When Rachel Pearson ’08 logged onto Zoom from her computer in Los Angeles, she’d just returned home from working as lead video editor for ESPN at the 2024 NCAA Women’s Final Four in Cleveland, Ohio. Pulling 17-hour shifts in the basement of the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse—home of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers—editing footage as quickly as possible wasn’t glamorous courtside work. Yet the job resonated with every cell of Pearson’s identity as a human, athlete, a member of the media, and a queer woman.

When Jim Steck L'07, and his high school sweetheart, Michelle, started a family, they moved back to their hometown of Torrington, Connecticut."Litchfield County needs more lawyers and professionals in general, and it was clear to us that we needed to go back home," Steck said. Steck cares deeply about his town but never pictured himself running for office.

As a kid, Matt Beane, SM ‘14, PhD ‘17, followed his dad, a general contractor, around job sites, learning by watching as tradespeople passed master-level skills and tools down to talented apprentices.Beane never lost his fascination with how knowledge and learning are transmitted in the workplace. In fact, he’s made a career out of examining how humans work with machines...

An experimental partnership between student journalists and local media is helping to serve an industry in distress—and Gulls are thriving.

As a rising senior in high school, Kahina Haynes ’11 scored admission to a summer intensive with a prestigious dance company, an on-ramp program for aspiring ballerinas to leap into professional careers. Just as top high school athletes are scouted and recruited, summer intensives are opportunities to be discovered. She remembers, “I was the only Black dancer.”

Working in 30 countries and across the United States, Frontlines teams collaborate with local partners to imagine solutions for some of the world’s most challenging problems. To achieve this, Frontlines advisors donate approximately 400 hours of their time over any given semester. Acting as mentors and coaches, advisors provide solid business expertise and institutional memory about a project’s history and stakeholders, and emotional support to the team along the way.

Adjusting to the BFA program with its expansive structure was overwhelming at first—but turned out to be what Hotamisligil needed to thrive. He said, “At SMFA, you have the freedom to explore, but it comes with responsibilities. It pushes you to be independent and creative in a powerful way. At the end of the semester, you have to be able to talk about what you’ve accomplished in a room with faculty and your peers.”

What you might not realize is that back before she made it big as an author, Moreno-Garcia was first a Gull, majoring in communications, working her way through college as a Resident Assistant at Endicott’s very own haunted house, Winthrop Hall, which legend says is stalked by the ghost of the Pink Lady. “There’s a door in the stairwell that goes nowhere, but I can confidently say that while patrolling the halls at night as an RA, I never saw anything other than students trying to trick each other into believing they’d seen a ghost,” said the 2003 graduate from the Vancouver, British-Columbia, townhouse she shares with her family. Is it possible that the idea of the Pink Lady subconsciously came up in her latest book, Silver Nitrate, in which a vision of a main character’s dead, mangled girlfriend visits him in a claustrophobic hallway after midnight? Perhaps, but Moreno-Garcia said bluntly, “I don’t believe in the supernatural—and I especially don’t believe in the supernatural in that dorm.”

Art won’t last forever. Heather Cox. MFA '98, would argue that artists often make their art intending for it to die one day. In fact, it’s Cox’s job as Executive Coordinator of the Conservation Department of the Whitney Museum of American Art to interpret artists’ wishes when it comes to the care and feeding of their greatest works...

Milind Agtey (MBA ’79) learned early on in his career that making the right gut decisions can save lives. As an officer and, later, a captain of a ship in the Indian Merchant Navy, he was stationed aboard cargo ships and oil tankers 24-hours a day, seven days a week, circling the globe three times each year — sometimes through dangerously rough waters. From the instant a sailor falls overboard in freezing water, he explained, you have just 10 seconds to rescue them before hypothermia sets in...

“A few weeks ago, everything was in pieces, and nothing was complete,” Yu-Wen Wu says from the artist co-op where she lives and works in Boston’s Fort Point Channel neighborhood. Work in progress hung from the ceiling, covered every table, and lay in disarray on the floor. “But now everything has come together.”

As a kid, Amy Buchan Siegfried (MBA ‘21) wasn’t exactly athletic. Actually, one of her earliest memories involves getting smacked in the face with a soccer ball. Left out, she watched from the bleachers as her brother Scott scored instead. Years later, as a business executive and experienced founder, she realized that when it comes to following sports news, too many women sideline themselves. They lose out on connecting with colleagues in the workplace and on building relationships...

Carlos Yescas ’00 has a job most people only dream about. He’s a scholar of cheese, an expert in all things cheese, and a cheese advocate who fights to preserve traditional recipes and methods of cheesemaking that are being pushed out by big cheese operations. Just this fall, Yescas, who lives with his husband in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, led a delegation of cheesemakers from the Global South on a tour across the U.K.’s cheese country, learning how British cheeses are manufactured...

Marlon Forrester is sitting at a long table in the SMFA library where he used to study as an undergraduate. When he leans in to answer a question, he pulls the sunglasses off his face and really connects. His presence is as electric as the fast-paced games of sidewalk chess he likes to play in the Fenway outside Blick Art Materials, setting down bags of supplies and risking parking tickets to claim checkmate. “As artists, we’re all giving birth to something,” he believes. And at the...

As a child, Chike Aguh’s mother, an immigrant from rural Nigeria, cut dress fabric for minimum wage at a shop outside New York City. “My parents came to America because they saw an economy where their kids would not have it as hard as they did,” says Aguh, A05. “The America that they came to was built by the American worker.” Because of his own family’s success, it became Aguh’s personal mission to help others rise, too. He has worked as a second-grade teacher, a lecturer at Columbia University