Lara Salahi was yawning over the phone. She’d just rolled off the 4 a.m. shift at NBC Boston, where she moonlights as a producer when she’s not teaching broadcast and digital journalism at Endicott College. But at that moment, the Associate Professor of Broadcast and Digital Journalism was in multi-tasking mom mode, picking up her two young children from the school carpool line and no doubt punching straws into juice boxes while firing back deeply thoughtful responses to interview questions. Salahi does many things well all at once. Most recently, that included reporting an investigative three-part story with the support of a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. “I spent my entire career trying to get away from local news,” she said. “I really didn’t understand the power it holds. But now I know that it’s not enough to just sit high up in a big newsroom.”

To say that Ines Latorre is busy is an understatement—but she thrives on the wavelength of determination and hustle. The t-shirt she’s wearing in her Instagram profile reads, “I CAN & I WILL.” That’s pure Ines. The founder and principal of Latorre Architecture decided to go back to school after receiving her undergraduate degree in 2001 from Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). She will graduate in 2024 with her Master of Interior Architecture from The Boston Architectural College...

It’s all in the family for David and Will Firestone, the father and son duo behind Firestone and Parson, the fabled jewelry and silver firm located in the heart of Boston. This is true for their business, as well as their deep connections to NBSS: David has been an energetic volunteer at the School since 1980, when he was first invited to join the Board. He remembers, “I was working for my father back then, and North Bennet already had a reputation for supplying strong bench workers to the jewelry business.” As someone who believed in the trades and cared about building the future of the North End, David eagerly contributed more of his time, connections, guidance, and philanthropy over the decades...

Life 101 is a new monthly series delving into timely real-world topics with the help of Endicott College faculty expertise. This is the first in the series. Every year, more than 40% of Americans make a New Year’s resolution. Yet research shows that just 8% succeed at sticking to their goals. Why is starting over—and trying to make something new work out over the long term—so hard? To put it simply, starting over can feel terrifying...

The incoming Board Chair, Genie Thorndike CF ’16, was 52 years old when she graduated from North Bennet Street School. A full-time parent of two and former English teacher, she had changed directions and forged a new professional path as a furniture maker and woodcarver after her children were grown. On the first day of class, she met a 19-year-old student to her right and a 65-year-old student to her left. “The breadth of experience was incredible, and the fact that we all connected over a common love of woodworking was thrilling,” she remembers. “I found my people at NBSS.”

Shaye J.D. Cohen works in an office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. Volumes in English, Hebrew, and Aramaic are piled on every available and makeshift surface. Most of the texts are bound in leather, with pages as translucent as onion skins. The speckled pattern of the wool sweater Cohen wears is so similar to the stacks that he appears in near-camouflage at his desk. Cohen, the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern...

Maybe you’ve seen Tom Curry ’16 on a random Thursday night, caddying his own bag, swinging his seven irons at a foam ball straight down the center of an iconic Back Bay or South End street? A buddy acts as cameraman, filming him with a simple iPhone as Curry narrates each play in the even-keeled voice of a sports commentator...

More than two years since the pandemic halted travel and dining, visionary Endicott alumni are shaping the future of international hospitality and tourism. Leave all your cares on the mainland. You’re approaching a tropical island by speedboat, James Bond style, surrounded by the most vivid turquoise water imaginable. It’s the trip of a lifetime to visit the Kurumba Maldives resort where General Manager Andrew Jansson ’98 will greet you with a cold beverage and a tour of the pristine white sand beach (complete with hammocks strung across palm trees) on the way to your villa with a private plunge pool...

It’s highly unusual for MIT students to be encouraged to throw one another to the floor, but that’s exactly what was happening during a lab that met in the Wrestling Room at the duPont Athletic Center at MIT in November. After learning some basic judo moves and pairing off, students were instructed to shift their body weight and apply force all the way from their feet to their hands. “Your goal is to take your opponent down without hurting them,” explained Jennifer Light...

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 wife 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...

Midway through his Bachelor of Architecture degree at The Boston Architectural College (BAC), Hossein Abdavies, B.Arch'24, chose to enlist in the U.S. Military Reserves. Covid numbers were soaring, and people needed help. Hossein says, “Personally, it just felt like something I had to do, and I knew that it was right for me.” He took a semester off from the BAC to complete Basic Training in Great Lakes, Illinois, then returned to the BAC full-time while juggling weekend service with the United...

Catherine Hale completed her five-year contract in the United States military and began her studies towards a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture degree at The Boston Architectural College (BAC) just a few days later in January 2022. She shakes her head. “It’s crazy. I grew up in Maine in a town so rural that we had to drive an hour just to get to the movies. Now I live in Boston and take the subway to school every day.” The exciting new location wasn’t the only difference in Catherine’s new life...

You can find David Wilkins, B.Arch'11, MDS-SD'13, elbow deep in dirt. He’s hunched over a raised gardening bed and pulling carrots up by their leafy tops outside the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts. As the founder and executive director at the November 11th Foundation, David works alongside other volunteers to grow more than 480 pounds of fresh produce annually. These crops are donated to support hundreds of local veterans and their families...

The sounds of construction buzz in the background as Faries (above left) and Taj (above right) McCree sit shoulder-to-shoulder at an outdoor table in Arlington, Virginia. They are wearing T-shirts emblazoned with giant lobster claws, an insignia for the Mason’s Famous Lobster Rolls franchise they are opening there. “I’ve always wanted to start a business of some kind,” says Taj, JD ’01. “I spent years researching different opportunities.” He and Faries, MEd ’97, settled on the Annapolis, Maryland–based lobster company as one that would be a hit with local diners (and require minimal cooking, since the lobster arrives freshly prepared)... Image: Kelvin Bullock

Peter Jenner knows a thing or two about pivoting. Long before the pandemic upended the hospitality industry, Jenner, now Chair of Endicott’s Hospitality Management Program, made a life-changing decision: He went back to school. At age 42. And he chose Endicott. “I was absolutely petrified to go back to the classroom with much younger peers,” he said. “But they were the most accepting bunch of people. They were very supportive of me, and we shared a lot, I had the industry skills to help them...

“What are you really interested in?” Gabriel Sosa remembers the SMFA faculty asking him this question over and over back when he was a graduate student. “One of the things I walked away with was the idea of focusing your work around the answer to that question. That’s something I now teach my own students at MassArt,” he says. “The SMFA faculty were enormous influences on me.” Gabriel’s starting point has always been broadening and building community. It’s what he’s “really interested in.”

Richard “Dick” Eckaus, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, emeritus, in the Department of Economics, died on Sept. 11 in Boston. He was 96 years old. Eckaus was born in Kansas City, Missouri on April 30, 1926, the youngest of three children to parents who had emigrated from Lithuania. His father, Julius Eckaus, was a tailor, and his mother, Bessie (Finkelstein) Eckaus helped run the business. The family struggled to make ends meet financially but academic success offered Eckau

A few years ago, Juan Travieso stopped painting under his own name. He and his fiancée, Katerina Santos, joined up under the tag of TRATOS, which translates to “a deal or an agreement,” in Spanish and is also a clever combination of their two last names. When SMFA called TRATOS for an interview, both members were high up on scaffolding rigged inside the Frost Museum of Art at Florida International University. Image: Courtesy of TRATOS

At lunchtime on October 14, Gail Cantor, Endicott’s Director of Belonging and Spiritual Life, will lead a contemplative walk across the College’s 235-acre oceanfront campus. Silently drinking in the sea air and the sound of bees buzzing in Endicott’s own hives, participants will be asked to move their bodies without the typical modern demands of trying to solve a particular problem or hit a fitness goal. “On contemplative walks you allow thoughts to come up and you see if you can let them floa

When Emil Cohen first arrived at SMFA for a post-baccalaureate year, his goal was to become an established portrait photographer, but he only had one model. “When I thought of professional photographers, my mind went to someone commissioned by National Geographic to photograph children on the streets of a war-torn country,” he says from his studio in New York City. After watching him pushing to define his practice, Emil’s professor offered advice that still guides him today. “She reminded