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Advisors Coach, Mentor and Walk Alongside Students

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.

The Formula: Deniz Hotamisligil, BFA '08 | School of the Museum of Fine Arts | Tufts University

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.”

When Silvia Moreno-Garcia Haunted Endicott

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.”

The Care and Feeding of American Art: Heather Cox, MFA '98 | School of the Museum of Fine Arts | Tufts University

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...

The Family Startup - Notre Dame Business

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...

Fair Game - Notre Dame Business

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...

For Carlos Yescas ’00, Sweet Dreams are Made of Cheese

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...

The Creator: Marlon Forrester, BFA '08 | School of the Museum of Fine Arts | Tufts University

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...

Invest in Workers to Invest in the Future

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