Suffolk University

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Fact: No NBA team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit. So good luck to the Boston Celtics as they try to make some magic in Dallas for Game 3! From your partners at Suffolk University and the Sawyer Business School.

Psychology Professor Mary Beth Medvide is researching a powerful remedy to the youth mental health crisis: the conscious cultivation of hope. Read more about her work in the spring issue of Suffolk University Magazine.

The Power of Hope - Suffolk University Magazine: Spring 2024 The Power of Hope

Suffolk University Political Research Center Director David Paleologos to give the keynote address at tonight's Conexion-All Demographics virtual event. Admission is free. Learn more:

Another moment to celebrate our 2024 Suffolk University Law School graduates! 🎉

Read more about the Law ceremony and see more photos here: https://www.suffolk.edu/news-features/news/2024/05/18/18/43/2024-law-commencement

Another moment to celebrate our 2024 Sawyer Business School graduates! 🎉

At yesterday's Suffolk University Law School Commencement ceremony, Joshua Koskoff, JD ’94, walked to the stage of the Leader Bank Pavilion wearing bracelets given to him by the families of children killed in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, which, he noted, took place almost exactly two years ago. Koskoff, who now represents some of those same Uvalde families, won an historic $73 million judgment on behalf of nine families whose children were killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut. It was the first time in American history that a fi****ms company has been held to account for a mass shooting.

'Stare Risk in the Face. Stare Fear in the Face.' - Suffolk University Attorney Joshua Koskoff, who won historic settlements for victims of the Sandy Hook shootings, urges Suffolk University Law School graduates to avoid taking the off-ramps of life

At today's Commencement, Chief Justice Kimberly Budd, the first Black woman to serve as chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, encouraged graduates of the Suffolk University College of Arts & Sciences to grow from adversity and use their liberal arts education as a foundation to bridge differences and build dialogue.

'Engage in Dialogue With Others Who May Disagree With You' - Suffolk University CAS Commencement speaker Mass. Supreme Justice Court Chief Justice Kimberly Budd told the Class of 2024 'this is how you will build a better society'

On the 40th anniversary of his own graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Wolf—the former chairman and CEO of UBS, the global financial services firm, founder of 32 Advisors, and advisor to both President Biden and President Obama—urged the Class of 2024 to take what they have learned about “business with purpose” at the Sawyer Business School and “apply it to the careers you’re all about to enter, whatever those may be.”

'Apply Purpose To Your Careers' - Suffolk University Robert Wolf, financier and presidential advisor, urges Suffolk University Sawyer Business School graduates to embrace the idea of 'business with purpose.'

A toast to the Class of 2024! Check out scenes from last night's Sparkling Toast 🥂✨

2024 GRADUATES SPOTLIGHT: It might not work for every sibling, but for identical twins Skylar and Hayden Rungren, graduating together from Suffolk’s biochemistry program is “very on brand.”

Their college experience hasn’t always been smooth, and they’ve relied on each other—and their “friendly competition”—to overcome medical and academic struggles, transfer schools, build strong support networks, and excel in the lab. Resources like the Office of Disability Services and peer tutoring, along with the small class sizes and empathetic faculty helped them succeed.

“It really feels like professors here care about their students,” says Hayden, who works hard to help make others feel welcome as a Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) scholar.

Now they’re embarking on their next tandem adventure: launching careers in Boston’s world-leading healthcare sector while applying to medical school (yes, the same ones).

All smiles at last night's 1913 Graduation Celebration of scholars from various backgrounds, cultures, races, ethnicities, countries of origin, ability statuses, religions, genders, gender expressions, sexual orientations, and life experiences! 🎓

Racism impacts the mental health of young people of color; it can also impact their access to treatment. Dr. Fatima Watt, MPA ’23, is looking for ways to change that. Read more about her work in the spring issue of Suffolk University Magazine.

Advancing Equity in Mental Healthcare - Suffolk University Magazine: Spring 2024 Advancing Equity in Mental Healthcare

Senior Week is off to a great start! Check out scenes from the Senior Week Brunch and the Senior Boat Cruise 🛳

2024 GRADUATE SPOTLIGHT: Before coming to Suffolk University, Noah Jones, Class of 2024, was really good at the game-designing side of his Roblox business. He just wasn’t as experienced with the business side of his Roblox business.

But in his four years as an entrepreneurship major in the Sawyer Business School, Jones has been able to take what he’s learned in his classes and from the people he’s met along the way to scale Clockwork Gaming to impressive new levels of success.

A self-admitted nerd, Jones was only 13 when he realized that he could take his burgeoning game-design skills and convert them into a successful money-making venture. So he founded Clockwork Gaming in 2016. Eight years later the company has grown into a thriving, full-time business with teams of programmers, modelers, and artists around the globe—and revenues in the six figures. The company has created more than 30 games, some of which have reached concurrent player counts of more than 30,000 people.

Jones credits many faculty members and alumni for helping him grow the business and explore potential new business relationships. “I didn’t have the brand contacts until I came to Suffolk,” says Jones. “Now I’m able to explore incredible new directions for the company.”

For a dozen Suffolk students, a weeklong journey to Rwanda to explore the economics of water yields powerful lessons about how the country has rebuilt itself, 30 years after the genocide. Read more about their trip in the spring issue of Suffolk University Magazine.

Sawyer Business School

Diving Deep - Suffolk University Magazine: Spring 2024 Diving Deep

2024 GRADUATE SPOTLIGHT: Jenna Dwy, University Law School Class of 2024, got an early education in disability law.

Growing up, Dwy bounced between special education and regular classes, always striving to keep pace with her peers. At the same time, she watched her single mother—who lives with a spinal cord injury—waging her own fight to keep up, navigating a maze of government benefits and social services to maintain their family’s stability.

Dwy is already well on her way to a career in public service and disability advocacy law. After earning BA degrees in disability studies and human rights at the University of Connecticut, she became a community health worker at Massachusetts General Hospital—a position she held throughout law school. As a Suffolk Law student, she has interned with the Disability Unit at the De Novo Center for Justice and Healing, served as a student advocate for Veterans Legal Services in Boston, and most recently worked as a certified student attorney at the Suffolk Law Health Law Clinic (HLC).

Dwy credits her Suffolk Law with providing her with an array of tools she applies toward public-service law. The wide range of classes she took helped her make connections between different areas of law and come up with more creative solutions to problems, particularly while interning with Veterans Services, where she dealt not only with complex military regulations and policies, but also public housing administrative law.

2024 GRADUATE SPOTLIGHT: Few students are as involved as graduating history major Selvin Backert. Among his many achievements, he’s a student-athlete with double minors in Black Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies, an active member of numerous clubs, and the most recent recipient of the Outstanding Student Award at this year’s Celebration of Black Excellence. And yet, in high school? Not so much.

Backert says his drive for engagement started at Suffolk when courses in Black studies and public history sparked his now-intense desire to learn and share his knowledge with others. Working as a programming assistant at the Museum of African American History steps from campus confirmed he’d found the perfect way to inspire others to explore the depth and complexity of American history.

“I always want to be of service, specifically to the Black Community,”says Backert. “I hope that my legacy will be that I helped people by being that resource.”

As graduating students prepare to enter the job market, Suffolk University is setting students up for success with interview tips, labor-market insight tools, training with AI-based applicant software, and help with what to look for in an employer beyond a paycheck.

NBC Boston Stations' Leslie Gaydos featured the Suffolk University Center for Career Equity, Development & Success in a recent news segment about job prospects for graduating students, highlighting a survey from staffing agency Robert Half showing 65% of companies intend to hire entry-level workers this year.

Hear more from Dave Merry, associate provost and executive director of the Center for Career Equity, Development & Success, as well as Suffolk students Prajakta Khare, Jake Sherman, and Cristina Castillo, who were also featured:

Tips for new college grads as they enter the job market That first class of college graduates who went through the COVID era are now looking for jobs. While hiring is projected to be slightly down for the class of 2024, there are still many opportunities. Being prepared can run the gamut from the very basic to understanding the role artificial intelligen...

Suffolk University Law School Professor Shailini Jandial George is teaching her students practical tools to help manage the inherent stress of law school with her book, The Law Student’s Guide to Doing Well and Being Well. Read more about her work in the spring issue of Suffolk University Magazine.

Addressing the Legal Pressure Cooker - Suffolk University Magazine: Spring 2024 Addressing the Legal Pressure Cooker

2024 GRADUATE SPOTLIGHT: As executive director of The NAN Project, graduating Sawyer Business School student Jake Cavanaugh thinks about his sister every day.

That’s because the “Nan” in the nonprofit’s name is his younger sister Nancy, who took her own life in 2012. A smart, vibrant young woman who was studying to become a social worker, Nan also struggled with severe anxiety, depression, and OCD—a struggle she hid from all but her close friends and family, her brother recalls.

Cavanaugh and his mother, Ellen Dalton, started The NAN Project in 2016 to help young people like Nan find the support and services they need. Cavanaugh had no background running a nonprofit, so during the pandemic when the world moved online, he earned a graduate certificate in nonprofit management at the Sawyer Business School. He then decided to come back for his Master’s in Public Administration (MPA). The experience, he says, has proved invaluable.

“With every class I was taking I’d bring something into work the next day,” Cavanaugh says. “It was stuff that was immediately applicable to the programs I was running and the fundraising I was doing.”

Cavanaugh hopes to expand the nonprofit into other states over the next few years. “Without compromising our mission, we want to make sure that kids are still getting the mental health support and understanding they need,” he says.

Learning the facts about climate change can help young people move from anxiety to action, says Psychology Professor Sarah Schwartz, who leads the University’s Adolescent Connectedness and Empowerment Lab. Read more about her work in the spring issue of Suffolk University Magazine.

The Age Of Climate Anxiety - Suffolk University Magazine: Spring 2024 The Age Of Climate Anxiety

2024 Graduate Spotlight: Graduating Suffolk University Law School student Tim Scalona became homeless when he was in eighth grade, after his family was evicted from a home that was being foreclosed upon. Throughout his career at Suffolk Law, he has drawn upon his experience of living in shelters and hotels to become a voice for housing and homelessness law reform, writing op-eds in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. He has worked as a student attorney to help struggling clients and has also represented his class as a Student Bar Association representative.

Scalona has served as a student legal aid attorney in housing court, helping clients facing eviction, and has interned in Boston’s Office of Housing Stability, where he helped more than 50 low-income individuals find housing, access legal resources and apply for rental assistance. He was recently named among the nation’s Top 8 Law Students of the Year by The National Jurist.

Suffolk is responding to the national youth mental health crisis with a proactive, campus-wide effort to support student mental health and emotional well-being by fostering a “culture of caring.” Read more in the spring issue of Suffolk University Magazine.

https://www.suffolk.edu/news-features/suffolk-university-magazine-spring-2024/a-culture-of-caring

2024 Graduate Spotlight: Graduating Sawyer Business School student Annette Sachs took inspiration from her childhood growing up in Costa Rica to start a coffee company, Café Tres Monas, with her two sisters in 2020. Café Tres Monas buys coffee from women producers, roasts it and sells it to high-end customers in Costa Rica. With the help of their family, the three sisters are able to run the company remotely from the United States. They donate 10% of the money they make to the Women Coffee Alliance, which aims to educate other women who want to get into the industry.

During her time at Suffolk, Sachs worked as a student employee in Suffolk’s Office of Media Services and received a Rosenberg Student Training and Employment (STEP) Scholarship, which supports students who work in various technical roles in offices across campuses. During her junior year, she switched majors from Marketing to Information Systems and Operations Management (ISOM).

“ISOM has helped me to dig into the numbers and figure out the kinds of markets that we need to focus on,” she says. “It’s also been helpful to figure out how to price our coffee to we can make a profit.”

After graduation, Sachs is moving to Germany to work in the tech industry.

The spring issue of the Suffolk University Magazine is here! Learn how Suffolk is responding to the national youth mental health crisis and how faculty research is uncovering possible remedies.

https://www.suffolk.edu/news-features/suffolk-university-magazine-spring-2024

2024 GRADUATE SPOTLIGHT: Growing up visiting Cape Cod, Meredith Melia was terrified to see the toll climate change has taken on the shoreline in her own lifetime. Now a graduating Environmental Studies major, Melia has already made an impact by analyzing current and sediment data from the Boston Harbor Islands. This work is critical to understanding how and where to deploy stabilization structures like living shorelines to protect against beach erosion.

After discovering her passion for research at Suffolk, Melia draws inspiration from the creativity of her fellow climate scientists. She’ll meet with researchers from around the globe this summer in Shanghai during the International Workshop on Urban Ecological Security and Sustainability, jointly hosted by Suffolk and Fudan University.

“The field gives me a sense of purpose, and doing research provides direction. I feel so much pride being a part of this work,” says Melia.

2024 GRADUATE SPOTLIGHT: Graduating Suffolk University Law School student Johanna Merlos has committed herself to assisting indigent criminal defendants throughout her Law School career. She has represented defendants charged with shoplifting, assault, drug possession and trespassing. She has interned with the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project, Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), and the New England Innocence Project.

Her performance as a student attorney with the Suffolk Defenders Program this year drew the attention of the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, which offered her one of the first slots in its incoming class of new attorneys. The Massachusetts Bar Association will also be honoring her with the Oliver Wendell Holmes Award for student public service in May.

Merlos says she has always wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer and will launch her career as a staff attorney at CPCS this spring. She says she is interested in doing post-conviction and death-penalty cases someday, but for now her focus is on her work as a Massachusetts public defender.

“Everyone is deserving of zealous and competent representation,” Merlos says. “And that is what I intend to provide.”

We had such a fun time celebrating 50 years of SpringFest with spectacular performances! Check out scenes from the night: