really
hurting here. We really have to reset
our priority.”
Loh thinks the whole culture
of the school, and the vision has
changed for the better under Chancellor Keith Motley.
“I think UMass Boston, more
than any other universities around
here, really is here for students in
the Massachusetts and New England region.”
After graduation Loh clerked in
the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, and eventually worked
his way into a law degree. Now he
is a law firm partner working with
start up companies.
“Last year in my taxes I paid back
more than all the tuition and fees
that I paid to UMass Boston in just
one year. So whatever the subsidy
was, I paid that back probably ten
times in my career right now, and
I’m going to keep doing this, so
clearly they’re getting a really good
return on me and a vast majority
of us, so it’s a really really good investment, a huge investment, more
than probably any other investment
that they’re making.”
“Any society that invests in education, is going to do well, and
obviously you have to tinker with
the specifics, but I think the general concept should be, invest in
the education, and you’ll get a great
return.”
Digital Technology Revolutionizes Access for All
One morning a blind student arrived at the disability service center
and said, “Hi I’m going to start my
computer class next week, and I
don’t know how to use a computer.”
The person at the desk said, “Oh
geez, go talk to computing services.”
Computing services had appropriate equipment, but no idea how
to teach a blind person how to use
it. That’s when Charlotte Corbett
took over.
“They looked to me because I
was the resident geek for the department,” Corbett says. “I basically
stayed a paragraph ahead of the
student, teaching them how to use
the computer with the speech synthesizer, and screen access software,
and he taught me about the needs
of students who are blind, and together we muddled through the
semester.”
Corbett was not a student at the
time, but she worked for the disabilities center as a freelance sign
language interpreter. Both of Corbett’s parents were deaf, so she
had already developed a knack for
helping people communicate. After
the semester ended John Murphy,
who directed Computing Services,
asked Corbett’s boss if he could
have her help on a regular basis.
“That’s how the idea for the adaptive computing lab was born,” she
says. “It was phenomenal in its hay
Charlotte Corbett, Adult Training and Human Services, 1996
day, a first. This was created in 86,
87. It was for people with cerebral
palsy, learning, cognitive, mobility,
visual, hearing, and adapting computers to meet the unique needs of
the students.”
“We had a student who was blind
and without a right elbow, which
meant the lower half of her arm
moved freely forward and backwards, so how do you keep it up on
the computer? She had full use of
her hands, but without a functioning elbow, she couldn’t move the
mouse around, so we created things
like a mouse for her foot.”
“There was a guy with cerebral
palsy who typed with his nose,
but he was really hurting his back
bending all the way down to the
table. We raised tables for wheel
chair access, got headsets, put the
outlets up above the tables. We had
had them down on the floor, and a
seeing eye dog got tangled in the
chords, and unplugged the computer, and the student lost all of his
work.”
“If you look inside there, you’ll
see that the work stations are five
feet long with a dividing wall between them for kids with distractibility issues, also sound proofing
in that back room. The idea was to
accommodate access.”
Thanks to the Americans with
Disabilities Act (ADA), and in-
creasing awareness of disabilities
issues in the early 90s, the culture
and attitude toward students with
disabilities at UMB evolved.
“While I was there access became everybody’s responsibility,
and that’s a huge shift, because before that if we wanted a computer
expert for students with disabilities,
disability services had to hire one.”
Through the advocacy work of
Carol DeSouza, Adrian Shine, and
John Murphy among others, UMB
entered the digital age committed
to access for all.
“A big change was hiring Dann
Brown, a person in a wheel chair
to work for computing services,
but not in the adaptive computing
lab, but in the regular lab. That was
huge, and all part of ADA.”
While Corbett worked at the
adaptive computing lab she wrote
grants and training manuals, and
she started taking classes.
“I took a lot of different classes,”
she says. “There was a class called
the psychology of learning, and I
took history, disability, stuff like
that, so I was all over the place, just
taking classes that I needed for my
job that didn’t fit for a degree. CPCS
allowed a way to capitalize on the
stuff I’d been learning on the job,
using that to demonstrate that I had
learned the stuff.”
As a “late bloomer,” having taken
her time starting college, Corbett
felt at home in the College of Public and Community Service, where
they gave her credit for her work
experience in the computer labs.
“UMass Boston tends to be a little bit more younger now, but at the
time in the 90s, it was a good mix of
older students. I didn’t feel odd or
out of place.”
As an undergraduate she started
hanging out in the LGBT center,
and joined the disabilities awareness club. Every class she took offered new insights and inspiration.
“I gained valuable mentors that
I’m still in touch with to this day.
Mary Brady, who’s in the college of
ed. There’s Allen Gerelli, who’s now
with CAPS. There’s Gene Schlaub
who’s in instructional design, so I
think the opportunity to network,
and meet people to help me learn
and go forward were all a tremen-
dous help.”
In one class with David Rubin,
from CPCS she she discovered that
many Disney villains have disabilities.
“My favorite class was probably
with Gary Siperstein, who is still at
UMass Boston, sort of a curmudgeonly professor who was constantly knocking me for not taking notes
in his class, Human Development,
and yet I wrote the best classical essay he had ever read, so that helped
me to get into graduate school.”
Corbett went on to graduate
with a masters degree from George
Washington University, where she
majored in Educational Technology Leadership. Now she teaches
at the Horace Mann School for the
Deaf in Alston, and over the summer she worked as a teacher in residence at the Museum of Science’s
Pixar exhibit.
“40 kids who are deaf or hard of
hearing living in inner city Boston
now learn about robots and computer programming and cause and
effect, and engineering, and all
kinds of different things.”
“It couldn’t have happened without UMass Boston,” Corbett says.
“Anything can happen at UMass.
Make those networks. Make those
connections.”
14
1990s
Football Player Discovers the Craft of Physical Fitness
Sean Skahan, Human Performance and Fitness, 1998
Sean Skahan discovered his career in the Healey Library when he
stumbled upon a strength and conditioning journal in the stacks.
“I was like wow this is actually a
profession,” he says. “I liked to train.
I liked to work out. I was an athlete,
and I was into sports medicine, and
I figured out that there was a profession of people that did this. I said
hey this is what I want to do with
my life, and here I am doing it at the
highest level of the sport of hockey.”
When Skahan enrolled at UMB,
he had a shoulder injury. He
couldn’t play sports, and he struggled through his freshman year.
“In the spring of that first year I
had surgery, and I didn’t do a good
job academically that fall freshman
semester, so I actually enrolled in a
junior college in Franklin Mass my
second year, and I did well in my
schooling then.”
He realized he was interested in
sports medicine, and re-enrolled at
UMB in the spring of 1995 as a Human Performances Fitness major.
“I went from athletic training to
strength and conditioning.”
As an extra curricular, he played
on the football team for the 95, 96,
and 97 seasons in division three
varsity.
“I met some great people on
those teams. A lot of people that
were on that team are good friends
of mine today. We definitely had a
good time.”
Skahan decided to go to UMass
Boston because it was close to
where he grew up in Squantum.
“I lived at home after graduating
from high school, and I also wanted
to continue to play football. I know
that football is now a non issue at
UMass Boston, but they had a team
at the time. I played football. I was
able to continue my education and
play football at the same time.”
Living in Quincy, he’d drive in to
UMB and sometimes hang out with
friends in the cafeteria between
classes, but he didn’t spend a lot of
time on campus.
“In the fall I would have practice
at the school, and then games on
Saturdays,” he says. “I worked part
time as a bar tender on Saturday
nights, and I also worked at a mental health clinic, a homeless shelter
for mentally ill people and that was
my work to pay the bills throughout
the year.”
His favorite class was Kinesiology, taught by Gail Arnold. He also
liked the exercise classes taught by
Avery Faigenbaum.
“Those classes were foundation
classes where I learned about the
body and how it works,” he says.
“Dr. Faigenbaum was really a guy
that spearheaded strength and conditioning. He introduced a lot of
students to the field of strength and
conditioning.”
Skahan also enjoyed taking classes with Kyle Mckinnes, an exercise
physiology professor, and Duncan
Nelson, who taught an inspiring
writing course.
“It’s a unique school in the fact
that it was a commuter school, and
the fact that people were very dedicated when they were at school, and
they had other things going on in
their life while they were students.
They were very serious while they
were at school, making sure their
work was done, and focused while
they had their away from campus
life going on as well.”
Shaken felt comfortable among
his peers at UMB.
“They were students like myself.
There weren’t too many kids who
just went to school there. They also
had other responsibilities and commitments such as outside work or
other things going on in their life.
They weren’t just. It wasn’t a typical college where the kids just mom
and dad dropped you off in September and picked you up in June.”
He says it’s a good school for people in the Boston area who want to
do well in life.
“It’s an avenue for people to
achieve their dreams and goals,”
he says. “I’m certainly a product of
that.”
After completing undergrad at
UMB, Skahan worked for a strength
and conditioning company and
interned with the United States
Olympic Committee in Colorado
Springs. Then he went on to gradu-
ate school at the University of Minnesota. Holding an MA of Education in Physiology, Skahan worked
briefly at the University of North
Dakota and then Boston College
before getting a job as a strength
and conditioning coach with the
Anaheim Ducks.
“They were looking for a strength
and conditioning coach and the
new head coach at the time reached
out to a friend of mine’s friend, and
asked if they knew of anyone, and I
was lucky to be at the right place at
the right time to be recommended
for that position.”
Skahan’s passion for fitness took
years to develop into a career, and
he credits UMB with inspiring
his determination to a life around
sports medicine.
“It’s ok if it takes longer than four
years if life gets in the way. Just stick
to your goals and you can achieve
them.”
Building Communities
Stifling a giddy burst of laughter,
Leila Kohler remembers the interview that altered the course of her
life. As a student, in 1998, Kohler
joined a qualitative research study
about diversity and interviewed
Steven, who was the coordinator of
what was then the LGBT Center.
“Steve was amazing,” she says.
“He was one of those phenomenal
student leaders, just somebody who
absolutely needs to manage a place,
and my role in meeting him was to
just record his story, and hear what
he had to say about life from there,
especially for the LGBT community.”
Steven’s resolve and energetic effort to bring awareness to LGBT issues impressed Kohler. With some
political maneuvering, and after
raising $45,000, Steven brought the
Ryan White AIDs Quilt to UMass
Boston in 1998, its first appearance
in Boston.
Several months after her conversations with Steve, as the fall semester approached, Kohler still saw
posters looking for a new LGBT
Center coordinator.
“I had seen them before, and it
fueled me with a certain call to action, because nobody was applying.”
Being LGBT coordinator was a
contentious position, and nobody
was ready to step into Steve’s shoes.
The center had been a target for
some hateful graffiti, and the occasional verbal epithet. It was an
intense time of protest for the gay
community, just two years after
President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. Compelled
to act, Kohler felt insecure about
stepping in on her own.
“For one thing I was engaged to
a man at the time, and didn’t necessarily identify with any of those letters in LGBT.”
She had talked about the opening
with Lauren Craig Redmond, in her
Feminist Theology class with Kath-
Leila Kohler, Religious Studies, 1999
leen Sands, and the two decided to
lead the center together.
“I had another friend through
the religious studies department
named Haywood Harvey, and I
reached out to him too and the
beauty of that is that, you have this
20 something caucasian straight
girl, and a lesbian, and a gay man,
folks who were also older than me.
They were both of the generation
that went through part of the civil
rights movement and Stonewall
and all that. They’re both AfricanAmerican, and have a very definite
picture of LGBT history and the
universe of advocating for things.”
While they were arranging the
space, and figuring out how to manage it, Kohler asked Harvey what he
would like to see in the center. He
said that a person should be able
to come to the center and ask for
breakfast if they needed it, and just
have a place to hang out and meet
likeminded people.
“It was about couches and welcomingness, and there were a few
people that were there pretty much
daily. It was a hang out space. It was
a place for people to congregate and
be with each other, and feel safe,
and propelled to moments of creativity with each other, to moments
of advocacy and support with one
another. That was the goal, and
that’s exactly what it became.”
“Between the three of us we developed a hyperattenuated focus on
how to advocate for LGBT, which at
UMass Boston it wasn’t just about
youth. People who ended up being
in the Center were of all ages, because that’s UMass Boston. We had
vets in there. We had people who
were straight allies in there. We had
the span of it. We had multiple conversations about race and ethnicity,
and how that plays out in gay communities.”
Experiences in this diverse group
fueled Kohler’s passion for social
justice. Now she develops communities with hard working families in
low-income situations, working for
Habitat for Humanity in Baltimore.
In this work she uses those skills
of advocacy and keep-to-it-iveness
that she gained from her involvement in the LGBT center.
“I do not live in those communities, just as I didn’t live in the LBGT
community, but it’s about getting
in there and hearing it, and moving things according to how people
speaking for themselves really want
to have them done, not my vision,
but their vision or the vision.”
After graduation, Kohler went to
Harvard Divinity School, a longtime ambition, propelled by UMass
Boston.
“I got in [to UMB] with the intent of being a Sociology major,
but I ran into Professor Richard
Horsley. His program was just so
amazing that I decided to just start
concentrating on religious studies
immediately. That was always my
intent, but their program was just
so full, and extensive.”
She loved the Religious Studies
Department, headed by Richard
Horsley and Kathleen Sands.
“Having the opportunity to have
somebody like Horsley as a mentor
was intense. He was so devoted to
the mission of UMass Boston, serving students who were sometimes
from disenfranchised places, or
backgrounds, or who are certainly
stressed in some way or another.
He was so devoted to public education in that way, and he provided so
much of his own personal time. The
man was an energy powerhouse.“
Kohler remembers UMB as an
unusual environment, an amalgamation of people who would never
come together in any other context.
“I think that what I learned above
and beyond it all, and this actually
really relates directly to my interview buddy, Steven, who caused me
to go in and to run the [LGBT] center, is the kind of ambition and willingness to not just seek change in
the world, but to absolutely actively
effect it in any dogged, grassroots,
more sophisticated, networking, or
other profound kind of way. There’s
an unstoppable-ness to the kind of,
‘I will.’ That’s kind of a mantra that
can come out of it, ‘I will do what
I believe to be right, and do what I
can to cause it to be.’ I’ve been a student in private institutions, more
than one, and the kind of can-do-it
attitude, the ability to pick it up and
keep going on no matter how many
setbacks there might be, is pretty
particular. You don’t always get to
be at a place where people are so actively aware of the kind of opportunity that they have and the way that
they can try to transform it.”
2000s
www.umassmedia.com
Philosophy Major Fights for Social Justice
15
Lauren Craig Redmond, Philosophy, 2000
Imagine Thanksgiving, 1998, the
turkey, the stuffing, all the sauces,
the warmth within, the chill without, students anticipating a few free
days. For those who don’t have a
family, or who are not invited home
for the holiday, Laura Craig Redmond announced a LGBT community meal:
“If you are in a relationship with
a same-sex partner, a different race
partner, or God forbid, a partner
who is both, the folks can sometimes be less than warm,” Redmond
wrote in the student newspaper.
“Come holiday time, many in these
situations are left out in the cold.”
It was one of the first major events
Redmond organized through the
LGBT Center. She and her co-coordinator, Leila Kohler, had met in a
religious studies class the semester
before, in the spring of 1998.
As a student, Redmond aspired
to become a philosophy professor.
But when she was mid-way through
her degree Larry Foster, chair of the
philosophy department at the time,
showed her research showing how
well philosophy majors do in law
school. This inspired her to take on
the extra Philosophy and Law program. After graduation, Redmond
went into law school.
“I like blameworthy law,” She
says. “I like knowing that somebody’s right and somebody’s wrong,
within the context of the law. I
couldn’t be a tax attorney, for example.”
As a part of her practice Redmond takes court appointments
that public defenders cannot take,
and represents those people being
charged with crimes at a major discount, one fourth of her cheapest
fee.
“People always tell me I could
have made so much more money,”
She says. “But I like who I am, and
that’s more important than money.”
This activist spirit, the desire
make life better for other people,
already inhabited Redmond when
she attended UMB in her 40s.
Training in philosophy, she felt,
would help her better advocate for
the downtrodden, and that is the
reason she returned to college.
“It’s really paid off,” She says. “I
formulate arguments better, and
there are more tracks in my arguments thanks to my philosophy
training.”
At graduation her father called
to congratulate her on having completed the “32-year undergraduate
program.” All of her siblings had already graduated from college when
she finished, in 2000.
“I waited till the last damn minute to get my undergraduate degree,” Redmond says. “So it doesn’t
matter if you drop out. If you find
a passion, go back to school. You’ll
find a way.”
For Redmond, UMass Boston
was the easiest and cheapest option.
“I didn’t have to take gym and all
that. It’s an adult campus.”
As a student, she championed social justice.
“I’ve always been a bit of a rabble-rouser. I came up through the
60s, the civil rights movement, the
woman’s movement, the gay rights
movement. I like to fight when
there is injustice, and make it right.
I heard of four or five or six different instances within a month or so,
of discrimination on campus, and
that pissed me off.”
“My friend Tiffany and I were
incensed about the number of instances of out and out discrimination on campus, mostly toward gay
people, but some also based on race,
and of course gender, against women. So we started a movement to
get the office of the undergraduate
ombudsperson reinstated. During
that time we made presentations
in classes, but also we interviewed
every single dean, and all of them
supported us, except for the dean
who was supposed to be handling
that stuff. I remember the look on
her face when she heard what we
were doing.”
Through the efforts to appoint
someone who would advocate for
student rights, Redmond remembers how she made friends with
Leila Kohler through the LGBT
student center.
“I’m a gay woman, and my friend
Leila is straight. This was the late
90s, and people were like ‘Does
she have the right to be a coordinator.’ I was like, ‘Yeah!’ To me it
was an eye opener, because I didn’t
realize how many gay people were
reverse-bigoted against straights. I
mean, people got really upset that a
straight woman was co-heading the
LGBT Center. I just thought that
it was a sign of progress. We were
co-coordinators, and we did weekly
rap sessions so that people could
come in and have a free space to ask
questions, and to get rid of their homophobia.”
As an older student, Redmond
learned it was ok to spend the majority of her time fighting evil. She
became a social justice warrior, defending the honor of her fellow students at every opportunity.
“One guy was going into the
garage, underneath the Wheatley
building, and somebody said something to him like, “faggot,” and,
“fudge packer,” and they didn’t even
know this guy.”
She helped several students talk
through emotional situations, and
before she left she organized a
vigil for Matthew Shepard, a boy
from Wyoming who was killed and
strapped to a barbed wire fence.
“That was Leila’s idea,” she says.
“The Westboro Baptist Church
picketed his funeral with signs that
said, “Matthew Shepard is burning in hell.” “God hates fags.” Their
sole mission in life is to eradicate
gay males from the universe. She
wanted to hold a vigil in response
to that, and it was during the time
when we were doing the movement
to get the ombudsperson reinstated, and a couple of hundred people
showed up during the course of the
day.”
Redmond’s favorite class was
Formal Logic, Philosophy 120.
“Oh god, it was so geeky, and so
challenging, and I just loved every
minute of it, with Professor Roma
Farion.”
Though she hasn’t been back on
campus lately, she is excited to hear
about the improvements,
“When I was there the science
building had a split that was in some
places like two feet wide, and it
went the whole length of the building. That was because somebody
had blown something up in the lab,
and all that pressure built up, but
they couldn’t afford to fix it. So, I’m
thinking any improvement to the
physical plant is good because back
then the campus was held together
with spit and a prayer.”
Banking on Success
Heather Dawood, English and Communication, 2003
Heather Dawood has been volunteering for as long as she can
remember. She helps wherever
needed, from crime watch to food
pantries to the Pan Mass Challenge
bike race. This year she is a captain for one of the bike race teams,
the Nancy Reagan Gulliver Chain
Gang, organizing and encouraging
volunteers to ride and financially
support research on multiple sclerosis in Massachusetts. She brought
her passion for service to UMass
Boston, got involved in student life,
became a student leader, and the
connections she made by serving
UMB students propelled her into a
career in banking.
“I got here through my experience at UMass,” Dawood said. “As a
student I was pretty active on campus through clubs, but then became
involved in the Student Senate and
eventually was elected to be a Student Trustee. Through that experience one of the Trustees mentored
me and I came in to work at Citizens Bank after graduation.”
Now Dawood works in Treasury
Solutions at Citizens Bank. The
details of her job sound rather tedious, involving commercial banking and purchase programs for
mid-market clients (like hospitals).
Basically she helps large institutions
make transactions. She worked her
way through a variety of positions
at Citizens, managed a team across
the entire footprint of the organization, and most recently designed a
credit program for her clients.
Over the phone from her office
Dawood had one piece of advice for
students:
“I recommend that people get to
know the administrators in Student
Life. People like Donna Neal and
Joyce Morgan helped me to understand how I could get more out of
my academic experience than simply going to class. I would say, don’t
always rush on and off campus.
Spend a little time understanding
how much UMass Boston has to
offer.”
Dawood’s journey through higher eduction began on the highway
during a commute to work.
“On my way to work one morning I turned around and made a
decision that I was going to make
changes and get myself back to
school. I applied to UMass Boston.”
It was the best option for her in
terms of location.
“My first semester I was not matriculated, and I ended up getting
what was left over for courses.”
She always looked for ways to
connect with other students. At the
time UMass Boston was completely
a commuter school, with an slightly
older student body. She found a
community by hanging out in the
cafe that used to in Wheatley Hall.
“It was through that social environment at the Wits End where I
built relationships with classmates
and found myself getting involved
with the Student Senate.”
She went from being a Student
Senator to the president of the Student Senate, and then from there
she ran for the Trustee position.
“The following year was I elected
Student Trustee. I had an experience that was probably as close to
living on campus as I could.”
Through the Student Senate Dawood connected with members of
all the clubs and centers on campus.
“Those relationships have carried on in my life outside of UMass.
One of my favorite programs was
the Beacon Leadership Program.
We were given mentors and we met
regularly. I was able to run a breast
cancer awareness campaign on
campus.”
Organizing this community
event, Dawood brought health care
professionals to a panel along with
a breast cancer survivor who was a
student, and also a student who lost
a family member to breast cancer.
The panel got a lively dialogue going about what receiving a cancer
diagnosis is like, and the importance of early diagnosis.
“We also had the health care professionals on campus giving lessons
on how to do self-examinations,
scheduling appointments to come
in and have private lessons. It was
a monumental experience for me
as well as for other students, in just
bringing breast cancer awareness
onto campus.”
The a list of professors that impacted Dawood is long. Mark
Schlesinger, who headed up the
communication program, taught
her the value of modern communication techniques by leading a
class through internet forums and
discussion boards.
The very first class she took was a
300 level art history class with Paul
Tucker.
“I was discouraged because I
hadn’t built that foundation for
studying yet, so I failed miserably.
I went to him, and exposed my vulnerabilities and fears, and he took
the time to help me to build confidence in the knowledge that I had
been taking away from the lectures,
and to build out my study skills,
and to tap into my own passion and
interest in art history.”
“The greatest thing that I learned
is to set your sights high, ask for
help, and recognize the value of
perseverance. The opportunities
to be successful in achieving your
goals are available to anyone at
UMass.”
Dawood returns to campus occasionally.
“I visited a couple of times. My
most recent experience was this
past summer when I did the MS
Boston to Cape Cod bicycle ride,
and UMass Boston hosted the starting line for what turned out to be a
160 mile bike ride.”
Considering all of the current
construction, Dawood remembers
being part of the groundbreaking
ceremony for the Campus Center.
“I dug a shovel into the ground
as the Student Trustee. Going back
and visiting that facility, it’s just so
impressive and it makes me proud.
It’s wonderful that the Commonwealth is investing money to beautify the campus to match the academic potential that it presents, so
it’s not just beautiful from the inside
out, but it’s beautiful to look at from
the outside in as well.”
16
2000s
Discipline, Dedication, Work Ethic, and Good Character
Seith Bedard, Exercise Science and Physical Education, 2004
In the last game of the baseball
season, playing against the University of Southern Main, team captain
Seith Bedard had lead the Beacons
closer to the Little East Conference
tournament than the team had ever
been at that point in the history of
the University.
“It’s the bottom of the 9th,” he
says. “We’re down by one run, the
tying run on second base. Our
clean up hitter, Rob Young, hit a
ball out to right field that he absolutely crushed, and the bench went
crazy because we thought we won
the game.”
Players were jumping up, and
running out of the dugout celebrating as the ball sailed up over the
field. But Beacon stadium was notorious for its headwinds.
“The wind coming off the water
would literally be about 40 or 50
miles an hour and would knock
balls down consistently. As we saw
the ball going out of the park, the
wind started gusting and blew the
ball back into play, and the right
fielder caught it for the last out. We
went from total euphoria to complete heartbreak in a matter of a
minute.”
The team still gathers every year
for a cookout at Coach Bettencourt’s house.
“It’s the ongoing joke, if we’d
played in any other field in the state
that ball’s a home run. A lot of us
were excited a few years back when
we saw plans that the school would
reach an agreement with BC High.
They were planning on building a
real state of the art stadium on campus there.”
Since Bedard left the UMB baseball team has played in the college
world series.
“When I went there we did not
have field to practice. My high
school was more equipped to house
a baseball team than the campus
was, and I can say I had a small part
in really changing that program. It
means an awful lot to me to come
back every year and see not just
how well the team is doing but seeing the athletics program, and the
student body really buying into
things, and they’re really making a
conscious effort to make sure that
these programs are done right.”
Bedard enrolled in UMB primarily to play baseball.
“My senior year of high school
UMass Boston got a new coach, a
gentleman by the name of Mark
Bettencourt, and at the time the
baseball program wasn’t really
good.”
UMass Boston didn’t even have
a home stadium, but what sold Bedard on joining the UMB baseball
team was the opportunity to really
make an imprint on the school athletically.
“The campus center was being
built, and since then the campus
has flourished, and in a small way I
was able to be a part of changing the
culture of the athletics program.”
Couch Bettencourt brought an
exciting energy to the baseball
field, and Bedard believed that he
could help change the culture and
how people in the Little East Conference, or even in New England
viewed UMass Boston.
“He had a saying printed on
our shirts: Discipline, Dedication,
Work Ethic, and Good Character.
He always drove that into his players and it’s something that not only
did we take on the field with us, but
we took off the field in the classroom and in the community.”
The coaches in the athletics department enforce a strict study hall
period that athletes attend every
day.
“Our grades were closely monitored, so if not in the weight room
I was in study hall, and if I wasn’t
in study hall I was over in the library doing some studying or get-
ting some tutoring,” Bedard says.
“Academics were taken just as seriously as athletics, so not only was
there an expectation and a demand
to work hard in the weight room
and on the field but there was just
as much focus put on your studies,
and making sure you made grade
point average, and you were on
course to graduate.”
As a high school coach, and administrator now Bedard instills
those lessons into his students.
“Being a part of the baseball program was very time consuming.
It was a real demand,” he says. “It
shaped the person that I am today, and as a matter of fact it really
shaped the kind of educator that I
am because the rigor and the demands of being a student athlete at
UMass Boston was very difficult,
and I took a lot of the lessons that
I learned there and implemented
them into the school that I work at
right now.”
One of the biggest things that
Bedard took away from UMB, was
from a class that he took in his
junior year with professor Avery
Faigenbaum called Project JUMP.
“It was an acronym, Junior Urban
Movement Program at the Murphy
school down the street from the
campus, and the class required students to create and implement an
after school program for the kids of
Dorchester.”
It changed Bedard outlook on
what he wanted to do with his life.
“To be thrown into that at such
a young age and basically given the
opportunity to create a program
and to work with these kids, the
lessons he gave us with the kids of
Dorchester were invaluable. They’re
inner city kids. They’re tough kids.”
After graduation, Bedard taught
special education for a few years,
and ultimately he became the director of the Peabody Learning Acade-
my, which is an alternative program
affiliated with Peabody High School
for students who are at risk or who
have dropped out.
“My job is to get them back on
the right path, and I’ve been really successful in getting a lot of
these kids into college, and into
other post secondary schools so it
really stems back to my time with
Dr. Fagenbaum. That class out of all
the classes that I’ve taken at UMass
Boston that was really the one that
left an imprint on me.”
Bedard remembers his professors
being rigorous, and having high expectations. UMB felt like an adult
place to learn, with a hard working
culture.
“Because of the dynamics, the
schoolwork there were a lot of
people that were a lot older than
me, as a matter of fact there were
some people in my classes that were
old enough to be my parents, but
the classes were so engaging you
really got a chance to know all the
students, and it was much like a really big family atmosphere. It was
great.”
The only thing Bedard regrets
about his is not being able to be an
undergrad at UMB when the master plan is complete.
“The campus, it’s beautiful. It’s so
modern. It’s really nice to see that
the state has invested time money
and resources in really making that
school top notch, one of the gems
of all of New England. When I went
there esthetically it really wasn’t the
nicest thing you saw going through
town, but now you really can’t help
but stop and just look at the place,
and walk around campus. To see
that the school has really blossomed and flourished over the past
ten years, it’s made me really proud
to be able to say that’s where I went
to school.”
Resource for the People of Massachusetts
Jason Campos, English, 2004
September 11, 2015 — Jason
Campos stands in the hallway outside of the CAPS office in Wheatley
Hall remembering 9/11, fourteen
years earlier when he was in that
same spot after class.
“That was an interesting day,” he
says. “I was in class. I can’t remember what the class was, but I went
back up to the Wits End, on the
Wheatley 3rd floor, and the manager at the time came up to me and
said, a plane hit one of the towers,
and I had no idea what he meant.”
The chancellor called off classes
for the day, and the campus evacuated.
“I remember going back to class
the next day, and a professor in the
English department took about
a half hour, and just talked to us
about what it meant in terms of this
very scary situation, and why it’s
important to be cognizant of what’s
going on in the world.”
The anti-Islamic sentiment that
followed 9/11 nationwide often
came up in discussions on campus.
“I had a good friend at the time,
Hakim, who was scared because he
didn’t know what was going on, and
we kept on seeing these images on
television of the planes hitting the
buildings, and of course we’re getting attacked by some place over in
the Middle East.”
Professors at UMass Boston
come from everywhere.
“They prod you, and really try to
make you think about what you’re
trying to learn. Many of them are
from Harvard, which is fine, if you
want. But they really do try to make
you think of the content that you’re
supposed to learn. I appreciate that,
and the student body is diverse. It’s
wonderful. I can’t think of a better
place to have people be.”
Working for Joyce Morgan and
Donna Neal in the student activities office, Campos started as a
writer on staff at the Mass Media.
Soon he was the Sports Editor, then
Managing Editor, and then Editor
in Chief. He worked hard on the
managerial end to just to keep the
paper printing week to week.
“I always have an interest in trying to bring students in and have
them find a place within our social
aspect.”
He was also the Fiction Editor
for the Watermark’s 11th volume,
Spring 2004.
“I was on committees to review
the submissions and make sure that
everything got a fair shake.”
As an employee he helped with
the administration of several clubs
and centers, and always had access
to the offices.
“I was sort of the back end of
making sure that that functioned
well, making sure that I could support those students so that it would
function well.”
“I’m proud of being a mentor.
That’s what I think my legacy is
when I was at the Mass Media, as a
mentor.”
Campos is a background kind of
guy, soft spoken and quick to promote the people around him.
“There was a challenge of funding,” he says. “What I had to do was
advocate for resources, and that’s
not necessarily something that
comes naturally to somebody who’s
being a journalist. You’re a journalist or you’re trying to be someone
who’s trying to make sure that an
institutional unit continues to exist.”
He spent a lot of time in the Wits
End, near where he works now.
Working with UMB administrators, Campos learned to measure
his expectations and help others,
and he also learned diplomacy.
“You want to be a student newspaper, and do that, but at the same
time you need to also balance that
against trying to get the stories out
there, and trying to be a mentor to
young students.”
Now working on a middle floor
in Wheatley as the Manager of
Online Education within the Col-
lege of Advancing and Professional
Studies (CAPS). It’s an exciting
time to be on staff, watching the
university grow.
“The campus is constantly changing, and it will. I mean they have a
25 year master plan, so it’s ongoing.
It’s evolving. It’s not going to stop.”
“We have a diverse make up, and
that goes from student population,
to staff, admins, and even though
we have constant frustration, challenges, et cetera, it’s just a whirlwind
of experience, and even though it’s
frustrating at times we preserver. It
can be rewarding, and something
that you can look back on and say
yes, I was a part of that.”
Campos’s father in law was a
UMB professor in the 1960s, and
his wife went to nursing school at
UMB, and he carries on the legacy.
“I’d like to see UMass Boston
continue with its original mission
of being a source of inspiration for
students who want to have an education in an urban environment.”
“I know change is inevitable in
what UMass Boston is and what it
will become, but I also think that
it’s important to be a different kind
of institution for higher education.”
“We don’t want to be Harvard.
We don’t want to be BU or BC,
and it’s not to say there’s anything
wrong with those institutions. We
just want to be different. We are an
instuition of higher education that
is a resource for people who have
grown up in the city of Boston.”
www.umassmedia.com
2000s
Life Dedicated to Community Service
17
Michael Herbert, Community Planning and Public Affairs, 2007
In his very first class in graduate
school, Michael Herbert learned to
navigate The Power Wheel.
“You look at an issue, look at all
the different stake holders that are
involved with it, and basically it’s
for finding out who you need to
have on your side, and who has a
vested interest in a policy issue,
even if they don’t know they have a
vested interest.”
In the class New England Political Environment, with professor
John Viola, Herbert learned to organize support for public policies,
something he uses regularly now
as the Assistant Town Manager
of Ashland, which is in the Metro
West area of Massachusetts.
“When you have angry residents
screaming at you, and you get
bashed in the paper and things like
that, that’s not fun, but if I wasn’t
passionate about this job I wouldn’t
be able to last in it, and that goes for
anybody who’s in a management
or administrative function in local
government. The ability to see the
effects of things that you do on a
daily basis, and in people’s lives are
pretty powerful.”
Herbert discovered his interest in
local governance before enrolling as
an undergrad at UMass Boston. He
had dropped out of another institution, where he was a music major.
While working in the community
college system, he started getting
involved in local affairs in the town
of Winthrop, where he lived.
“I wanted to go toward a community planning role, so UMass Boston offered that degree and that’s
what initially interested me. When
I got there I had a great experience.
I had some great professors there
who took an interest in how I developed. I also got involved in student
life, Student Senate.”
While pursuing his interest in
policy and government, Herbert
wanted to be involved on campus.
“I wasn’t yet 30, but I was getting
close to it. I thought I could add
that type of perspective to student
government, and it was interesting.”
He applied for a job that the
Student Senate created called the
Student Educational Resource and
Advocacy Center Director, a liaison
role between student government
and the university administration
and some state level policy makers.
“I was able to be involved in
things like dorms on campus,
things that were at the time, even
though it wasn’t that long ago,
pretty controversial. But it was an
opportunity to be involved in that
discussion, and help the community reach some kind of consensus
about the way to go.”
Married, with a kid on the way,
going to school full time, and working part time, Herbert invested his
few free hours into the campus
community.
“If I was able to break away from
Columbia Point, it was usually to
spend time with family, so I spent
a lot of time there, but I didn’t have
much room for extra curriculars.”
He made a host of friends
through his work on the Student
Senate, and in the McCormack
School of Public Affairs he made
even more lasting connections.
“What was really great about
my grad program is we did it as a
cohort model, and so all twenty
of us went through every course
together, and that really created
some lasting relationships. There
are quite a few of us that went into
local government afterwards, and I
talk to a lot of them on a somewhat
regular basis just in my professional
capacity.”
Massachusetts local and state
government is a central focus in the
McCormack School, where Herbert
studied. The resources available at
Rocking City Hall
Joyce Linehan, American Studies BA 1996, MA 2006
Joyce Linehan says she has the
best job in Boston. As the Chief of
Policy in the Office of Mayor Martin J. Walsh, she works on a wide
and wonderful range of things,
from income inequality to human
trafficking, snow melting technology to online dog licensing, and
everything in between. Her path to
and from UMass was long and full
of twists and turns. She attended
UMB for approximately 20 years,
working all the while, and came out
with a BA and an MA in American Studies. While in college she
worked in the music industry. She
also started her own PR company
and volunteered on several political
campaigns.
Q: Why did you decide go to
UMB?
A: UMass took a chance on me.
Right out of high school, I flunked
out of another area college. I was
not ready to be in college. I went
off and worked for a few years, and
then approached UMass Boston.
They let me in on a trial basis, and
said I could matriculate if I did well
that semester.
UMass Boston connect the most local governance issues with national
and even international politics.
“You’ve got a wealth of resources
right there, just in the fact you’ve
got the [Massachusetts] Archives.
You’ve got the Kennedy Library,
and now you have the Kennedy Institute, so it’s a unique place from
a logistical standpoint, having access to different historical records
that you can use to research some
of your policy decisions that you
wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise.”
From his teachers and mentors
at UMB, Herbert learned commitment, and the value of investing
time in the success of others.
“I wouldn’t have been able to get
Q: Were you involved in any
clubs or student activities?
A: Not really, though I did help
curate a great festival of epic proportions there that no one came
to see. It was sometime in the 80’s.
It was five shows over the course
of a month and featured Charlie
Feathers, the McIntosh County
Shouters and Jessie Mae Hemphill
in super-rare Boston appearances.
I also helped bring Redd Kross to
campus. This was back when there
wasn’t a lot of campus activity!
Q: What was a favorite class or
activity that you did at UMB?
A: I loved all of my classes in
American Studies, History, Film
and Political Science.
Q: Do you remember any of your
professors or fellow students?
A: Sure. I still keep in touch with
many of them.
Q: What are the most important
things you learned at UMB?
A: I learned so much. I got a
great, expansive education from
really smart people – teachers and
students alike. Back then, the average age of a student was 28. There
were veterans, working people, el-
ders, etc. in all my classes.
Q: Have you been to campus
since you were a student? Any
thoughts on how the campus has
matured?
A: As a Dorchester native and
resident as well as a City official,
I get to campus fairly often. It has
changed a lot since I was there. I
like what the construction represents, but hope it ends in my lifetime!
Q: What’s one thing that you did
at UMass that you couldn’t have
done somewhere else?
A: I got a university education I
could afford. I would not have that
without UMass. It was the only
option for someone like me at the
time.
Q: Where did you spend most of
your time on campus?
A: Wheatley Hall! I also spent a
lot of time outside, smoking. We
did that back in the 80’s. Not anymore!
Q: Do you have any wishes for
UMB on its 50th birthday?
A: I wish the best for UMB, and
implore that it continues to serve
non-traditional students like me.
through undergraduate without a
few real key professors. One was
Ann Withorn. Another was Michael Stone. Another was Lauren
Oran-Rivera, and Andrew Leong.
All four of them were instrumental
in helping me work through my undergraduate degree.”
Several staff members, like Elaine
Ward, also influenced Herbert’s
studies.
“I really just enjoyed pretty much
all of the classes quite frankly. It
was a very diverse cross section.
Probably if I had to pick a favorite
it would be economics with Randy
Aldalda. I would be hard pressed to
pick a favorite in grad school.”
He enjoyed studying with such a
diverse student body, racially, demographically, and socioeconomically.
“I was in classes with those who
were just out of high school, and
with people who were in their 40s,
and going back to school to get another degree, or they had just never
finished, and that kind of life experience lends itself to better student
outcomes.”
Returning to campus occasionally for events related to local government Herbert enjoys observing
the growth and construction that
was just beginning when he was a
student.
“The times I go there are spaced
far enough apart to see dramatic
changes to the campus each time I
go, and I’m absolutely thrilled to see
the investment that’s being made
there, in the physical plant and the
infrastructure.”
Investment in infrastructure was
deeply needed when Herbert was a
student.
“When I went there, they just
had really started shutting down
the garage under Wheatley because
all the concrete was falling. To go
from that to seeing some of these
beautiful new structures being put
up is really cool.”
As UMB enters its 50th year,
Herbert hopes folks on campus
never forget where the campus
came from or where it’s going. Most
of all he hopes students remember
that the best success comes from
making your community better.
“You get out what you put in,” he
says.
18
2000s
Lens Focused on Diversity
Michael Hogan, English, 2008
Michael Hogan grew up in Canton Massachusetts, a homogeneous
suburb 20 miles south of Boston.
“It is not a diverse town at all. I
grew up in a town where, when I
was going to school, I graduated
high school in 1997, and I could
count the minority students on one
hand in my grade. It was a very caucasian class, and it was just the way
the town was, and so I grew up not
really understanding diversity.”
“To go to UMass, and have students from all around the world,
students of all ages, students from
all walks of life, for me was eye
opening, but also really empowering.”
After high school, Hogan spent
about eight years working, trying to
figure out what to do with his life,
and then he enrolled in Massasoit
Community College in Brockton.
After a few semesters of study, he
got the Foster Furcolo Scholarship.
“It got me into any state school
for free,” Hogan says. “At that point
I was 26 years old, and it was the
diversity of the school, and also the
closeness, but the quality of the education, of all the state schools that
I could choose from. It was by far
the best education for the money.”
Part way through his first semester a friend said something about
the Mass Media needing some writers, and Hogan made his way up to
the office and started writing articles for the arts and entertainment
section.
“Within almost a month I became the assistant arts editor, and
less than a month after that was
made the arts editor. It was just sort
of this whirlwind thing, and then I
worked as the arts editor for another semester after that before I went
on to be the Editor in Chief.”
The newspaper took up a majority of Hogan’s time, though he printed a few creative writing pieces in
the Watermark, the student literary
magazine. The students that gathered in the Student Media Office
became like a family to Hogan.
“The people that you work with,
not only are they colleagues but
they become good friends. Being
there Friday nights, finishing up
editing and laying out the paper,
and just sitting around the production computers with the production
team. Things like that are for me
some of the fondest memories.”
The media conventions in Washington DC and New York strengthened those bonds.
“We got a lot of schooling at the
conferences, but for me it was more
those moments sitting around the
production computer on Fridays
and picking out the final pictures
and things like that, or eating a sub
with everybody at editorial meetings, trying to come up with the
perfect spread and the perfect cover
and things like that. It was those
little things that were really the
great memories about the paper,
because they were more personal
cause it was you and your friends
putting this thing together, almost
on a whim. I still am good friends
with a number of the people from
the newspaper.”
One good friend, John Mozzarella who became one of the first
umassmedia.com webmasters, inadvertently met his wife at a barbecue at Hogan’s house. Hogan lists
a slew of names that made up the
Mass Media clique in his days as
editor.
“Most of us didn’t have any formal journalism background. For
the most part it was kind of just
learning on the fly, so being able to
sit down and you put together your
own newspaper.”
Hogan’s background was specifically arts and entertainment, so
when he became editor of the newspaper that was the focus of his writing, and he let the section editors
take control of their sections.
“What I learned there the most
was leadership skills, learning to be
able to teach people.”
He led from behind, editing,
picking up the slack and encouraging the writers around him.
“I remember times that Ryan
Thomas would come to me with
a story he had written, and it was
a really great story but there were
moments in it that could have used
a little bit more air. They were sports
articles, so telling what happened is
great, but bring the reader to there.
Don’t just tell them the facts. Describe what the atmosphere was
like.”
Sometimes Hogan would walk
out along the water toward Castle
Island, enjoying the scenery.
“When it was really really nice
in the summer, and I had to write
a paper, or I had to write a story or
something like that, I would often
take my notebook and walk down
the beach, and just sit on the beach
by myself, and start writing.”
He took most of his creative
writing classes with Askold Melnyzchuk.
“He ended up really helping
with the writing that I was doing,
which then in turn helped with the
newspaper, so the creative writing
workshops were probably my most
fun classes for the most part. Every
class had some kind of fun to it.”
Hogan also fondly remembers
his Shakespeare classes with Scott
Mysano and John Tobin.
“I don’t think I had a single bad
teacher there. I had classes that
were more difficult than others. I
had one entire class was on Virginia
Wolff, which in many was was a
great thing to study, but at the same
time when you’re taking four other
classes, and studying for finals and
things like that Virginia Wolff can
be draining to process.”
After graduation Hogan got his
Technophile Bumps House Music in Florida
teaching license in Massachusetts,
but on a whim moved to China for
a year. He taught English at to a city
just south of Shanghi, where he cultivated his eye for photography.
“Keeping in touch with family
was difficult, so I ended up keeping a blog, and taking photographs
while I was over there. It was a way
for me to express myself, and for
me to show what I see of the world
to people, and when I came back
that quickly blossomed into me deciding that I wanted to buy a fancier
camera.”
When Hogan moved back to
Boston he started a freelance photography business, which supplements his primary income running
the customer service department
for the Boston Tea Party Ships.
“This city is an incredible place to
come and learn,” Hogan says. “This
city has so much history in itself
and so much culture and so much
diversity, that it’s an incredible
place for anybody to come during
their formative years, becoming the
person that they are going to be.”
UMB worked well for Hogan,
commuting up from Canton, but
he’s excited to see how the university grows and expands with an increasingly diverse demographic.
“You didn’t have as much of your
normal American college crowd as
you would think. I fit in perfectly
because a lot of people were around
my age, but I could tell that some of
the younger college kids, the 19/20
year olds would look around the
classroom, ‘Oh this is weird, I’ve
got somebody’s grandmother next
to me.’”
“It’s almost like seeing the world
through the different people in
your classroom, and very quickly
understanding that not everybody
thinks the way you do, and then
maybe there’s a reason that they
don’t think the way that you do.”
David Facada, Management Information Systems, 2008
Born and raised in Dorchester, David Facada followed in his
uncle’s footsteps, going to UMass
Boston and studying information
technology.
“It was the cheapest option
among the colleges I picked,” Facada says. “My parents were saying we
support you, but you got to figure it
out financially. That’s why I went. I
was able to save a lot of money and
work, and go to school.”
He went to Boston College High
School, so he was familiar with the
campus, and liked the location.
“It’s a beautiful location, and was
convenient for me,” he says.
During school, Facada worked
for an IT company in Savin Hill,
and also worked an overnight shift
at a supermarket. He spent one semester working 9pm to 9am during the week, and going to classes
afterward.
“Everyone was working their butt
off,” he says. “Everyone had a job or
was working to get a job. That’s one
of the things that I enjoyed about
the student body is that since I was
also a working student, I felt like we
were all on the same page even if we
didn’t have residence halls.”
“It’s always been a little different
than most colleges. Everyone had
an understanding of what it meant
to go to school and work, and so it
felt good.”
“My goal was to bust my ass, and
be able to pay for my own schooling, and I was able to stay at home,
save money on rent, but I still payed
rent, and I was able to pretty much
for the first three years pay for my
school. Towards the fourth and the
fifth year I needed a little bit of assistance, but it didn’t put me in the
hole for more than $15,000, so it
felt really good to graduate without
a massive loan on top of my head.”
Starting as a Computer Science
Major, Facada didn’t do well on calculus in his first year, so he started
looking into other options.
“MIS looked interesting because
it was a high bred of computer technology and management, which
made sense to me. If you want to
have a successful career you gotta
learn how to manage at some point,
so I figured that that was my best
option.”
On campus Facade got involved
in Real Life Christian Fellowship,
which had a club space in the Campus Center. He found a group of
friends for pick up games here and
there, and a reason to go to campus
events.
“We had our own space where we
could meet up. When I was there
the campus was spread out, but
there wasn’t a lot of hang out and
chill places.”
The Campus Center opened for
Facada’s sophomore year, and he
vividly remembers its fresh smell
the first time he walked through the
doors.
“The sheer fact that you had a
student center, and it was high tech,
and it had the latest and greatest,
it definitely changed the dynamics
of the school. It was a place to escape once the garage started falling
apart.”
Over time the landfill had shifted
around the campus buildings on
Columbia Point, causing foundational issues.
“Pieces of concrete fell from the
ceiling in the garage onto cars, and
it just wasn’t safe. So they had to
close the whole thing down and use
some parking near the JFK library,
and right by the new student center.
It sucked because sometimes you
had to walk really far just to get to
class, but it wasn’t too bad as long as
you got there early.”
The classes Facada enjoyed most
were outside of his major. He particularly liked a music theory class.
“We listened to classical music
from all different periods and had
to memorize songs, and be able to
recognize them. It was really challenging because it’s not something
I’m good at, but I love music, so it
was great to get exposed to some
other types of music, and push my
memory.”
Working in the IT industry during school helped Facada find a job
in the industry once he graduated.
“I was taking these classes, and I
quickly learned that they were behind in relation to the industry, and
it was eye opening because compared to other focuses like nursing
and business and whatnot, technology changes so frequently that you
have to be consistently up to date,
and some of my classes were three
four years behind.”
In the IT field specifically certifications are almost worth more than
degrees.
“You get a degree they go, ‘Great,
you went through college. You
survived. Do you have any experience?’ If you have a certification it’s
valued a lot more. I realize looking
back that I was doing the right thing
by getting the experience and working while I was going to school. I’m
glad I have my degree. I’m glad I
went through that. I learned a lot.
Grew a lot, but I also know that I
came away with four or five years
of working experience on top of
graduating which I think made a
big difference.”
Facada’s advice to anyone interested in the IT field is to start fostering relationships with employers
early.
“One suggestion I would have,
would be to link up students with
potential employers and head hunters, job head hunters sooner than
later during the time that they’re
there, because I think that would
put everyone in a better position
to be ready, and not to feel so green
when they graduate.”
After graduation, Facada worked
at an IT company in Dedham for
a few years, before moving to Fort
Lauderdale Florida, where he now
works as an IT manager for Litai
Assets.
“I figured it was that time to kind
of spread my wings a little bit,” he
says.
In Florida Facada got into the
house music scene, and he began
pursuing a second career producing his own tracks and DJing in
clubs on weekends.
“I play some techno. I play some
tech house. I love stuff with good
solid vocals and bubbly base lines.
I pretty much play music that you
want to grove to, you want to move
around, where it’s hard to just sit
there and be still but not overbearing or ear shattering.”
It doesn’t pay well, $50-100 for
a night, but it’s a chance for him to
play his tracks in a loop with more
popular ones, and see how the
crowd reacts.
“I’ve aways worked with computers my entire life, so being in the industry is second nature to me. The
music part was a hobby, something
that I loved, and it grew on me over
the years. It was something that I
started to get good at. I wanted to
get my tracks out, so what better
way to get them played than to be
the DJ.”
www.umassmedia.com
2000s
Sailing Club Weathers Budget Cuts
Eliza Wilson, Philosophy and Public Policy, 2008
On Chancellor Keith Motley’s
second day of work at UMass Boston, Eliza Wilson burst into his office. Motley was Vice Chancellor
for Student Affairs at the time, and
he held the fate of the sailing program in his hands.
“I walked into his office frustrated and just upset, ‘How are you
going to allow this to happen?’”
Wilson says.
After weeks in a bureaucratic
muddle, trying to figure out who
could stop the seemingly inevitable end of the sailing club, Wilson
found a friend in Motley.
The CURE committee had recommended an array of cuts to
student programs, and the sailing
program was toward the top of the
list because of the expense of maintaining the boats. Wilson had just
joined the sailing club that year, and
she quickly became their most vocal advocate.
“We didn’t cut the sailing program,” Wilson said. “We’ve actually
invested in it and it’s grown. They
should probably get new boats, but
right now at least there’s still a program.”
Now an outside firm manages
UMass Boston’s boats, which allows
the public to rent and use UMass
Boston’s boats throughout the summer as well.
“They can provide more things
like stand up paddle board and kayaking, not just the 1973 mercury
sailboats that UMass Boston has,”
Wilson said. “So I think it’s a great
thing for not just UMass Boston
students, but also for the residents
of Dorchester and South Boston.”
Chancellor Motley’s receptiveness to Wilson’s request, his willingness to make her part of the
conversation, prompted her to join
student government. The skills she
honed as a Student Senator became
the foundation for he career in
administration. She works in risk
management for a real estate investment firm, the Berkshire Group.
“My time at UMB was transformative,” she says. “I got involved in
the decision making process, and I
learned how to own the process.”
After advocating for sailing, Wilson joined in a slew of campus activities including the Beacon Think
Tank, the Investment Club, the
Skateboarding Club, and the Sustainability Club.
“I was able to get involved in anything that I was interested in, not
just in the classroom, and I learned
how the university functions.”
She got to know all of the Vice
Chancellors on a first name basis.
“They’d take the time to explain
the administration of the school,”
she says. “I learned a lot from my
UMass Boston professors and ad-
Speaking from a sidewalk in San
Francisco (judging from honks and
feedback through the phone), Erica
Mena-Landry reflected on the undergrad experience that catapulted
her into the publishing industry.
“I was the kind of person that
took classes with the same professors over and over again, and everything that I took was great. I actually can’t think of a class that I took
at UMass that I didn’t like.”
The two professors that she took
the most classes with were Askold
Melnyczuk in the English Department, and Kathleen Sands in the
Study of Religion Department.
“One of the things about Kathleen’s classes, there was a group of
six of us that took all of her classes.
Any class that she offered we were
in it, and the six of us have stayed
friends. In fact I live two blocks
away from one of them and see her
every week, so that was another really meaningful group that I was
involved with that formed essentially because we were all groupies
of this professor. We were originally
a study group for her class because
it was really hard, and we stayed
friends for the entirety of our experience at UMass. My experience
at UMass was just so incredible.
There’s nothing bad that I have to
say about it. Everything was good.”
Asked what she learned, MenaLandry glibly responds, “How to
multitask.” But there’s more to it
than that.
“I learned a lot about who I am
and the kinds of things I’m good at,
and how to find people that would
mentor and encourage me. That’s
the kind of thing I learned outside
of the classroom, through student
groups and activities, on the Senate, and in my job. That’s probably
the most important thing I learned,
who I am.”
Active on campus, Mena-Landry
worked in the admissions office,
edited the Watermark, worked at
WUMB, and served in the Student
Senate.
“All of those experiences and the
community available to me outside
of the classes were really important
to my experience there. It shaped
my time there, and has shaped everything I’ve done since leaving.”
After graduating from UMass
Boston in 2008 Mena-Landry created Anomalous Press, which recently published a portion of UMB
professor Askold Melnyczuk’s
forthcoming novel, “Smedley’s Secret Guide to World Literature.”
Emblematic of marketing challenges in the publishing industry in
general, at the 2013 AWP conference in Boston Mena-Landry set up
a booth for Anomalous Press and
sold out on promo shirts and mugs,
screen printed with the phrase “I
Prefer to Remain Anomalous,” but
left with unsold books. Online the
press has branches into new forms
of literary expression, with a mission of “publishing literary text, advancing audio forms and creation,
and supporting all sorts of alternative realities of the near future.” It’s
an amalgamation of old and new
technology. Mena-Landry designs
the books in unique detail, and in
print they are a pleasure to hold.
Each of the nine chapbooks avail-
ministrators. I’ve been to three,
now with my MBA four schools,
and not every school administrator
in other colleges appreciate a student knocking on their door asking
administrative questions about the
running of the university”
“I can tell you, what makes UMB
different is that UMass Boston
truly is a research university with a
teaching soul.”
One of Wilson’s favorite memories of her time at UMB involved
some delicate financial maneuvering, when she became part of the
Sustainability Club.
“We created UMRET, UMass
Renewable Energy Trust,” Wilson
says.
A Student referendum asked students if they would support a fee
for generating renewable energy
solutions on campus. 96% students
voted in favor and the fund was ap-
proved by the board of Trustees.
In celebration, Wilson and two
other members of the club planted
a tree next to the Campus Center,
near the side exit where the Admissions office is located.
“We planted this tree to mark our
growing commitment to promote
sustainability in the built environment, transportation, and community investment in UMass Boston,
Dorchester and South Boston.”
Dorms were a hot issue when
Wilson was a student.
“There was a huge push against
dorms by the locals. I would go to
the civic association meetings.”
The university’s neighbors in
Savin Hill, where Wilson had rented an apartment, arranged a UMass
committee and they were looking
for members.
“I volunteered,” Wilson says.
“Afterwards we had a little gathering out by the door and I asked
what the committee was for, after
they had already said I could be
the chair, and they said, ‘We need
to make sure UMass Boston doesn’t
bring students into our neighborhood.’ I said, ‘Um. Hi.’”
She introduced herself, and told
them that the guys living in the
house with regular loud parties late
into the night were not UMass students (she’d investigated).
“I think that maybe clarified that
UMass Boston students are not
wild party animals roaming the
streets of Dorchester. The average
UMass Boston student is very involved and engaged in their school,
and their studies, and what they
want. They’re very driven students.”
Being part of the student government helped Wilson develop connections all around campus.
“We knew we were the elected officials on campus, and we took that
seriously. It was a unique time for
For the Love of Literature
19
the university. There was a search
for a Chancellor. Most of the students, including myself, wanted
Keith Motley to be the chancellor.”
The most important thing that
she learned was how to understand
“the process.”
“Know how you can get involved,
and only when you’re involved can
you change the process. We can sit
back and say oh that’s bad, or they
should be doing this.
“When people are making decisions or rules or laws or policies
you actually can get involved and
you can ask questions, and you can
change the status quo by caring
enough to get involved and digging
to figure out who they are.”
Through classes with Laurence
Blum and Arthur Millman, Wilson
pursued her interests in policy and
developed a knack for philosophy.
“Being at the only public research
university in Boston, having access
to the state house, I got a real understanding of how decisions in the
legislature impact UMass Boston.
I had access to go there and watch
votes happen, to speak with legislators. I learned how to do that at
UMass Boston with Ken Lemanski,
a chief of staff at the chancellor’s office. He explained how it all works.
Things don’t just happen without
someone knocking on some door
and asking for something.”
When Wilson arrived on Campus, the Campus Center was just
being built, and she had no idea
what it was. She ended up attending
the ribbon cutting.
“I got to see UMass Boston
through a very transformative time,
and see how and why the decisions
were made the way they were. I
wasn’t in student government until
we were in the Campus Center, but
I was in the sailing club, and they
had an office in Wheatley.”
Erica Mena-Landry, English and Religion, 2008
able for sale on the website (anomalouspress.org) has an intimate feel,
specially made.
Working in San Francisco as the
Managing Director of American
Literary Translators Association,
Mena-Landry is making a life out of
literature. She is also the Managing
Editor of Drunken Boat (drunkenboat.com), an online arts journal.
On the phone from the other side
of America, she reminisces about
the experiences that got her started.
“Two things that impacted my
life more than anything else: one
was the work that I did for the Watermark, which got me started in
book design and publishing, and
those are two of the skills that I have
built a career on; the other was the
Student Senate, which in addition
to building a lot of skills in terms of
administration, and organization,
and running meetings, those really
practical skills, I met my husband
on the Student Senate, so that was
really important.”
Mena-Landry went to an alternative high school that didn’t have
classes or grades.
“When I was beginning to apply for college I realized that my
options were a little bit limited, so
I started taking a summer class at
UMass, a poetry class with Pam
Annas from the English department, just to prove that I could do
college level work. I loved the campus, and I loved the feel of the English class so much that I decided to
apply to UMass and only to UMass,
and luckily I got in.”
As a student she took on a host of
responsibilities.
“I don’t imagine that there’s that
much autonomy at other universities, and that was a huge benefit in
my education, being thrown into a
situation where I had to learn how
to do everything. The trust placed
in students in leadership roles is
absolutely unique to UMass in my
experience.”
Now Mena-Landry follows the
changes on campus from afar.
“I did hear about dorms in the
alumni newsletter. Dorms were sort
of a hot button issue when I was
there. It was an entirely commuter
campus. I’m not sure if that’s true
anymore. It’s definitely something
that we spent a lot of time talking
about on the Senate.”
“At the time when I was there I
was extremely against it. I didn’t
think that it was something that we
needed. My fear was that it would
change the dynamic of the campus
in such a way that it would no longer be the place that I loved it for
being. And one of the reasons that
I applied to UMass Boston, and not
any of the other UMass-es was that
it was a commuter campus. That
was very important to me. I didn’t
want to be on a campus where
commuters where a minority. So
those were my feelings as a student.
Having moved out into the world
and having been at four different
universities since with dorms, I
think I would have slightly different questions and concerns. Perhaps my thinking has become more
nuanced, but I don’t know if I can
weigh in. All I know are rumors.”
Whatever ends up happening,
UMB continues to hold a special
place in Mena-Landry’s heart.
“UMass Boston has the most exceptional student body of any campus that I’ve been on. I wish for the
professors that that continues to be
true, and I wish for the students
that they realize how amazing of an
experience that they have access to.”
20
2000s
A Romantic Interlude Before Dream Job in the Magical Kingdom
After a semester of grueling commutes from Westborough to UMass
Boston, Samantha Rincon (now
Thomas) escaped to Disney World.
“I took a semester off, and I
worked at a place here called Disney Quest, which is like a five floor
interactive theme park.”
Through the Disney College Program Rincon learned to run all of
the attractions.
“They’d put you in an apartment
and you live with all of the people
that you work with, and you get access to the parks for free.”
She was 19 at the time and obsessed with Disney’s High School
Musical. The stars of that movie,
Zach Efferon and Venessa Hodgens
visited the park and got private tour
for the day.
“I told the tour guide, I want to
be the person that takes them all
around. So he told me the processes. I asked my mom if I could just
stay and not go back to school, and
she said no, so I went back to UMass
and moved into Harbor Point, went
to school and did everything. I still
came here maybe once a year with
those friends that I had met during
the college program.”
Back at UMB, Rincon decided
to became an orientation leader as
practice for her dream job.
“It was pretty amazing to see like
all of the new kids coming in and
showing them around.”
Rincon made it her mission to
create social experiences on campus.
“A lot of people weren’t too excited that it was a commuter school,
so just explaining to them all of the
things that we still had to offer, even
though you are still commuting to
Ryan Thomas admired Samantha
Rincon from the sports desk in the
student media offices.
“She caught my eye from the first
time I saw her,” he says. “She always
had so much energy and she always
had a smile on her face, so I liked
her from the start.”
Thomas transferred into UMB,
and spent two years on staff at the
Mass Media.
“At the time I was only one journalism class into knowing anything
about journalism, but I knew I liked
to write so they were just like, hey
here you go, have fun. Let’s all work
together. I wound up being the
sports editor, and it was pretty fun.”
He found a group of friends at
the newspaper, and throughout his
first year he would occasionally flirt
with Samantha, who worked in a
cubical near by.
“I don’t remember exactly the
first time I met her or anything because it just kind of progressed, and
it was kind of sophomoric.”
Thomas told Michael Hogan, the
editor of the Mass Media, about his
crush on the girl over at SAEC.
“I think he knew someone over
there that was friends with her,
and they both told each other that
the other person was interested, so
we started hanging out a little bit
more.”
In his senior year, Thomas went
to Pat’s Peak on the ski trip that
SAEC put on each year, and on the
ride up to the mountain he sat in
the front of the bus with Samantha.
“We didn’t really leave each others’ side through the whole day,
just hanging out, playing cards or
something inside, and just having
fun and being ourselves, and it just
kind of happened from there, man
Samantha Rincon-Thomas, Theater and Communications, 2010
the school every day.”
She joined the Student Arts and
Events Council (SAEC).
“I am a people person, and I like
learning from experiences,” she
says. “There are people from so
many different places in the world,
and learning about other communities and how they lived and all of
their traditions. I had a pretty well
rounded group of friends. We were
all very different.”
In SAEC, Rincon helped plan
free events to encourage students to
gather in the Campus Center ballrooms to see magicians or comedians, or to make wax hands and
paint frisbees and hats in the plaza.
It was all about giving students an
opportunity to hang out with other
students on campus.
“I was definitely more of an activities person,” she says. “My dance
and theater classes were great. The
professors were always very knowledgable.”
Working in student life, Rincon
had a cubical down the hall from
the Student Media Office. She became good friends with some writers for the student newspaper, and
that is how she met Ryan Thomas.
“We would talk while he was
working, and while I was working,
and then he started coming to a
couple of our events, especially our
speakers.”
Their romance really began at
SAEC’s yearly ski trip to Pike’s Peak.
“We did that at the first Saturday
Fun in the Sun
Ryan Thomas, English, 2009
it was fast. We started dating, and
before I knew it she was asking me
to move to Florida.”
While managing the sports section of the Mass Media, Thomas
loved writing about the mens
hockey team. They had a new head
coach, Peter Balisle.
“He was a great guy to interview,
so the stories wrote themselves. I’d
just fill it up with quotes from him,
and provide some insight. Following that team, it was nice to see
them grow a little bit, and make a
couple of strides, and by the next
year they were pretty competitive
in their conference.”
Thomas would sometimes travel
with the team and he developed a
friendship with the team manager,
who helped him get an internship
at the Boston Globe.
“It was a progression. I started
at the newspaper, and one person
to another person, I kind of networked out, and just it worked out.”
While working for the Globe,
considering a move to Florida,
Thomas found an internship in the
communications department with
the Tampa Bay Rays. Connections
he made at the Boston Globe helped
him land the position.
“I was going to use the restroom
one day at the Globe, and I ran into
Dan Shaughnessy either on the way
in or on the way out, and he said,
‘How you doing?’ I told him that I
had applied for an internship with
the Tampa Bay Rays, and I was
waiting to hear back from them,
and then he was like, ‘I know Rick
Vaugn, down in the communications department there, good friend
of mine, I’ll put in a good word for
you.’ To be honest with you I’d had
very limited interactions with Dan
up to that point. He was just being
of every year, and he went to the ski
trip, and we clicked right there, on
that bus ride to the mountain.”
It was the first time they’d hung
out on their own.
“We actually date our anniversary from our Pat’s Peak trip, and
it was actually the date we got married on as well.”
During the ski trips Rincon always stayed in the lounge, helping
people with meal vouchers watching out for injuries, while while everyone else hit the mountain.
“Ryan would go out and snowboard, and then he’d come back and
sit in the lodge with me for a couple
of hours and just talk with me, and
it was a little awkward sometimes
because my cousin was right there,
but it was definitely fun, and ever
since then we pretty much didn’t
stop talking.”
Ryan and Samantha became fixtures at UMB events, and Rincon’s
face appears on some UMB promotional materials.
“I’ve seen my picture hanging
up on some of the fences and stuff
like that, so that was cool to see that
those pictures that I took six years
ago. they’re still there, and they’re
still being used.”
One proud moment in Rincon’s
time in SAEC was when she helped
Mike Metzger, student president,
place a beacon statue next to the
athletics center.
“We realized that we didn’t have
our mascot really anywhere, and
we have a pretty unique mascot. So
we worked together with the Beacon athletics teams. We wanted to
make sure that we could have one
somewhere, so when other schools
would visit, they could see that we
had school pride, which I think was
something that was missing when
we first started.”
While dating Ryan Thomas,
Rincon followed the hockey team
and watched most of their games.
“They made it kind of far so we
did the whole get on a bus so we
could go to their game. I tried to be
involved in as much as I could with
anything that had to do with school
spirit, to feel like I was a part of that
school community.”
After graduating, Rincon moved
to Florida and became a VIP tour
guide at Disney World. She’s given
tours to a few celebrities, including
Mariah Cary, but mostly she gives
families a personal experience at
the park.
“They enter through the fast pass
entrance of all of the attractions,
which is like a quicker entrance,
and they can also have VIP seating
for shows and parades, so I’m basically like their walking talking map
concierge person.”
Looking back on her experience
at UMass Boston, Rincon’s glad she
got involved in student life, and left
her imprint on the UMass Boston
community.
“I think a lot of people rule it out
because it is a commuting school,
and I think it’s so much more than
that. I know plenty of people that
have graduated, and work in amazing places all around the country.”
“You never know where all of
those experiences and all of those
classes, and all of those events and
all of those things at UMass will
take you.”
a nice guy doing something for a
young nobody at the Globe. So he
put in a good word for me, and I
ended up getting the internship.”
He spent the entire 2010 season
with the Rays, writing game notes,
doing minor league reports, and
putting together their media guides
“I was lucky enough to be part
of the front office team when they
went to the playoffs that year. They
lost in the first round, but it was still
a really cool experience, and then
once the off season showed up, my
internship was over so I went and
looks for another job.”
He did odd jobs, some manual
labor, and then in July of 2011 he
got a call from his former boss at
the Rays saying that they needed a
replacement for an intern who had
left for a masters program in Chicago.
“I jumped back on in a heartbeat.
At the time the Rays were kind of
floundering. They were around 500.
They weren’t really in the playoff
picture, and then they went on this
crazy run, and if you followed the
Red Sox at all you know that’s the
year they crashed and burned, skidded into the finish line, and ended
up losing out on the last day of the
post season.”
Thomas got a front row seat to
witness the drama.
“On the flip side the Rays finally overtook the Red Sox in the
standings on that last day. It was
really surreal because the last three
months of the season I was there
part of the Rays, and it was really
weird because I had all of this passion for the Red Sox growing up
and once I was enveloped in the
whole push to make this historic
run for the Rays, I wasn’t even
thinking about that.”
“Everything was just focused on
the job, so it was really quite an interesting moment in my life to take
part in something like that, and the
Rays kept coming back in that last
game, and finally hit this home run
in the 11th or 12th inning, and it
was just hysteria.”
“Everyone was just going crazy,
and I was up for almost 48 straight
hours after that happened, because
we had to finish the post season
media guide, and just three months
ago no one had post season on their
minds. So we spent all night and the
next day, and into the next morning
working on this book, and editing
everything.”
Thomas stayed with the Rays
through the off season, and when it
was all over he applied for a position with the MLB players alumni
association.
“It’s my main responsibility there
to book paid appearances for the
former players, so I went from reporting, to writing game notes, to
being on cold calls and trying to sell
appearances for ball players, so it’s
been about three and a half years to
this point, and it’s going pretty well.
I enjoy what I do. It’s been awesome.”
Now he lives in Florida married
to Samantha, who works as a VIP
tour guide in Disney World. They
visit Boston about twice a year, and
lately each time he’s visited, the
campus looked a little different.
“I love to see that my alma mater
is doing well, and expanding,” he
says. “UMass prepared me well to
be a successful person after college.
It taught me what to expect, and
how to prepare for the real world.”
2000s
www.umassmedia.com
Art Publication Connects UMB with High Schools Across Mass
21
Deanna Elliot, Communications, 2009
At UMass Boston Deanna Elliot
immersed herself in student media,
first as Advertising Manager of the
Mass Media. Then she delved into
literary publishing, editing the 2008
edition of the Watermark, and designing the 2009 edition.
“As a communications major I
didn’t really have much experience
with the creative side of publishing,” she said. “I didn’t know design
software. Although I enjoy reading
and writing creatively, I didn’t really
take any classes pertaining to that,
and I had no art background.”
She fell in love with the creative
side of publishing at UMass Boston,
where she spent her senior year on
a domestic exchange from UMass
Amherst.
“Advertising Manager for the
newspaper was more like a business
job. I was doing invoicing for ads
and boring stuff, so I loved the experience I had at the Watermark.”
Inspired by her work on UMB’s
literary magazine, the summer after
graduating Elliot began planning to
create a new literary journal.
“It was right when the market
crashed, so it was really difficult
to find a job, and I didn’t want to
settle for something that I wasn’t
passionate about, so I started thinking, ‘I wish I had the opportunity to
participate in a magazine of the arts
when I was in high school.’”
She surveyed all of the English
department chairs in high schools
across the state to see if there was
an interest in a magazine of the arts
for high schoolers. 24 schools responded.
“Then I started rolling with the
idea. I was still job searching and
sending out my resume to a bunch
of different places, but I got really
passionate about The Marble Collection, and that’s how it got started.
Now we have over 200 schools and
nonprofits that participate with the
magazine, and we’re based here at
UMass Boston.”
The Marble Collection is a nonprofit organization, the only statewide magazine of the arts with
juror-selected works from teens
across Massachusetts. They publish
writing, fiction, non-fiction, poetry,
artwork, paintings, drawings, photography, and also multimedia on
their website, like music, spoken
word, and poetry readings. They
publish two magazines each year,
one in the fall and one in the spring.
“For those students that are selected for publication, we offer
them a student mentoring workshop where they’re paired one to
one with college student interns.”
Elliot still works at her family’s
farm in the summer to supplement
her income, harvesting fruits and
vegetables, which she’s been doing
since she was eight years old.
“I gravitated toward UMass Amherst because it’s a very rural area.
It started as an agriculture school,
and my background as an 18-yearold kid was the farm. I really loved
that area, and after three years I was
ready to try something new. The
city was very intimidating for me,
but I also knew that it probably held
a lot more internship opportunities,
or opportunities to kind of hone my
workforce skills.”
She also had friends that lived
in the city, so rather than studying
abroad and spending a lot of money
and go somewhere exotic, she decided to spend her last year in college at UMass Boston.
“I came to visit the campus, and
I just thought that it was beautiful. I loved that it was on the water, and I also liked that the classes
were a lot smaller. In Amherst I
found myself as a communications
undergrad being in seminars that
were 150 - 300 people. There wasn’t
that much interaction between the
professors and the students, or with
your peers, which I guess when I
was younger that appealed to me
because I felt, well nobody’s gonna
know if I skip class, because I’m just
one of 300 people.”
At UMass Amherst Elliot worked
at the Daily Collegian for a short
time selling advertising, and she
sought out a similar opportunity at
the Student Media office at UMB.
“I became the advertising manager for the Mass Media, and at the
time the Watermark office was right
next door, and the walls were plastered with art, and everyone flow-
ing in and out of the office seemed
really creative. I was doing my boring business job, and I just thought
I would love to be in that office, and
learn the publication process.”
She got a chance to run the Watermark because there were budget
cuts that year.
“The Watermark staff quit in protest, so that was my opportunity.
No one was running it, and Donna
Neal was the supervisor for both
the Mass Media and the Watermark,
so I went to Donna and I said, ‘I’d
love to try to be the Editor in Chief,’
and she’s like, ‘Ok, well that’s kind
of a tall order. You’re going to have
to hire a new staff.’ It was really exciting.”
The one major skill that Elliot
took away from UMB was time
management.
“I was working 20 hours a week
for the Watermark, 10 hours a week
for the Mass Media, and I was taking 5 classes, so I was very stressed
out. It’s when I first started drinking coffee. I wasn’t a coffee drinker
before my senior year. Time management was the biggest thing, and
learning when to say no. I wanted
to do everything, and I remember
in April I left the Mass Media because it was publication time for
the Watermark, and I was really
stressed out, and there were finals,
and that was a really hard decision
for me to make, basically quitting
the Mass Media, but I found myself
doing a mediocre job at everything
instead of an excellent job at a few
things, so I think that was one of
the better lessons I learned my senior year.”
Now Elliot is back on campus,
managing the from an office in Student Activities.
“In the past we were a virtual
organization, so all of our interns
worked from home or their col-
lege campus, and we had interns
all across the state. We had interns
at UMass Amherst, Bridgewater, Stone Hill, Emerson. One day
when I came to visit Donna, who
is my college mentor, I was giving
her an update on the Marble Collection, and where I envisioned the
organization going in the next few
years, and I said it was likely that
we would partner with a higher ed
institution since we’ve technically
partnered with a number of them
to recruit our intern staff. I said
I see us being housed at a university, and kind of have an exclusive
internship program with them. She
was like, ‘That’s a great idea. You
should come to UMass Boston.’”
She met with a bunch of department chairs, and rallied support.
“They thought it would be a great
opportunity for UMass Boston
students working for a non-profit,
especially for the art and creative
writing students who could really
get a feeling for the publishing industry, and also if they are pursuing
education, since they’re working
one-on-one with the teens that are
published.”
It was a partnership a year in the
making, and now Elliot is a permanent fixture in the UMB community. She is excited to be a part of
the expanding vision and scope of
UMB’s educational opportunities.
“They have their 25-year plan
to become a residential university,
so that’s exciting. It’s all good stuff.
I would have loved the opportunity to live on campus. I rented an
apartment in Dorchester, which
was great, but I think that you miss
out on that residential college lifestyle when it’s a commuter school,
so I’m excited to see what happens
in the next few years here, and how
the university grows.”
Arts and Events Council Plants Career Seads
Mike Metzger, History and Political Science, 2009
Mike Metzger arrived for his first
day of classes at UMass Boston in
the fall of 2004. He was just getting his bearings in the brand new
Campus Center, when a fire alarm
went off. The building evacuated,
and he stood outside in a crowd of
students on a particularly blustery
day, waiting for the all clear. That is
how he met UMB’s chancellor, Jo
Ann Gora.
“We were all standing outside
during Welcome Day and she was
working the line of people, saying
thanks for coming,” Metzger says. “I
thought that was so cool. Here’s the
leader of a major university outside
in the cold and to say hi to people.”
In four years as an undergraduate
he met two other UMB chancellors,
Michael Collins and Keith Motley,
in student government through one
transformative period in university
history. After the Campus Center
opened, offices from various buildings on campus came together, and
vied for space.
“To be involved in those conversations,” Metzger said. “To see how
the campus was shaping the concept of this building as a student
space that also provides critical services, and also serves the broader
community, transformed me.”
Metzger worked on campus,
starting off in the Admissions Office as a tour guide.
“I went to orientation, and two
weeks later I was giving tours of
campus,” he says.“That was my
first job. I was also an orientation
leader. I did that for pretty much
every summer, built some life-long
friendships.”
After working in several administrative work study jobs on campus, Metzger became a co-program
coordinator for the Student Arts
and Events Council, which had just
shifted advisors.
“I was a part of things from as
small as the logo all the way up to
developing the various program
channels that they now offer, the
Free Fun for Everyone and the Ball.
Those are things that I hope are
now viewed as more traditions here
on campus.”
As an undergraduate Metzger
facilitated a variety of events and
initiatives. One of his proudest accomplishments was to put a beacon
statue next to the Clark Athletic
Center.
“It was SAEC’s 25th anniversary that year so we gave it to the
school to promote entertainment,
tradition and the more social as-
pect of campus,” Metzger says. “At
that point the beacon was just an
abstract concept. We had the mascot that went to games and things
like that, but you couldn’t go anywhere and be like, ‘I’m a Beacon.’ I
get chills every year when families
stand out in front of it and they do
their family photo thing.”
A couple of Metzger’s favorite
classes were Renaissance and Reformation History, taught by Maryann Brink, and Constitutional Law
and Civil Liberties by Elizabeth
Bussier
“Those courses crafted my critical thinking and gave me an appreciation for our system of government and the way that our systems
operate. In terms of my experience
with different clubs and organizations, each is its own special thing
to me.”
Classes taught Metzger critical
thinking, analytical writing, and
persuasive speaking, all of which he
applied through his extra curricular
activities.
“There’s also this sense of community and responsibility to that
community that I think is the
driving force of what I took away
from here. The classroom learning
definitely contributed to that, but
also being around these people,
these faculty, these staff, and having a sense of what it means to be
a servant leader and provide that
experience for the community that
you’re a part of and to make sure
that you’re giving back as much as
you take.”
He ran for student government,
was vice president for a year, and
then became president.
“That was some of the best leadership training I have ever had,”
he says. “A lot of the capital development for some of the amazing
growth that we are experiencing
now was in that period. I was at the
table saying we need more student
space, or we need more availability
for faculty in terms of advising.”
“What an awesome responsibility
to be able to speak about issues for
people who are working so hard to
get their degree. People care about
their degree. Here you don’t see that
student who just shows up to show
up. They’re invested.”
In student government, the third
floor of the Campus Center was
Metzger’s hang out. His old office
was in the back of Student Activities, on the third floor, where Donna Neal’s office is now.
“There used to be a couch where
senators took lengthy naps. I spent
a lot of time in the ballroom because of orientation. A lot of programming happened there. Then
the Wits End, I actually have a
t-shirt from the last week of operation. It was tough towards the
end. It had been around for a lot
of years and when campus traffic
patterns changed, unfortunately
people didn’t go to the fourth floor
of Wheatley anymore.”
As president of the Undergraduate Student Governement, Metzger
sat in on meetings where University
leaders developed the master plan,
and discussed ideas for redesigning the campus. That experience in
student government propelled him
into a career in higher education
administration. He got his masters
at the University of Connecticut,
and worked at American University for two years. Now he is back at
UMass Boston, Assistant Dean for
the Honors College, and a student
in the Higher Education Leadership PhD Program, which focuses
on access and equity in education.
“I missed the connection to the
urban mission that I experienced
as a student here,” Metzger said. “I
wanted to serve marginalized students, students who are non-traditional, who haven’t had the easiest
or most straight path to college.
When I was a student leader here I
found that incredibly rewarding. As
I got further and further away from
that, I was really interested in coming back here to provide that type
of launching pad for students to be
whatever they desire.”
In 50 years, Metzger hopes he’s
still around for the celebration.
“It would cool to see this place at
100, to think about how far we’ve
come in 50 years, and where we’ll
be in 50 more. I wish UMass Boston all the best, and all my love. I
met my fiancé here in 2006, so this
place has a very special place in my
heart.”
22
2010s
Slipping on a Suit at Sunrise
Reynolds Graves, Political Science, 2011
After a semester interning in
Washington DC, Reynolds Graves
landed in Logan airport just in time
for his graduation.
“I had a fantastic experience
working at the White House,”
Graves says. “Walking in and out of
1600 Pennsylvania Ave every day is
mind blowing, bowling in the West
Wing, but Scheduling in Advance
was not fun.”
Enmeshed in the daily tedium
of his internship, Graves learned
the great lengths of planning that
go into vice presidential appearances in Joe Biden’s Scheduling
and Advance Office. Graves sat
through lengthy meetings about
podium placement, cue cards, and
how many steps the vice president
would take through a room.
“I totally respect the work,” he
says, “A lot of times people think
internships are a segway to a job,
but sometimes I think you need to
look at internships as something
you don’t want to do in your career
going forward.”
As a student Graves transferred
into UMB from Hampton University. He had an internship with the
Patrick administration, and wanted
to find a school where he could take
classes without breaking the bank.
“Coming from a historically
black college I was like, ‘Cool, not
only are there Black people here,
but Asians and people from all
After high school, Edson Bueno
took several years off, slowly chipping away at his degree.
“I saw UMass Boston, and I
thought it was a great platform to
get a world class education, meeting students from around the
world, and it was affordable because
I financed my own degree.”
When he first started at UMB,
Bueno worked at Trader Joe’s, a job
he loved but that didn’t offer much
mobility.
“The professors at give immense
support for those working and going to school at the same time, without sacrificing quality in education
and expectations. They understood
we’re all working students.”
On campus, Bueno joined the
Mass Media as a business manager,
collecting ads and helping with the
background administrative work.
Soon he became the Managing Editor, and collected a small salary.
“You may think that the students
have lots of time, but in actuality, if
you’re a working student your time
is your most valuable asset, and I
thought it was more productive to
step out of the classroom, and go in
to work at the university setting.”
Working on campus became a
business calculation for Bueno, offering him the opportunity to grow
his network and visibility within
the university. Bueno handled the
student newspapers finances and
printing logistics.
these interesting countries I’ve
never even heard of.’ So you’ve got
a whole bunch of different cultures,
and people mostly from Boston so
I would learn a lot about the city.’”
He moved into a brownstone in
Dudley Square, and that fall began
riding his bike to Harbor Point every day for classes, and then to the
State House for work. Active in student government, Graves learned
the awkward realities of politicking.
“Student government is a great
way to learn how things happen.
You get professional and personal
skills along the way. When you’re
a student, and you’re nervous or
anxious about all of the tension between students about a budget for
a party on the student government
council, it’s the same thing in real
life. There’s nervous tension. There’s
political stuff going on, and you’re
having those issues, or working
through those problems with your
colleagues. It’s the exact same thing
in real life.”
He ran in the first open election
for student body president, and lost
by 54 votes.
“It was one of the coolest things
I’ve ever done in my life,” he says.
“You study all night. You don’t
sleep, but put on a suit like a campaign politician to shake strangers’
hands early in the morning, ‘Hey
I’m Reynolds Graves. I’m running
for student government president.’
“I’d literally stand at the sliding door to the student center.
People were walking by, getting off
the shuttle bus, wouldn’t care just,
‘What’s your name? Ronald?’”
“As far as retail politics goes, I
gained those skills, shaking someone’s hand and remembering their
name and whatever the conversation was two days later in the cafeteria went a long way. I was not only
able to do that, I was kind of forced
to do that. It was a great experience,
and it was interesting to see how
many people voted, and how many
people didn’t vote.”
“It was a really great learning
experience because we had a very
small budget. We had a Facebook
page. I remember we got some guy
to do a photo shoot. We had the
little suckers with stickers around
it saying, ‘Vote Chenelle Brown
and Reynolds Graves for student
government.’ I mean, that whole
experience was just awesome and
invaluable and something I never
would have done anywhere else.”
Around the same time as his
campaign, Graves happened to be
in the Political Science department
when Professor Busier invited him
to a lunch with then Deputy Assistant Secretary Richard Schmierer
from the Bureau of Near Eastern
Affairs, from the Department of
State.
“She said, ‘Hey, you’re into foreign policy stuff, right? We got this
guy giving a lecture in the library,
but he wants to have lunch with a
few students beforehand. I want
you to go to this lunch.’”
Graves ordered Schmierer’s book
online, and read it to prepare the
lunch.
“I made notes, and at the time my
friends and I at Hampton started a
political/lifestyle magazine. I started to generate interest in interviewing him for the magazine. When
it came to the lunch, next thing I
know I’m asking him softball questions about the book.”
After the lecture Graves asked
Schmierer for an interview.
“He didn’t even hesitate. He said,
‘Yeah, but I’m really busy.’ I said,
‘OK, well I’ll come to Washington.’
He said, ‘You’ll do what?’ I said, ‘I’ll
come to DC.’”
“I’ll never forget, I was next to
broke, took the bus from Boston to
DC overnight, 9 hours, crashed on
a buddy’s couch, woke up the next
day, threw on a suit, went to the
Willard Hotel, which is the oldest
historic hotel in Washington, and
sat in the lobby with a coordinated
press pool, and one of his aides, for
an hour long interview.”
“At the end of the interview when
I clicked the tape recorder off, he
said, ‘You’d be a great foreign service officer.’”
At the time Graves was applying
to an internship at the embassy in
Cairo, so he mentioned his application to Schmierer.
“Next day I got a call from the
same aid that was there asking
about my application very specifically and then I got the internship.
The article came out in our magazine. It was called, Boston Power
Lunch, Washington Tea Party.”
Two days after losing the election for student government Graves
got an acceptance email telling him
how to report to Mission Cairo.
Having rubbed shoulders with
students from some of the most
prestigious schools in the country
through his various internships,
Graves urges UMB students to have
confidence.
“The biggest lesson I learned,
don’t let the neigh-sayers phase you
by making you feel like you went
to some stupid city college, or you
went to a graduated community
college, and because you did they’re
better then you. Always have pride
for the school.”
His favorite class was called
Reading the Newspaper, taught by
professor Frank Harron, who publishes of the Worcester Telegram.
“I was that kid sitting in the
front row cause I’ve always loved
the news and the newspaper and
the flow of news. I really loved it.
That’s what spurred me into writing
for the Bay State Banner. It came
full circle when I was no longer
interning in the governor’s office,
but I was a freelance reporter, and
professor Harron was hosting these
Ethnic Media Roundtables with
Governor Patrick, and I would then
go to the statehouse, sit in the pressroom.”
“After graduation, when I went
back and worked in the governor’s
administration, I was at an all staff
meeting and they were introducing
me as the new staffer, and I think
the Press Secretary chimed in at the
time and said you know nothing’s
new about Reynolds around here.
He’s the governor’s favorite reporter
from the Bay State Banner.”
Graves also served as the vice
president Phi Sigma Alpha, the political science honors society.
“That was one of those things
were I expected, ok we’re going
to have some meetings and talk
some stuff, and have some snacks
after class, but we actually went to
DC and lobbied congressmen. We
met with Nikki Saugus, and then
senator John Kerry. We met with
the Chief of Staff to Congressman
Capuano.”
On campus, Graves would often
do his homework in the atrium in
the Campus Center.
“That was a cool lounge kind
of place, and when I looked at my
watch, and realized I gotta get to
class and I gotta print my essay I
was able to run over and do it on
one of those computers. The coolest thing about sitting in the atrium,
I think, is you look up and you see
all of those flags from all of those
countries, and you just hear the languages in that atrium. I loved that
big high ceiling.”
his company.
“All the shared experiences I had
were amazing whether it was going
to the media conferences and learning something, or late nights trying
to get the print off to our printer,
and making that tough decision to
call it. You’re not editing anymore.
It’s midnight. They need this. Send
it off, making that decision, and really holding firm because a lot of
people there were perfectionists.
They wanted to make sure everything was set because their name
was on it.”
As far as classes, Bueno has a
hard time naming a favorite.
“All of the classes left a mark,” he
says. ”International Trade, and International Finance are classes that
I still refer to, and it’s surprising. It’s
so basic, but to apply that knowledge and share it with people, it’s
a strong credibility factor. Are you
a credible banker? Do you know
these fundamentals?”
Since graduation Bueno has been
working in wealth management
as private banker for a small bank
based in San Francisco with a location in Back Bay.
“I can help people, and for me
that’s the big thing,” he says. “It’s
fun, very challenging, and there’s
always a lot of new stuff to learn.”
“I wasn’t a super star academic,
but at the same time it was like wow
this is so fascinating, learning about
the currency crisis or how interest
rates effect bond yields. In classes
from Janis Kapler, and Adugna
Lemi I leaned key things.”
Bueno cultivated a loose study
group, people that took the same
classes semester after semester.
“They would make it a point to
have a study session to make sure
we could do well on the exam, make
sure we understood the material,
and I think in that sense it was easy,
because they weren’t there just for
the paper, they were there because
they were actually interested in it,
and they were interested in actually
doing well. Having that collaborative effort, and that platform, and
being able to study with other students made it so much easier.”
“There’s so much opportunity for
the university to keep growing, so I
think phenomenal institution and I
have no hesitation in letting people
know that I went there. That’s my
university. That’s my alma mater.”
Bueno says UMB can be whatever you make of it. If you put a lot
in, you can get a lot out.
“The return in terms of relationship currency and monetary
currency is pretty good,” he says.
“Overall it’s a positive experience,
and I guess a humbling experience
too, because we’re in a university
college town, and it’s a state university. It shouldn’t be a fall back university, I think. It should be a first
choice.”
Becoming a Credible Banker
Edson Bueno, Economics, 2010
“There was a lot of opportunity
to tighten things up in terms of cost
and waste and efficiency with guidance from the previous business
manager and Donna as well, and
Shelby. I had no idea how to do it,
but I got to figure it out.”
He also dabbled in photography, and published a photo essay in
LUX, which was the honors magazine. He loved working in the Student Media Offices.
“It’s great that that university had
that amenity, and a good working
space not only to get your work
done, but also to transition, ok my
work is done for the day, let me
transition over here because the
amenities are here not only to do
your job, but ultimately study.”
The campus became Bueno’s second home.
“There’s a swimming pool.
There’s a gym, so why would I trek
all the way back when you pay for
the gym membership already rolled
into cost. All the resources are there
that I needed at the time were there,
so I was like why would I leave?”
“It was a phenomenal experience,
and I feel very fortunate to have had
that opportunity.”
At the Mass Media, Bueno also
found kindred spirits who enjoyed
www.umassmedia.com
A few days after his classes started in the fall Baris Mumyakmaz
found himself on a boat trip in the
Boston Harbor. The boat left from
Harbor Point as a part of orientation for new students, and onboard
he met an ex-editor of the Mass Media, Christian DeTorres.
“When we started talking about
everything, he was very interested
that I came from Turkey, and I told
him that I was actually working at
the student newspaper at my university in Turkey.”
He was the Editor in Chief of the
student newspaper at the university
he went to in Turkey, and his work
as a student journalist inspired him
to seek out a graduate study program in conflict resolution.
“When I was reporting I became
aware of all the conflict in Turkey,
and Turkey’s problems with its
neighbors. Because we have conflicts with Armenians and Greeks,
Iran, and there was a multifaceted
conflict going on in Iraq, and the
turmoil in Syria.”
He applied to two of the best
conflict resolution programs, one
in Sweden and the other In Norway.
“I realized that the study was also
available in the US, but I was hesitant because the US is so far from
Turkey, from my family and everything. If I went to study in Europe,
it could be two hours away, two
three hours away by plane.”
He applied to two schools in the
U.S. anyway.
“I actually got into both schools
in the US, and none of the schools
in Europe, because I was majoring
in Philosophy and doing journalism they were expecting me to study
political science or something, but
the schools in the US thought that I
could bring something new.”
He got into a school in LA, but
2010s
The Arithmetic of Cancer
Baris Mumyakmaz, Conflict Resolution, 2011
UMass Boston offered him a research assistantship on Armenians
in Turkey.
“One of the scholars at UMass
Boston was looking for someone
who could do press related research
in Turkey. It fit like a glove, and I
landed there as a graduate student,
and that was awesome.”
On the boat in the harbor, DeToress told Mumyakmaz he should
meet Edson Bueno in the Student
Media Office.
“I told him you know I’m looking for a position where I can just
write. I know my English is not my
first language, and I’d like to pursue
my secondary career activities and
I’d like to write in English as well.”
The very next day at the Mass
Media offices, Bueno asked him if
he wanted to edit a Culture and Diversity section.
“It was incredible, because again
it fit like a glove. I came from a different culture and country and I
was learning a lot about the world
as well so I knew a lot about different cultures and diversity issues.”
Outside of classes, Mumyakmaz
became a fixture in the media offices.
“I could say for two years during my masters studies I spent most
of my time at the office working
there, and even some people at my
graduate studies were saying oh you
know you’re at that newspaper all
the time, and not spending enough
time with us.”
The more time he spent on campus, the further Mumyakmaz got
away from Turkish Armenian conflict.
“I became more interested in
conflict itself, in conflict between
individuals, between organizations.
I became more interested in that
and I got into a mediation internship.”
The internship was in a small
claims court, and Mumyakmaz began to realize that the dynamics of
conflict were the same on both a
micro and a macro scale.
“I was listening to all of these
people at small claims court
through the mediator, and I was
really seeing how the dynamics
went, and what went wrong with
these dynamics, and I could resolve
these conflicts, and I realized that
I could just do this thing with the
international conflict. I had already
learned the essentials of it. It was
only a matter of applying it to another field.”
The realization felt fantastic, and
by the end of his studies Mumyakmaz had a whole new perspective
on life and the value of diversity.
“I tried to apply my new understanding of conflict everywhere,” he
says. “Since I learned about Yoga, I
was looking for ways I could implement yoga and conflict resolution
together. I was really going into
different trajectory because my perspective was getting broader. It gave
me the chance. It was incredible.”
“There was amazing diversity on
that campus. I got there, thinking I
was going to bring diversity to campus, but the campus was already so
diverse that I learned myself about
diversity.”
The shuttle rides to campus alone
were remarkable Mumyakmaz.
“It was a magical bus because
when you got there you could see
people of all races, of all ages, of all
backgrounds. You would meet a
black kid from Dorchester, a professor who works at MIT but is taking classes to get a certificate, and
international people like me from
Thailand, Latin America everywhere.”
“You see all of these different
people on the same shuttle, and
that’s the small scale, and when you
got on campus it was even bigger.
On the shuttle you see fifty people,
but on campus you would see 15000
people of all different backgrounds
and it was incredible. The campus
was the most educating thing for
me, being with all of these people.”
The environment at UMB inspired Mumyakmaz, and he particularly appreciated the liberal attitude on campus.
“I think the administration was
really awesome. I’m in a country
right now with a lot of freedom
expression issues, and in the Mass
Media we mocked the Chancellor, and he was a tolerant person.
We weren’t respectful to him, but
he didn’t say anything. I think he
was just smiling at us. He was very
kind.”
“I would just envy being younger
and coming to college as well in
that growing environment because
23
it’s just getting better.”
In the midst of his last semester
on campus, Mumyakmaz fell in the
hall of his apartment, and couldn’t
get up. Raced to the hospital, doctors scanned his brain and found a
tumor.
“I was diagnosed with cancer,
and I went through a treatment,
and when I convalesced I had a lot
of chance to think about what I got
from this life, and what I’m doing in
this life and what my passions are,
what my weaknesses are, and i realized my big passion is writing, and
writing about people, writing about
the world and everything.”
He blogged in Turkish about the
experience.
“I realized that I learned a lot
from UMass Boston studies about
diversity, about tolerance, about
conflict resolution, so I started
looking at things differently when I
got back to Turkey”
Now he’s turned the blog into a
book, The Arithmetic of Cancer,
which will be published in the new
year.
“I wrote a memoir about my experience, and all the conflict that I
experienced about moving back to
Turkey and dealing with a really
terrible disease but I learned, and
I’d like to transfer what I learned to
the people here, especially cancer
survivors.”
Mumyakmaz now freelance
reports for Turkish newspapers,
blogs, and is the Enlgish-Language
News Editor for Bianet.org.
“I try to bring this conflict resolution perspective to my reporting,
and I’m working to apply still what
I learned at UMass and continue to
live my life, my second life.”
All Politics Are Local
Neil MacInnes-Barker, Environmental Science, 2011
Neil MacInnes-Barker squatted
with his smartphone outstretched,
flipping through a list of Massachusetts state representatives. His new
app makes contacting representatives in government easy.
“I try to teach people about this
great gift that they have,” Barker
said. “The most valuable, sacred,
honorable thing that you have is to
vote, but also to be engaged. You
have a tremendous amount of power, far more power than corporations with a lot of money . . . people
don’t understand their value.”
The goal of the app is to make it
easier for people to engage in democracy. Open it up, type in your
district, and you see all of your representatives. Click on one, and you
have three options. You can email,
call or send your politician a video.
“Your story is important. It’s
valuable. People will listen to you,”
Barker said. “You don’t have to
dress up fancy. You don’t have to
speak fancy. You’re yourself, and
that’s the best way to communicate
because it’s human to human.”
The app catalogues the videos
by topic, so people can find others with similar concerns to form
advocacy groups. Barker spends a
lot of time at the state house talking
with representatives about his own
interests, and he wants others to do
the same.
“They want to hear from their
constituents,” Barker said. “They
get this glisten in their eye when
I talk about this app. They’re like,
‘I’m up there fighting for stuff that
I’m assuming my constituents want,
and I’m also getting a lot of people
talking in my ear who do have time,
lawyers, lobbyists, and it’s not that
fulfilling. I’d listen to a kid from my
district first.’”
Behind Barker, in the corner of
his home-office, a duel-screened
computer littered with open windows, shows a video timeline for
a new film: At War With Peace. It
will be Barker’s second. His first is
called is called No Place Like Home,
and it’s a documentary about youth
homelessness in Boston.
Barker’s idealism “awakened,”
he said, when he was a student at
UMass Boston, and President of the
Undergraduate Student Government.
“I wouldn’t have been doing everything I am doing now with my
company, IPC, and this app without
UMass Boston,” he says.
Moving back to Massachusetts
from New Hampshire, Barker matriculated into UMass Boston because of its location.
“I wanted to be in the city at a
state school and I grew up loving
the ocean. That’s basically it.”
“It was challenging to go back to
school late in life, but I found that
in that environment I felt confident
to get involved. I felt supported
by the administration at UMass.
There was a very personal student
approach. I felt valued as a student
there.”
Barker dove whole heartedly into
student life, and got elected Student
President.
“I feel, as a non-traditional student, being between the age of tra-
ditional students and faculty and
staff, I could be a goof-ball with
18/19 year-olds and then I could
go sit with executive staff who
were not that much older than me,
and bridge the connection. I was
also vice-chairman of the Student
Advisory Council for the state. I
was member of the Vets Center,
MASSPIRG, and so many boards
and committees. It was a tremendously rich experience.”
Doing Campus Connect as a Student Senator, a two week process
of gathering information from the
faculty, staff and students about
changes that they wanted to see on
campus, inspired Barker’s app.
“That informed my belief with
how government works, that you’re
supposed to hear directly from the
people that you’re representing, and
you’re supposed to carry out the actions that they want to the best of
your ability.”
His favorite classes were the ones
he took in the Earth Environment
and Ocean Sciences classes.
“I could spend many more hours
being immersed in the benthos of
the ocean and the minerals of the
earth. Any class that delivered the
chance to ride in a boat or wade
around in water had to be the best.
I liked playing piano and my ASL
classes a lot too.”
Barker spent time all over the
campus, often in the Campus Center, but also swimming in the Athletic Center, studying in the library,
and eating quiet lunches in Quinn
cafe.
“Part of it was that experience
of being so involved, I learned the
value of community, how to listen,
negotiate, collaborate. Aside from
all of the stuff I learned in classes
the biggest things were from all
of the leadership experience that I
had. Those extracurricular activities lead me to be reawakened, to do
what I do now. The understanding
of what people can do together on a
large level all came from what I did
as the Student President.”
“I knew everybody. It sounds
corny and contrived, but it does
feel like a family. There’s a lot about
UMass Boston that I think is really
valuable. I really enjoyed my experience there.”
“I keep saying awakening. I feel
like a born again Christian. I’m a
born again advocate. Chancellor
Motley came around the corner
and he slapped me on the forehead
and I saw the light. I was awakened
my commitment to public service.
Because UMB is a state school,
reliant on the state government,
Barker found reasons to stay involved in the government.
“That brought me to where I am
today in how I am involved at the
state level. One of the things about
UMass Boston that’s different from
all of the other campuses, it’s very
involved in the community and
very involved at the political level.
I think that is something I wouldn’t
have got from somewhere else.
Then, having the opportunity to
step out of meetings or classes and
go look at the water to me is very
valuable. I love looking at the water.”
Barker also loves the fact that
UMB gets involved in local issues,
continuing its mission of raising up
the community around it.
“It’s right in an urban environment where there are a lot of people who are financially struggling.
So I would wish for the university
that it continues to work toward
that goal of being an internationally renowned quality institution,
but not leave behind the people in
the community who cannot afford
to go there, or who struggle to go
there. So, happy birthday UMass
Boston. Good luck where you’re going. Don’t forget where you’ve come
from.”
24
2010s
How to Feed Your Inner-Activist
Joane Etienne, Psychology and Sociology, 2012
“There’s somebody who’s hungry
somewhere in the world,” Joane
Etienne says. “It might be as far as
Africa, and it might be as close as
down your street.”
At UMass Boston Etienne
learned to be an activist. As a student she exercised her passion for
helping people in need, and discovered the power of mentorship.
“I will always find a young person to speak to and encourage and
empower because I benefitted from
that so much myself,” she says. “One
thing that I’m always going to do is
see where there’s a need, and look
to see how I can be a contributor.”
Now she works at the Boston
Youth Sanctuary, a therapeutic atmosphere for children who have
experienced trauma.
“These kids experience a lot by
the age eight,” she says. “In one
child’s case she witnessed her dad
murder someone. These things
happen every day in these communities to young kids. There’s a lot of
mental health work that goes into
trying to help them be kids again.”
There’s so much more going on in
the world, she said. There’s a lot of
work to be done. Etienne’s time at
UMB gave her the courage to seek
out the needy, to be outspoken, and
to be the catalyst of change, whether or not she gets to see that change
come to fruition.
“I’m sick of hearing students
say, there’s nothing at UMass,” she
says. “Do something about it. Start
something.”
In her senior year, Etienne participated in FLI, Freshman Leadership Institute, as a peer mentor.
“Freshmen come in and they’re
hungry,” she says. “If you can kind
of give them something they will
run with it.”
One of her mentees, Maritza,
was passionate about having a fair
trade community at UMass Boston.
It was not something that Etienne
knew well, but all she had to say
was, “You go girl.” Maritza took
the challenge and now Fair Trade
UMass Boston is thriving, raising
awareness for the workers behind
our food.
“Stop complaining, get up and do
it,” Etienne says. “If you can’t do it,
then find someone who can.”
Growing up in Boston, Etienne
had been to UMB before. When she
was in elementary school, Etienne’s
cousin dragged her along one day
to the urban scholars program. But
never thought she would end up
becoming a UMB student.
“I actually applied because my
parents begged me to,” she says. “I
wanted to go out of state. I am a
person who loves to travel. I love
adventure. I love something new.
I was born and raised in Boston. I
didn’t want to stay in Boston.”
Fate had different plans for her.
After getting pregnant at the end
of high school she decided to stay
in Boston so her parents could help
her raise her son. Still found several
opportunities to travel.
“One thing that sparked everything for me was doing the Alternative Spring Beak trip to New
Orleans, and doing Katrina relief.
It was just that ‘Wow’ feeling that
I can actually make a difference. I
can read about something in the
paper, or watch something in the
news, and go out there and actually
do something, Katrina was huge,
and it impacted so many lives out
there, everyone’s lives out there. Being in that environment where it’s
overwhelmingly disastrous, there’s
no way not to be impacted. Something that resonated with me was
how hopeful, and how appreciative
the people were. Even though the
help we offered was so small compared to what they needed, it was so
much appreciated.”
Most of the experiences that influence her work today came from
Office of Student Leadership and
Community Engagement (OSLCE).
She was their first Program Assistant for Community Engagement,
so she did a lot of service work. She
planned the first two Days of Service, one in the spring and one in
the fall.
“It was great. It was just overwhelmingly great,” she says. “Students got together and did all of the
planning, and gathering volunteers,
and registering. The students who
actually showed up made it count.
We had about 100 people the first
time around.”
“The students that find something to do have to seek it out. I
think that the university just needed to do a little more to let students
know that those opportunities are
out there. There are students who
are looking for something to do and
are not as proactive at seeking out
what is out there.”
In addition to that she joined
the sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho,
helped plan the Woman’s Leadership Initiative, and started a chapter
for Habitat for Humanity on campus. Her favorite class was taught
by Melanie Joy.
“Whatever she taught, she taught
it so well that you were able to leave
class with a concept and apply it to
your life. She would just somehow
connect everything. It was amazing. After I took one class with her,
I tried to take every single one with
her.”
Jean Rose’s research on mentoring sealed the passion. She had so
many great mentors at UMB, especially Sherrod Williams.
“I just love him. I credit him for
my whole college experience. He’s
my college father. I succeeded because Sherrod was right there, just
mentoring me, and that was invaluable.”
“The professors were always
willing to help, willing to support,
willing to actually get to know you.
They know you have a real life,
and I appreciated that. You have
real things that really matter, and
so they didn’t make their classes
pointless and full of nonsense. They
cared, and respected your time.”
UMass Boston is full of non-traditional students.
“You have the 18 year-old freshman and you also have the 40-yearold freshman in your English 101
class. There’s a wide population that
UMass caters to, but everyone has
different needs. It’s a mature atmosphere at UMass. Some people want
to get in and get out. Some people
want to get in and get involved.
Most of the people at UMass are
culturally competent and very focused on social change, and not just
sticking to status quo. Activists.”
As a student she learned that
there is always room to push forward for social change.
“Every experience counts. Every
voice counts,” she says. “College
is a whole different environment
from the workforce, and the spark
for change can start right at UMass
Boston.”
Becoming Creative in College
Andrew Otovik, Marketing, 2011
Ever since he was ten years old,
baseball was all Andrew Otovik
wanted to do. Now he works around
the sport every day as an administrator with the medical staff for the
Dodgers. He calls the job a dream
come true.
“I get to go to a place every day
that I genuinely love,” he says. “LA
is way bigger than I realized. LA is
huge.”
After gradating from UMB, Otovik went to Southern New Hampshire University for his Masters in
Sports Management. He finished
that degree in March 2013.
“I was looking for jobs in the
sports industry, but I had no luck,
until I had a conversation with a
childhood connection,” he says.
“She passed over some job applications, and they were all from the
Dodgers. It was kind of pick the job
you want. I picked the job I have
now, and three weeks later I had the
job.”
Out of high school, heading
to college, Otovik wanted to stay
near his family in Massachusetts,
so UMass Boston was the obvious
choice. He could keep the jobs he
had at that time.
“I also really like the idea of being able to have the dorm kind of
life, but not having a dorm type of
restrictions, like rules and RAs, and
whatnot, so that part was very appealing. I liked the fact that UMass
was a school that was on the rise,
and looking back now as compared
to where it was when I graduated,
it’s like night and day, with the new
buildings.”
He met the Sports Editor from
the Mass Media in a class, and started writing about the UMass sports
teams.
“Being able to write for Sports,
it allows you to put what you think
and say during games into a story
that 10 or 50 or 100 or 1000 people would read. To be able to do
that for the school was an honor.
It was something I really enjoyed.
It was nice to be on that side of it,
and have a chance to learn about
all these hidden secrets that the rest
of the campus doesn’t know about,
and get a chance to share them with
the campus.”
Otovik soon became the Sports
Editor, and spent most of his time
outside of classes in the student
newspaper offices.
“Being able to spend significant
time, even if it was broken up for
two hours here, an hour there, that
was a great thing about work at
the newspaper. It wasn’t just a job.
It was a group. It was a bunch of
friends who enjoyed each others
time and company. We were having
too much fun upstairs in the office.”
The communities that form outside of classes through student activities particularly impressed Otovik.
“UMass did a great job of bringing people of all different backgrounds together, and took kids
with different personalities, and
situations and brought them all out
as successful adults. It may not be a
division one school academics wise
or athletics wise, but it certainly
brings out division one people. It
starts with teachers, and it goes all
the way down to students. You can’t
ask for much more than that.”
Because UMass is not a huge
school, because of the intimacy
of the campus and the classroom,
Otovik was able to develop strong
relationships with his teachers.
“A lot of people I know went to
school in places where they were
happy if their teacher even knew
their name, because of the class size.
To take classes that were so personal, I don’t think many schools
besides UMass could offer that.”
Calculus 1 and 2 were Otovik’s
favorite classes. He says he had a
funky teacher who brought life to
formulas and equations.
“UMass was a school where the
teachers treated you like adults.
They had high expectations for you,
but they also understood too you
had a life or a job, or jobs, or sometimes kids,” he says.
“It was amazing how everyone
got along because there were so
many different backgrounds, and
heritages, religions, races, whatever. The students had a little chip
on their shoulders. UMass opened
to a lot of students who were first
time college students in their family, or had a tough situation at home,
or had a tough situation of their
own, whether it be a single parent
or whatever the case was. I felt that
the students were gritty, hard nosed
kids that were determined to live as
successful adults.”
In the second semester of his
freshman year, Otovik remembers
one of his English professors asking
the class to write something, anything, and to bring it back to talk
about in the next class.
“From that moment on, after my
freshman year, I realized you go to
college not only to get an education,
but you go to college to become creative, to learn to do things multiple
ways, and not always do it the way
that the textbook says, or the way
that the book says. The teachers
allowed us to be creative, and they
took examples from everything in
life.”
Otovik drove past UMass when
he was visiting his folks last Christmas.
“I thought that school was destined for great things when I graduated, but now that first building
there next to where the Science
building was, it’s out of this world.
That school is going to take over
that whole area. We all knew it was
just a matter of time. Driving by it,
I’ve only been gone, not even two
years, and that school looks 100
percent different than it looked
when I left, and as an alumnus that’s
pretty exciting.”
2010s
www.umassmedia.com
25
Activists Fasten the Palestinian Flag in Campus Center Without Protest
Rima Mahmoud, Political Science, BA 2010, Conflict Resolution, MA 2012
Students for Justice in Palestine
assembled because of Rima Mahmoud’s passion for peace.
“The first thing that we managed
to do was to put up a Palestinian
flag with all of the flags that are in
the Campus Center, and from there
we had a lot of different events.”
Mahmoud went to Student Activities and said it wasn’t fair to not
have a Palestinian flag, and they
said ok, bring a flag. The next day
they zip tied it to the banister.
“Me and a few other students
formed the group,” she says, and
it started because of the Occupy
Movement. “A professor who was
active in Boston, and as we talked
to her our interest in issues in Palestine came up and so she put us in
touch. She sent an email to all of us
and said, all of you have mentioned
this to me. You might want to talk
together and think about forming a
group.”
The next thing they did was organize a fund raiser to bring clean
water to Gaza.
“We raised almost $58,000,”
Mahmoud says. “We got student
groups, the faculty, and different departments to sponsor us.
We knew the resources were there
and we were able to go out and ask
people.”
At UMB Mahmoud learned to be
proactive.
“There are resources everywhere
that you go. There are people with
different experiences, and different
connections, and what comes down
to it is you need to know what you
want, and then you can go and ask
for it, and there are people there
that are going to go and help you
make it happen.”
Mahmoud started at UMB as a
Biology major, but she quickly got
involved in the many protest movements that were on campus at the
time and her interests began to
schools, but it was also the fact that
it was a commuter school.”
“I knew that I was going to commute to school, so that was a big
deal for me that it was a commuter
school, because at that point I didn’t
feel like I would be missing out on
anything that was happening in the
dorms.”
shift.
“At some point during my Junior
year I got to learn more about the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I got to
learn more about the different solutions that are available, and then
from there I realized that there’s a
program that directly teaches you
how to do these things, and went
from there into a completely different career path.”
She was hanging out at the Mass
Media, and met a student there who
was in the Conflict Resolution program.
“He was telling me about the program, and had a course book with
different classes being offered. It
was my last semester of undergrad,
and I had been considering going
to grad school or law school at that
point.”
She was already in the midst of
an independent study on the Palestine-Israel controversy.
“I think that was my favorite part
about UMass Boston, the flexibility
that you get, the fact that you can
design your own major as long as
you can get it approved by a professor.”
For her capstone in undergrad
Mahmoud spent a year studying
the nuances of a one state solution
for Palestinians and Israelis, and
she wanted to continue in grad
school.
“For someone like me who already has the background, I wanted
something more in depth, and I was
able to do it for over a year, work
with this professor who’s an expert
in the field”
Mahmoud moved from Jordan to
the US a year before matriculating
into UMB.
“Based on the research that I
quickly did it seemed like it was a
different type of education. Also
it was cheaper than a lot of other
At UMB Mahmoud found a community outside of the classroom by
seeking out activities on campus.
One day, as she was finishing up
her first semester of grad school,
she heard that professor Paudrig
O’Malley, an internationally known
peacemaker, was starting an international conference with delegates
from different cities that are divided by conflict. The goal was to bring
people from disparate situations
together to talk about their experiences living in the midst of wars
and conflicts.
“I heard that he might be taking
some students with him, and I remember getting his email address
and getting his assistant’s email address and emailing them, and saying hey I’m really interested in this.
Here is how I can help you. This is
how your program can help me.
Within three days I had a ticket,
and I was on my way to Kosovo.”
The conference was in Metqrovista.
“It’s divided by a river, and the
Albanians and Serbians are living
on different sides of the river and
they rarely cross the river, so there
isn’t much interaction that is happening, but there’s a lot of anger
and it was horrible conflict that
happened.”
A total of 12 cites participated,
and the cohort included delegations from Israel, Palestine, Ireland
and Lebanon.
“A big part of it was learning
about their conflicts, and then
speaking to them and knowing that
there are certain things that you
can’t say, certain words you can’t
use. For example someone typed
up a quick summary about what’s
happening and mentioned this Palestinian, and they used the words
‘collaborated with Israelis,’ and the
term ‘collaborate’ for Palestinians
just immediately means a traitor, so
it was a big deal, and it was actually
a very sensitive issue that came up
and we had to quickly figure out a
solution so that it didn’t escalate.”
“It was a real life experience of
learning how to deal with people
in conflict in general because they
tend to be a lot more sensitive and
less forgiving when it comes to mistakes, because these mistakes have
symbolic meaning.”
When she returned to UMB
Mahmoud got a chance to help a
professor design a course about
the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations,
and then helped teach students how
to negotiate on behalf of those parties.
“Every professor I emailed about
working with them on a project, or
to ask what projects do they have,
I’d hear back within 48 hours telling
me come to my office let’s talk. Let’s
figure out what you’re interested in
and I’ll tell what I’m working on,
and we’ll speak about funding. I
think most people just don’t know
about it or just don’t ask.”
After grad school Mahmoud
worked in the conflict department
of a law firm in Boston. This fall she
started law school at BU.
“I’m taking everything that I
learned from UMass with me to
these experiences,” she says. “My
understanding of the world completely changed. Not everyone is
living the same way that I am, and
that even with all of the differences
everybody’s perspective is important.”
Take With One Hand, Give Back With the Other
Alexander Bercerra, Accounting, 2012
The flags of countries from all
over the world that circle campus
made a deep impression on Alexander Bercerra the first time he visited
UMass Boston.
“It showed that they’re embracing
every type of culture,” he says. “Inside of my courses, the professors
always took different approaches
to teach the material and really say,
this is how it is here, but this is how
it could be somewhere else.”
With every class he took at UMB
Bercerra felt his perspective grew
more dynamic. His professors cultivated an environment that was
mindful of the diverse perspectives
at play in every issue.
“They were always trying to
make us appreciate the subject matter for more than what was apparent, because it may be relevant for
us here in one particular way, but
someone else could see it a totally
different way, and it may not be as
relevant for them.”
His classes offered more than just
readings and lectures.
“They would also teach us based
off of our experience, and I think
that that’s what made me realize
they’re trying to put themselves in
my shoes, so I should try to put myself into other people’s shoes.”
As opposed to treating UMass
as a safety net, Bercerra learned to
see his education as a collaborative
experience.
“You can never do anything on
your own,” he says. “The most important thing in life is building re-
lationships, and at UMass Boston
you’re able to build relationships
with people that are from very different backgrounds.”
Out of high school Bercerra
worked for awhile before taking
classes at Bunker Hill Community
College, where he got an associates
degree. UMass Boston accepted
him upon graduation. During his
first semester at UMB, Bercerra received an email about Beacon Voyages for Service.
“I always want to volunteer and
give back, and so I went up to the
student activities center and I started asking some questions, started
getting some feedback on past trips,
and how they went, how it was organized, how you could participate,
and then from there I just fully immersed myself in the application
process.”
He met Sherrod Williams, and
interviewed for a trip to Detroit
during spring break. He got selected with 12 other students, and
spent the rest of the semester raising money for poverty alleviation
in the Motor City.
“From that point on there were
little volunteer opportunities within the campus such as MLK Day of
Service or Spring into Action.”
He helped at a soup kitchen, and
painted inside a homeless shelter in
Lynn with the group he met during
his interview in the student leadership office.
“The Beacon Voyage for Service
really started it all,” Bercerra says.
That spring 13 students went to
Detroit to focus on poverty alleviation in the inner city.
“We did a slew of things, so for
starters we worked with an organization called blight busters in which
we helped destroy houses that were
used for illegal activity or questionable activity.”
They took down a whole house
piece by piece, recycling the building supplies.
“We did a lot of it by hand, and
we had to work with one another as
well as the organization, and from
day 1 to day 7 the house was actually collapsed, so it was pretty inspiring seeing that.”
As they removed material from
the house, they loaded it into the
back of a truck and to be transported to a building depot.
“That was unlike anything I’d
ever seen before because typically
whenever they’re gonna break
down anything it’s going to be with
machinery. You don’t see 20 or 30
people just going at a house with
some tools. People would probably
call the cops or something, and say
what’s going on with these people,
and so that was a really unique experience.”
“There was one particular moment I remember someone from
the organization was helping out
one of our volunteers, and then
they broke a piece off the house,
and it almost hit the person from
the organization that we were
working with, but luckily one of us
caught it, so it’s just looking out for
one another, being there for one another, supporting one another.”
While in the city, they also served
at a soup kitchen, visited a community garden near by that provided
the food, and admired art work
from the community in a local cafe.
“So it was really just being taken
in to another community and organization, and group of people as if
we’d lived there our whole lives, so
that was nice of them to do, and it
was also, it kind of makes you think
what you could do when you come
back to your community, or your
school, it’s all about helping people.”
This spirit of service also extended into Bercerra’s classroom.
“Professors were always willing to help,” he says. “They’d even
schedule time to sit with me after
class, or within their office hours,
making an appointment, and they
were very comical. They try to
lighten the load by keeping things
funny or just spinning it a differ-
ent way. My professors did a really
good job of bringing some enthusiasm to the classroom, and making
you want to learn, and trying to engage you in discussion.”
The classes were communal experiences, just as much about generating fresh discussions as they
were about readings as lectures.
“You can always poke at a particular topic and nobody’s going to get
upset because you’re trying to solve
a problem or trying to think of a
more efficient way to do something
or to try to think about something.
That’s the type of environment that
UMass Boston cultivates just in the
professors and the students combined.”
Now Bercerra works in accounting and recording at Bank of New
York Mellon, soon to be a first year
audit staff within Deloitte and Touche.
“My return on investment has
been huge,” he says. “it’s ridiculous.
I’ve learned so much. I’ve gained so
much from it, and I’m just grateful.”
“You’re going to receive some
great opportunities at UMass Boston. Make sure that you’re taking
with one hand, and with the other
hand you’re grabbing someone else
and pulling them up. It’s about everyone that goes to UMass Boston.
It’s a huge campus. It attracts a lot of
different people, but just be sure to
help some people out even if it’s just
with your point of view.”
26
2010s
An Ambition to Never Plateau
Brianna Reyes, Classical Languages and Historical Archeology, 2014
Driving in from a Boston suburb,
Brianna Reyes’ mom made her first
visit to UMB special. They stayed in
the city for the night after touring
campus.
“I went on one of the dreariest
days, it was rainy and slushy, and
really gross the day that I went to
campus, but even though it wasn’t
looking its best, I was really excited.
My tour guide did a good job of
talking about the travel and service
opportunities.”
UMass Boston was one of the
last schools that she found when
searching for schools. She wanted
small classes, but all of the private
colleges she visited seemed too
small.
“The tour of UMass really set
out to me that the class sizes were
generally smaller especially for the
things I wanted to study, but it also
had all of those features of larger
universities. There were so many
clubs. There were so many opportunities to travel, lots of opportunities
to do community service, and those
were things that really hooked me.”
On top of all of that Reyes got
the Chancellor’s Scholarship, for
high achieving high school students, which meant that tuition and
fees were completely covered. That
sealed the deal for her.
“It was everything that I wanted.”
Reyes started getting active on
campus before her freshman year.
She got a job in the undergraduate
admissions office, and after working there for a semester she moved
up and became a Beacon Ambassador.
“Working with admissions, and
being a Beacon helped me improve my public speaking. I’ve always liked talking to groups, but
after giving tours two to three to
four times a week in front of high
school students I got used to understanding the attention span of
high school students, and figuring
out how much information they
can handle at once, and when to
get things moving on, so that was
helpful.”
The day before her graduation
from UMB Reyes got a job teaching
Latin at Chelsea high school.
“I’ve always wanted to teach,”
she says. “It’s a lot more work than
I thought, because I did student
teaching but when you student
teach you really only see one side
of what goes on as a teacher, so last
year was kind of crazy. There were
some days where I was there till like
9 or 10 at night, really stressed out,
but in the end it panned out. I like
what I do.”
In her sophomore year Reyes
needed to decide what she wanted
to teach. She wanted to do some-
thing different, and difficult, something where she should never feel
like she is going to plateau. So she
chose to teach Latin.
“To this day it’s the hardest thing
that I do, so I really try to get my
students to understand that it’s
good to challenge yourself, and how
rewarding it can feel when you’re
successful at something that’s really
hard. I’ve always liked Latin, but it
has always been hard, and I’m glad
that I chose to do something that
would really challenge me. One of
the things that I learned at UMass,
was that it’s good to be challenged.
It’s good to push yourself to be better and to struggle.”
She emphasizes to her students
that their education is their own,
and they can have ownership for it,
and step up and be a leader in their
own education.
The work that Reyes did with the
Office of Student Leadership helped
her understand the vast opportunities available to people around the
world, and also the challenges that
some people face in taking advantage of those resources.
“My classes helped me understand my very urban, inner city
students from a different perspective, understanding that some of
them might work after school. They
might have jobs until 11 and 12
at night, that some of them might
have to take care of their families
because their parents are working
extra jobs.”
The extra curricular experiences
that influenced her the most came
from the Office of Student Leadership, where she worked with Sherrod Williams.
“He did a good job of getting people to understand that everyone is
different, and that even though we
are different, we all have strengths,
and we all have the ability to become leaders. What he taught me,
and how he taught me how to lead
other leaders, I really tried to take
into my classrooms.”
The classics department in particular helped Reyes expand her
experience through travel.
“They helped me find a program
that was doing an archeological dig
in Italy,” she say. “I had scholarships
that covered everything from the
flight to the cost of the program
to even spending money for food.
I never would have even thought
that I could do that if it wasn’t for
their help, and for them sitting me
down and walking me through the
process and helping me understand
that I could do these things. That
was something that I am never going to forget.”
At the dig in Abruzzo, Italy, Reyes
realized pretty quickly that she did
not want to be an archeologist.
“The first couple of weeks it
rained almost every day, so I spent
a good chunk of time barefoot
bucketing water out of our trench.
It was very cold. Then the last few
weeks it got hot really fast and we
were basically sweeping dirt off of
stones in a trench that had etruscan
and Roman roads. We had to be really careful, using toothpicks and
tooth brushes, and tiny little things
to clear more of the road off, and
keep it clean. You have to be very
careful, and it was not my favorite
thing to do.”
That experience further expanded Reyes’ understanding of the
world.
“We have a really unique campus
in that there are a lot of transfer students. There are a lot of international students. There are a hand full of
students that come right out of high
school, and I hope that UMass Boston preserves that diverse identity
that it has in its student population,
because that contributes to the kind
of education you get just from the
atmosphere.”
While changes are inevitable,
Reyes hopes that UMB maintains
its commitment to providing quality public higher education in an
urban environment.
“The staff and faculty at UMass
are the most supportive people to
help you figure out what you love,
and who you want to be.”
“Go to the different fairs they
have, check out the centers, or just
go and see what’s going on when
you see events that you think are
interesting. Go, even if you’re going by yourself, you’ll meet people
that that are also interested in those
kinds of things.”
Brush the Chip Off Your Shoulder and Learn
Amanda Huff arrived at orientation wearing her student newspaper staff shirt. The club tables were
all arrayed in the Ballroom of the
brand new Campus Center with literature, candies, and trinkets vying
for her attention.
“I was the News Editor on my
high school newspaper,” she says.
“I happened to meet Donna [the
Student Media Advisor] who noticed my shirt because it said newspaper staff on it. She gave me the
contact information for the Editor
in Chief and the Managing Editor,
and so from about the midpoint of
July, 2006, I had an idea that I was
going to be doing some work with
the newspaper staff, so just about as
soon as I moved here from Michigan.”
Returning in September she was
overwhelmed by the insecurity she
heard from her classmates.
“When I was an undergrad I
would get a lot of grief for saying
that I went to UMass Boston, and
not being from the area I seriously
did not understand it, and even to
this day I’m really not quite sure
where it all stems from, but I think
that people need to be more active
in defending the reputation of the
school.”
She chose UMass Boston to experience city life.
“I knew about UMass Amherst,
and I knew that it was a trusted
university system, but I didn’t want
to live in Amherst because I really
wanted the advantage of being in
the city.”
At orientation every single person milling around in the common
Amanda Huff, Art and English BA 2011, Middle and Secondary Education MA 2013
areas looked unique and interesting.
“Where I grew up in Michigan, it
was far enough outside of the bigger cities that there wasn’t a whole
lot of diversity, and that was really
what I was seeking. When I got all
my acceptance letters, it happened
to be that UMass Boston gave me
a decent financial aid package, but
when I came to visit the school, and
I got to see how unique the school
community was, I realized that it
would be a good fit.”
When classes started, she joined
the Mass Media staff.
“It it was a lot easier to make
friends than I expected, and the
friends that I made are all quality,”
she says. “It’s nice to know there’s
still an open line of communication even if you’re not in touch with
each other all the time.”
After about two years of writing
and editing for the student newspaper, she became the yearbook editor.
“One thing that I think I’ll never
forget is we got the police blotter for
the news section, and they thought
that there was a breaking and entering on the fourth floor of the Campus Center, and it turned out that a
raccoon had gotten in there.”
“We were trying to figure out
how that would have happened,
considering that there were no trees
up that high on campus, and there
are no windows that open, on the
fourth floor, so we’re imagining this
raccoon just getting in the elevator,
and getting off of the elevator and
reeking havoc.”
Managing the yearbook desk,
Huff worked in the Student Media
Office throughout her undergrad
studies, up until the second half of
her masters program.
“I had a brief opportunity to
work with the writing center, and I
did a little bit of tutoring, and took
a class with one of the professors
who helped coordinate the tutoring
program, and she suggested that I
look into getting a teaching license.”
While working on her BA, Huff
started tutoring English as a second
language. That’s when she decided
to pursue a career in teaching, and
she transitioned into the education
program at UMB.
“They focused in on what I
wanted, which was providing quality education to areas where people
are a little bit more under-served,
like working in urban school districts, working with students who
come from a disadvantage. That
was something that I always appreciated about UMass Boston’s message when it came to college, and
I appreciated that their program
focused on that thinking about the
whole child or the whole individual, building that message from kindergarten all the way up through
college.”
Now Huff works as an eighth
grade English language arts teacher
at a middle school in Revere.
“Aside from academics, I really
learned how I could push myself.
I learned how resilient I can be in
the face of any struggle, be it an academic struggle or a social struggle,
whatever. I realized that there are so
many more things that I am capable
of than I had ever realized.”
Huff ’s favorite classes were the
capstones she took at the end of her
BA.
“My professors were incredibly
supportive with the entire process,”
she says. “It was refreshing to get to
the end of a program, and to have a
little bit more control over the work
I did.”
She still keeps in touch with her
practicum advisor, Al Winestein,
and a few of her art professors as
well. More than anything, the culture of UMB influenced Huff.
“At UMass Boston, where you’re
able to talk to people who have so
many different experiences, who
have multiple different perspectives, people who are little bit older,
and might be able to offer advice
for something that you had never
encountered before, but they have.”
She knows that she got a great education, no matter what people say,
but she’s noticing that the buildings
have changed the way people talk
about her alma mater.
“I think that it’s time that UMass
Boston kind of gives itself a facelift.
Aside from the Campus Center the
majority of the buildings were old
or falling apart or almost falling
apart, and I think that people judge
so much on looks.”
“It’s time that UMass Boston’s
outside match everything that happens within its walls. There are so
many quality things going on at this
university, and people are so quick
to judge because the buildings are
old, or because of its location, or
because of whatever stigma it may
have had in the past. I think it’s time
for UMass Boston to have its place
in the spotlight, and new buildings
are an easy way to do that.”
2010s
www.umassmedia.com
First Generation College Grad Pursues Career in Higher Education
27
Junior Pena, Psychology and Communication, 2014
About half way through his undergraduate degree, Junior Pena
realized that he wanted a career in
higher education. He sat down with
his mentor, Sherrod Williams.
“I still remember it perfectly. We
were having the one on one meeting. He asked me about what my
aspiration and goals were, and what
was my passion. I was focused on
doing my psychology research and
on getting my communications degree. At the time I wasn’t necessarily considering student affairs as a
potential opportunity.”
Already immersed in the student
activities, volunteering for every
community service opportunity
that arose, Pena had developed an
outstanding resume.
“Sherrod provided me with an
option. He said, You don’t have to
decide this, by no means, but it’s
worth giving a shot. He recommended that I apply to the National
Undergraduate Fellows Program
(NASPA), which is an exploratory
program for students in undergrad
that are highly involved and could
potentially be interested in student
affairs to try it out.”
He signed up for the NASPA con-
ference, and that summer he found
himself interning with the Dean of
Students Office at the University
of Vermont. He loved it. Immediately after graduation he interned
at Northwestern university just
outside of Chicago with diversity
programming in their new student
family programs.
“All of those different opportunities sent the message that this was
my calling and my area of interest
and expertise.”
Now pursuing his masters of
science in higher education, Pena
works in student affairs as a graduate assistant at Florida State University. He advises several student
groups including the Hispanic/Latino Student Union, and the Service
Scholar evening coordinators.
With excellent grades, and test
scores coming out of high school,
Pena could have gone almost anywhere.
“I know that you have a very
trendy kind of campaign going on
with ‘My First Choice,’ and it actually was my first choice,” he says.
“UMass Boston provided me with a
great opportunity to not only have
access to the city, but also to be able
to study at a much more affordable
price tag, which ultimately was the
deciding factor for me.”
As a student he worked for the
Office of Student Leadership and
Community Engagement in a range
of capacities. He collected donations for the Project Serve Initiative, volunteered for every service
day, was a Peer Mentor, and became
the Student Director of the Freshman Leadership Institute. The list
goes on, but the activity that he
enjoyed most was the Alternative
Spring Break trip that he co-lead
with Kenny Andejetski.
“We worked with the Chicago
Youth Center in Brownsville Chicago, helping them with their end
of the year synthesis project. Additionally we also did some park restoration during the day to be able to
get a hands on experience of what
the physical spaces looked like.”
Leading about a dozen UMB students he raised several thousand
dollars over the course of a fall
semester in order to travel to Chicago during spring break and learn
about the state of public education
nationally.
“Rather than going into a community and assuming that we’re
saviors of some sort, we provided
the students with an opportunity
to learn about the culture and community of the South Side of Chicago. It was a collaborative learning
process.”
While there they studied the demographics and economics of area.
“We had a teacher’s union representative come in and speak to the
students, to educate us on the closings that were happening rapidly
in Chicago,” he says. “The students
ultimately really got the point, and
a lot of them left the experience
emotional because they saw that
there was a lot of urban injustice
happening and these students were
essentially becoming a product of
their environment with very little
to no leadership or role models to
model better behavior.”
He came away from that trip with
a passion for teaching.
“Education is a great opportunity
for us to create a more equitable
society, and I think particularly in
Chicago there are a lot of folks that
are running public education like
a business, and not understanding
that their product isn’t a product,
it’s people, and particularly stu-
dents.”
The experience in Chicago got
Pena thinking about the increasingly diverse population in America, and what makes a good education.
“What interested me most about
that was how much conflict and
disagreement arises from just misunderstandings of communication
interaction.”
“Some cultures prefer a lot more
context and information around
what they are expected to do, while
others prefer a lot less information
and it’s more assumed through
body language, and the less information that’s provided. Simple
things like that that can create large
conflicts. So how do students adapt
when they have these unique cultural communication processes,
and have to come to this completely
different country, completely different way of thinking and way of
communicating, and how does that
influence their ability to successfully transition into college?”
In classes with Gamze Yilmaz,
Jesse Contaro Johnson, and Michael Millburn, he gained insights
into intercultural communication
which became strong interest for
him.
“I by no means entered UMass
Boston being the person that I am
today,” he says. “As a first generation
college student I had an immense
difficulty navigating the institution
initially. My advice to students is to
continually put yourself out there,
step outside your comfort zone. If
you get nervous about something it
means that you care about it a lot.
Take that plunge and hope for the
best afterwards.”
It took Pena time to acclimate to
campus, and after his first semester
he thought about transferring to
the Dartmouth campus, closer to
where he grew up.
“What kept me on campus was
the leadership opportunity that I
got. I took it as a personal goal of
mine to be involved and try out
everything that the institution had
to offer. I understood that this was
something that I needed to take advantage of, because literally no one
else in my family at the time had the
opportunity or access to it, and so I
understood that it was an immense
privilege.”
It took another full semester of
work at the front desk in the Student Activities office for him to
learn to advocate for himself.
“At UMass more so than anything you really have to be comfortable asking questions. Because
we have a commuter culture, you
have to be able to transcend that to
be involved, getting to know folks,
and putting yourself out there in
many ways. That lesson is huge for
me, being a self advocate, the value
of being engaged not only academically but also outside of the classroom, and how that experience and
practice outside of the classroom
many times can supplement what
you’re learning.”
The opportunity to live and work
in Boston turned out to be a great
benefit.
“The city is such a vibrant place
with so many opportunities,” he
says. “It’s unique as an opportunity
to get to know yourself in a city
that’s walkable. It’s accessible, and
I would say more than any major
city there’s so much opportunity
per capita. The opportunity is just
there for a young professional and a
young student attempting to learn.”
Business Success Makes Home in Plainville
Jesse Wright, Management BA 2013, MBA 2014
Sitting in a ballroom on campus
a month before graduation, Jesse
Wright felt a surge of pride and a
certain finality. This was the first
TEDx at UMB, and he was responsible for making it happen.
“We had maybe 500 students in
the audience, and it broadcast on
TVs around campus,” Wright says.
“It was a great event, the culmination of a lot of different people in
the university coming together.”
As a student government leader,
Wright invited eight speakers to
UMass Boston, including the CEO
of Dana Farber, an Olympian, and
famous restaurateur. It was three
hours of pure inspiration. Wright
saw it on his fellow students’ faces.
He had worked as hard at putting
together this event as he had on his
degrees.
“As an older student it was important to me to find an institution
that was going to be flexible in allowing me to complete my degree
as quickly as possible. At UMass
Boston I could do my undergrad
and MBA at once, and that might
not have been as possible if I had
gone to a school that had a more
traditional style of doing academics.”
A year earlier, in 2013, Wright
had finished his BA. Now he was on
the cusp of getting an MBA.
“I believe I was the first person
to have completed the program in
12 calendar months,” Wright says.
“That’s what I was told by the Dean
at the time.”
After
graduation,
Wright’s wife gave birth to
twins, so he took it slow
and spent six months with
his new family. Then, this
past January he got a job
at the CVS corporate office as a Strategy Analyst
in the Merchandising
Department. He works
with profit margins, and
spends a lot of time thinking about how to better
serve customers. In his off
time, Wright is also on on
the finance committee for
the town of Plainville.
“To know that my sons
are going to be raised in
this town,” Wright said.
“To be part of the town
in a way that my skillset can best serve the future of my
family and hopefully the future of
the town in some capacity, I enjoy
a lot.”
Before attending UMass, Wright
was already a professional. He’d
been through the military. He knew
how to work, and he knew what
he wanted, so he was apprehensive
about going to school with a bunch
of 18 year-olds still trying to figure
out who and why they are. But he
wanted that MBA.
“I think UMass Boston’s going
to be what people make it,” Wright
says. “It can be that commuter
school that you show up at and take
two classes and leave, or it can be
a whole lot more. Everything from
our centers, the LGBTQ community, our veterans community upstairs, the Asian Student Center,
there’s opportunities at our university to be successful. You might
need to look deeper to find them,
but it’s going to be worth all of the
work that you put in, for sure.”
At first he was a little hesitant
to join in student activities, but he
found that age is really immaterial
at UMB. His fellow students valued
his experience.
“I was hesitant hanging out with
a bunch of 18 year olds, and not
knowing how that would work out.
But I found an organization in student government, and with Neil
MacInnes-Barker that was very
open to my situation.”
In his first semester
he was Chair of the
Budget and Finance
Committee, and Student Body President
after that. Then he was
the President of the
Grad Student Assembly while finishing his
MBA. He was also in
the Honors Program at
the College of Management, where he developed an honors thesis
that he presented it at
the Amherst campus. It
was called Sustainable
Affordability of College
Education.
“At that time Occupy was going on, so
there was a little more
weight on the issue of affordability.
I think now maybe that conversation switched to student loans and
the overbearing debt that those are
providing long-term for our economy, but at the time affordability was
very important.”
There are two UMB professors
that he remembers in particular:
Mary Still from the College of Management, and David Areford, from
the Art History department.
“The College of Management
and my classwork taught me the
value of always being a professional
in whatever situation that you’re
in, and things all the way down to
the small solutions, really understanding when it’s time to take a
step away from an email instead
of sending it, or proofreading the
work that you’re sending. It’s those
details that really helped me out in
the professional world.”
He returns to campus regularly
for events like the Alumni Athletic
Hall of Fame Dinner, and the Student Government Annual Dinner.
“I was able to do a lot at UMass,”
he says. “I’m not the only reason
that I was successful, and I won’t
ever be the only reason that I’m successful. A lot of people played big
parts in providing me the opportunity to do everything that I was able
to do, including the deans making
waivers for me to be able to take six
MBA classes in a semester, or other
people making accommodations.
It was one of those environments
that always acquiesced to my needs,
which was great when you’re trying
to do a lot.”
Wright spent most of his time on
campus in the student senate offices, and he particularly enjoyed
participating in the daily university
operations. He hopes that the university continues to stay student
centered.
“That’s been the root and driver
of its success in the past. As change
happens I hope that the university
keeps the students at the forefront
of all of their thoughts and decisions. If they do that they’ll continue to be eternally successful, especially for the next 50 years.”
28
2010s
Cutting a Path from Public Education through Politics
Felix Arroyo, Human Services, 2014
Growing up in the Boston Public
Schools, Felix Arroyo got to know
UMass Boston through a program
for young English language learners
called Talented and Gifted (TAG)
Latino Program.
“In middle school I was running
around those hallways at UMass
Boston,” he says. “I’m looking forward to being a partner with UMass
in my role now, while I have it, to
make sure that the school is successful.”
Last year Mayor Marty Walsh
added Arroyo to his cabinet as the
Chief of Health and Human Services for the City of Boston.
“I have the real blessing of waking up every day and thinking
about how do we make Boston
more accessible, how do we create
more opportunities for the people
in our city, and how do we make
sure that no one is left behind,” he
says. “I’m really in awe that I have
this opportunity. I’m grateful for it,
and a whole lot of things that have
happened in my life, including my
time at UMass Boston, that prepared me for this.”
He oversees several of the largest homeless shelters in Boston,
and finding housing for people that
need it is one of the most gratifying
parts of his job.
“Everyone in the city matters,”
he says. “We treat someone who’s
homeless with the respect and dignity that they deserve, and work towards ending that part of their lives
so that they can be stably housed
and move forward with their life,
and when we’re able to pull that off,
good things happen.”
Arroyo also works with youth
and families at the 35 community
centers across the city, helping ten
thousand kids get jobs in the city
over the summer through various
private partners. He also co-chairs
My Brother’s Keeper, which is a
program designed to remove ob-
stacles in the lives of minorities in
the city of Boston.
“No one’s going to really give us
anything that we want, and we have
to believe in ourselves to make it
happen. So the one piece of advice
I would give current students is to
soak it all in, learn everything you
can, know that you’re never going
to know everything, and to really
follow your passion, because when
you find that match it feels as if you
don’t even have to work because
you enjoy it.”
Arroyo started working on his
degree at UMB in the late 90s, taking night classes while working to
support his family.
“UMass Boston felt comfortable
for me, because of the economic
realities of my family. When it was
time for me to go to college, I knew
I wanted to go to a school that I
could afford, but that I believed
that I could still get a good education out of, and UMass Boston was
perfect for me in that it was affordable compared to other schools. I
thought the level of education was
good, I felt very familiar with the
campus, and I felt that I wasn’t the
only student there who was working and going to school at the same
time, and so I felt comfortable
there.”
He held three jobs at the time:
bussing at a restaurant on Newbury
Street, security at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital, and administration at the Donahue Institute,
which is a part of the UMass system.
“My higher education wasn’t a
straight line,” he says. “I had to pay
for school out of my own pocket, so
my path to higher education was
just different than I think other
people’s, not that it was better or
worse, but it took me a little longer.”
Because of the pressures of work
and supporting his family, Arroyo
left UMB for awhile. Then he tested into a masters program at New
Hampshire University, where he
studied economic development.
Equipped with a degree, Arroyo got
elected to the Boston City Council where he served for four years.
He left office shortly after the 2013
Boston mayoral election.
“It felt sort of strange to me not to
have the bachelors, so that was one
of the things I wanted to fix after I
had run for mayor and was seeing
what I was going to do next. I knew
that I had wanted to just get that
done so I could say I did it, and to
put that part of my life behind me.”
After the whirlwind mayoral
race, in which he came in 5th in a
field of 12 candidates, Arroyo wanted to hit the books again.
“I decided I wanted to go back
and sort of finish it up, and I’m
pretty proud that I did.”
While completing the final few
classes he needed to graduate, Arroyo worked closely with his teachers and didn’t have time for student
activities.
“They knew that life was happening, that I was an adult and there
were other things going on with
me, but still didn’t give up on me,
and therefor made it easier for me
not to give up on finishing.”
Reflecting on his first stint as a
student ten years ago, he fondly
remembers organizing events
through Casa Latina.
“It was one of my first leadership opportunities in my life, and
certainly it was a moment where
I felt that responsibility of coming
through for others and trying to develop programing that makes sense,
and working on issues around Latinos in higher education, making
sure that Latinos had access, and
then once they were there were able
to finish with school. I think that
helped prepare me for what I ended
up doing later in life.”
He put together panels on racebased school assignment practices
in Boston and gathered the founders to the Gaston Institute to talk
about the challenges facing Latinos
in America.
“I really enjoyed being active
in Casa Latina, and using that as
a space where I would learn with
others.”
He took a lot of political science
classes during his first few years,
and had the opportunity to study
with the current provost Winston
Langley. He remembers most of his
classes, and UMB is where he started developing his political network.
“I remember a lot of the students.
Some of them I still bump into,
some working in nonprofits across
the city, others were very helpful to
me in my political career, running
for city council, running for mayor,
and so even many of the professors
there are still people who are valuable to me and important in my
life.”
Because of his unorthodox path
through higher education, Arroyo
says UMB taught him resiliency,
and the value of sticking to a goal
no matter how long it takes.
“The culture and the spirit of the
university makes it very comfortable for people of different ages to
be in the same classroom, and to
learn from each other, and so that’s
the experience that I had, in fact,
when I was in my early 20s, I didn’t
feel as if I was the young one in a
room, and then later on when I was
older, I didn’t feel as though I was
the old one in the room. It just felt
very natural to be in that classroom,
and I think that speaks a lot to the
culture of that school.”
In the more than ten years since
Arroyo started his degree the campus has transformed, and that spirit
of community engagement
“I have great respect for the leadership that’s there now through
Chancellor Motley, and what he’s
able to bring to the school, and really to help elevate the school, to
really be the type of school we all
know it could be.”
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