The Heights Momentum Awards

May 5th, 2016

(n.)

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mo men tum

1. The strength or force that allows something to continue to grow stronger

THE HEIGHTS’ 2016 MOMENTUM AWARDS

. . .

KATIE CROWLEY, C2-3 CARLY PARISEAU, C4 AFUA LAAST, C4

. . .

ERADICATE BC RACISM, C 5

JERE DOYLE & KELSEY KINTON, C5 CAI THOMAS, C6

THE HEIGHTS’ MOMENTUM AWARDS

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Thursday, May 5, 2016

Katie Crowley michael sullivan

laugh and is willing to go along with anything.

“That was always great, because I love to tell jokes,” Kennedy said.

And so began the most prolific relationship in women’s hockey history.

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ARTHUR BAILIN / HEIGHTS SENIOR STAFF

K

atie Crowley stares warmly at three picture frames hanging on the wall across from her desk. They all show the glory of Boston College women’s hockey teams of years past, but she’s specifically looking at the one in the center. That one is of the Beanpot several years ago, held up by three of her former captains: Kelli Stack, Molly Schaus, and Katelyn Kurth.

For Crowley, those players, along with Deb Spillane and Allie Thunstrom, are her cornerstones, her rocks, the reasons she is The Heights’ 2015-16 Person of the Year. As she recalls what it was like to have them as her players, she can’t help but smile and think of suffering through practice, sharing a joke in the locker room, and, of course, raising trophies.

“That group was instrumental in bringing our program to a new level,” Crowley says.

What Crowley fails to mention is how instrumental she is the whole BC community. BC Athletics is mired in losses across the board—unless baseball wins out, only softball and women’s soccer finished with a record above .500 in the ACC this year. Football and men’s basketball’s winless year brought mountains of bad press and embarrassment on the University. Even men’s hockey, the preseason No. 1 overall team, failed to meet its own expectations to bring home a sixth national title. Yet women’s hockey’s legendary season provided enough excitement and pride to redeem BC. And the head coach was at the center of it all.

This is the tale of two people, each with an inspiring story. One is “Kinger,” one of the greatest players in the history of women’s hockey. The other, Coach Crowley, has shaped a middling program into the nation’s premier destination for young girls aspiring to become champions—of Boston, of the nation, and of the world. Just make sure to keep track.

“There needs to be more Katie King’s … er … Crowley’s out there,” said Margaret Degidio Murphy, her former head coach at Brown University.

And, however you remember her name—Kinger, Coach, King, or Crowley—one thing is certain: BC would be a little less complete without her.

S

he was a little weirded out at first.

I kept calling her Katie Crowley throughout our phone interview, but I honestly could’ve called her anything. Murphy, better known as Digit, doesn’t know one of her former star players as Katie Crowley—that’s her married name. The girl she recruited back in 1993 was Katie King, a powerful forward out of Salem, N.H. The longtime women’s hockey head coach just had to laugh.

“I’m never going to get used to calling her Katie Crowley,” Murphy said.

“She’ll always be Kinger.”

As she began the e ver-arduous recruiting process, Kinger knew she wanted to pursue hockey. Yet, like her current two-sport star Kenzie Kent, who plays lacrosse in the spring, Kinger also wanted to go somewhere that would let her play softball in addition to hockey. The pickings were already slim enough for hockey—only the Ivy League, Providence, New Hampshire, and Northeastern sponsored varsity women’s ice hockey by the time she had to submit that deposit. Murphy

gave her that opportunity, and sold her on Brown.

What she bought was pure gold.

In Kinger, Murphy found a true power forward, comparing her to the gritty Boston Bruins Hall of Famer Cam Neely.

The left winger had an imposing presence on the ice, using her body to power her way through the net. If skating on the right, she’d come down hard and attack the net. You’d often find Kinger as the one prepared to deflect a puck in from a shot at the point, forcing her way around blue liners and the goaltender to give her teams the lead.

“If you got the puck to her, Katie King was going to go down the ice and score,” said Courtney Kennedy, Crowley’s associate head coach at BC and a former defenseman at the University of Minnesota.

When asked who currently on BC women’s hockey has the most similar playing style, the only person who came to Kennedy’s mind as at all similar was freshman fourth-liner Ryan Little. But, for the most part, that toughness and grit are now forgotten attributes. Players today obsess over the finesse side of the game. It’s not a bad quality—the best of the best have all perfected the flashy moves—but what’s the motivation? Who can make the best toe drag around a defenseman to score is often code for who wants to make the SportsCenter Top 10 tonight. But that’s not how Kinger played.

“She was like a freight train,” Murphy said. “You couldn’t stop her.”

Perhaps more players should consider adopting that strategy, because it certainly worked for Kinger. She’s still the all-time leading scorer at Brown with 206 points, topping off her career as Eastern College Athletic Conference Player of the Year in 1996-97. In that time—the pre-NC AA Tournament days—Brown won three ECAC regularseason titles. That tenacity translated to her softball career, too, in which she won ECAC Player of the Year in 1996 and ECAC Pitcher of the Year in 1997.

It was Kinger’s leadership qualities that made her stand out—and why she became a natural fit as a head coach.

She captained Brown for two years on the ice and three years on the field.

Along the way, Murphy watched as her young star grew more mature and more confident with every step. She wasn’t the fiery captain who would get in your face to pump you up and get you ready for a game. Instead, Kinger’s warm and inviting personality allowed a team like Brown, full of big personalities and star players, to mesh and eye a championship.

She wouldn’t get one at her alma mater. But she did get one representing her country.

A year after she graduated, Kinger joined the United States National Team in the 1998 Winter Olympics, the first-ever Olympic Games to sponsor women’s hockey. Despite being massive underdogs, the Americans took home the gold medal, 3-1, over Canada.

Kinger herself was fortunate enough to be on the ice for the final shift, right after Sandra Whyte’s empty-net goal.

How did she react to that first Olympic gold?

Well, there aren’t many videos of that game, but one of the few in YouTube’s archives shows a glimpse of King’s emotion. As the camera begins to follow the puck and time expires, you can see Kinger out of the left corner, jumping and screaming, throwing her stick in

the air, and racing toward the mob in front of the goal.

“That was the most memorable shift of my career, because you knew you had it, you knew it was it,” Crowley said, looking back on it now. “And we weren’t supposed to that year.”

Her success on the international stage wouldn’t stop there. Kinger went on to grab silver in Salt Lake City and

ecruiting is a pain in the ass.

Ask a coach at a midmajor in football that doesn’t have any tradition or likely prospects in the future. Every kid in the country wants to play for Michigan, Texas, or Florida.

Try selling them on Western Michigan, Texas El-Paso, or Florida International.

You want the real thing, the one that everyone watches on Saturday knowing they’ll get to Sunday.

Once upon a time, Boston College was one of those programs.

While the BC men have long been in college hockey’s lore, the women are practically infants. And in their earliest days, they were clumsy infants, at that.

B C b egan sp onsoring women’s hockey at the varsity level for the 199495 season. The Eagles had some early success, with a 15-10-1 (4-9-1 ECAC) campaign in their inaugural season.

Yet it didn’t get much better. BC had a losing record in the next eight seasons, with single-digit win totals in seven of them. A move to Hockey East didn’t make matters any better.

So when you can’t sell the program or success to recruits, what can you do?

You have to sell the school. You have

That was until she got her first big recruiting win: Spillane. A Franklin, Mass. girl who spent two years playing on her high school’s boys’ varsity team, Spillane wasn’t difficult to convince. She was drawn in by the beautiful campus and Jesuit education—things every team at BC sells recruits on—but, more so, an opportunity to take BC to the next level. And Spillane began to do just that, providing steady production with 133 points over four seasons. As the star of the program, Spillane helped BC win its first Beanpot in 2005-06, helping the program get a winning record for the first time in more than a decade.

“She knew what the program was at the time when she was coming in, she knew it had been down,” Crowley said. “She saw a route where she could help build it up and help get it to be successful.”

With Spillane helping to prove that the coaching duo at BC was a force to be reckoned with, King recruited the best class of her young career. First came Thunstrom, the lightning-fast forward who broke out in her freshman year with a 30-goal campaign, and Kurth, the bruising defenseman out of High Bridge, N.J. Then arrived Schaus—a player who, Crowley said, stressed her out with how long she had to wait for her decision—as the first elite goaltending prospect BC ever had.

But no one was more important than Stack. The moment she convinced Stack to come, Crowley said, the program changed. Realistically, it wasn’t very hard. After all, King had been there

“We didn’t win it, but we got the ball rolling. Now, because of [Crowley], it’d be weird not to see BC in the Frozen Four.’’

- Kelli stack bronze in Turin. When she stepped away from playing, she was the all-time leading scorer for the United States: 14 goals, nine assists, 23 points. Her most successful Olympics was 2006, capped off by a hat trick in the bronze medal game against Finland.

Utah is where she developed her strong dynamic with Kennedy, who also played on the Olympic team. Kennedy believes they connected because of Kinger’s great sense of humor. While not particularly the comedian of the crowd, Kinger has an infectious

to sell the future. And you have to sell yourself.

So Katie King sold her recruits— hard—on all three.

She joined BC in 2003-04 as the chief No. 2 to head coach Tom Mutch, an assistant on that 1998 Olympic team. The Eagles suffered through a pitiful 6-22-3 campaign their first year at the helm, with only a single victory in Hockey East play. It’s not that the team didn’t have talent—today, Crowley is convinced that it did—but, as she puts it, it just wasn’t in the cards.

before.

“I wanted to be coached by someone who had been to the Olympics,” Stack said in a phone interview. “And she sold me on the fact that I would get a lot of playing time early on … We wanted to put BC on the map.”

She certainly did. Stack scored 17 goals and had 37 assists in her freshman season, 2006-07—the best in the program’s young history. The Eagles won another Beanpot and reached their first NCAA Tournament, and BC made it all the way to the Frozen Four before

JULIA HOPKINS / HEIGHTS EDITOR

THE HEIGHTS’ MOMENTUM AWARDS

Thursday, May 5, 2016

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JULIA HOPKINS / HEIGHTS EDITOR

falling to Minnesota Duluth in double overtime. Though early, it appeared that Mutch and King would become a legendary duo in maroon and gold.

Yet it wouldn’t last long. Shortly after the season ended, Mutch resigned amid suspicion of sharing inappropriate text messages with Stack.

And it ended up being the best thing possible for BC.

H

as it really been 10 years?

When we look back on all she has accomplished, Crowley can’t help but wonder where the time has gone. So much has happened in that time. She has since married Ted Crowley, a former BC hockey player and Olympian himself, in 1994, and had a child, Camryn, who is now 2 1/2 years old. She’s spent a lot of time with Kennedy, who she brought in to coach alongside her after she took the reins for the 2007-08 season.

Oh yeah, and there have been a lot of wins.

Prior to her tenure as head coach, BC women’s hockey was 104-240-29. Since Crowley and Kennedy have been in charge, the Eagles are 220-73-39, with a 119-37-20 record in Hockey East play.

“Wow” was all Kennedy could say when she heard those numbers. Yeah, BC has been that good.

A lot has helped Crowley achieve such a high level of sustained success. One is more institutional support. When she began at BC, she could only offer seven scholarships total. Now, Crowley and Kennedy can fill the team with a maximum 18 players on scholarship. Another is winning the games that matter. With that original core of Stack, Schaus, Kurth, and Thunstrom, the Eagles became dominant—2010-11 gave BC victories in the Hockey East Tournament and Beanpot, as well as another Frozen Four.

Five years later, winning trophies and going far in the tournament is just old hat.

“We didn’t win it, but we got the ball rolling,” Stack said. “Now, because of [Crowley], it’d be weird to NOT see BC in the Frozen Four.”

But the bigger key has been their message, which has convinced stars like 2015 Patty Kazmaier Award winner Alex Carpenter and Haley Skarupa that BC is the place to be. Many, like senior captain Dana Trivigno, truly believe that their best chance of getting to the apex of the sport—the Olympics and a national championship—is with the help of Crowley and Kennedy.

“Her and Court sold me on the fact that, you’re coming to BC, you’re going to get a good education, but, you know, we’re putting a good team together,” Trivigno said.

“Having two people who have already done it—the highest level a female ice hockey

player can get to—was huge.”

Once they’re here, Crowley can get the most out of her players and turn them into superstars. She has a hands-off approach with the forwards, while Kennedy takes the defensemen. She doesn’t place a lot of emphasis on a particular system and making sure every player can fit into it.

Rather, Crowley prefers to allow her players to show her what they can do and use their creativity as effectively as possible.

As she watches them on the ice, Crowley also pays close attention to their behavior in the locker room. She’s not the type that has one set style of motivation. If one player needs to be taken aside to have a mistake carefully explained, Crowley will do that. If another needs to be screamed at, she’s got no problem adjusting to that as well. As long as everyone is doing well in the classroom—something Kennedy said Crowley makes sure of—things are probably going to be fine.

That has all culminated in the last two seasons. BC was undefeated for a long stretch in 2014-15 and finished 34-3-2 with another trip to the Frozen Four, albeit without a victory in the Beanpot and Hockey East Tournament. This season, BC and Crowley took it to the next level. The Eagles’ 40-1 record was the second-best season in the sport’s history, and they took home three trophies: the Beanpot, Hockey East regular-season title, and Hockey East Tournament title. And, for the first time in program history, BC made the national championship game. How did Crowley achieve such a big jump in only one year?

Don’t tell Allen Iverson.

“A

lright, everybody switch sticks!”

Katie Burt was confused at first. Switch sticks? What is Coach talking about? That’s like putting on your first pair of high heels. It’s probably going to be disastrous. But it’s equally bad to start an argument with your coach. So everybody on the team dropped their sticks and gave it to the girl next to her. The righties became lefties, the lefties became righties. Pandemonium ensued. Girls were flopping all over the ice. Carpenter, one of the greatest players in the history of the sport, could barely move.

“It was so funny,” Burt said. “You give someone the wrong stick, they can’t even skate.”

It’s that kind of laid-back atmosphere that attracts players to Crowley’s coaching style. She and Kennedy make sure every practice has an element of fun in it by never taking themselves too seriously.

They don’t mind the repeated onslaught of pranks brought on by Carpenter. They constantly bounce jokes off each other like Amy Poehler and Tina Fey.

This season, Crowley tried something drastically different. As the season wound down, she dramatically cut the length of practice from the standard two and a half hours to one. Her players were greatly appreciative—BC student-athletes tend to have more difficulty juggling classes, social lives, and practice schedules than most other student-athletes. None appreciated it more than Burt.

“Best decision ever,” Burt said while bursting into laughter. “I thought it was great.”

Though it indirectly gave the players some R and R, Crowley’s primary focus was to keep the team engaged while she and Kennedy nitpicked the little things. Crowley believes those longer practices hurt the coaching staff more than the team—there’s only so much you can go over in two hours and keep the attention of your players to perform at a high level. And, after returning largely the same roster, Crowley knew what her team was capable of. By cutting the time down, she could concentrate on smaller skill drills, such as having forwards operate in the defensive zone on a strong backcheck or learning how to finish in front of the net. Practicing those intricacies of the game allows them to become habits, just like skating and shooting.

“It may seem monotonous at the time, but the repeated patterns become habits, and that helps you in hockey,” Trivigno said.

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ith the women’s hockey season already over, Crowley and her family took a trip down to Tampa to see the men play in the Frozen Four against Quinnipiac. No one

was more excited than Camryn. But what she didn’t realize was that her best friends wouldn’t be there this time.

“And as we’re leaving the hotel room to go to [the Amalie Arena], she said ‘Okay, so I’m going to see Carp, and I’m going to see Haley, and I’m going to see Dana, and I’m going to see Grace [Bizal], and Makenna [Newkirk], and Kenzie [Kent],’” Crowley recalled her daughter saying, with a big smile. “‘And Katie Burt!’ It’s always two names with Katie Burt.”

Crowley’s husband and daughter attend every home game, and try to get to as many road games as possible. And, over this season, Camryn, known as Cami, has grown up around the team. Her bubbly personality has touched each of the players as she bounces around outside the locker room in Conte Forum. Along the way, Cami has changed how Crowley coaches. Somehow, Crowley still puts her family and the team first, giving everyone everything she has.

Having Cami around all the time, her players believe, has changed her perspective and helped her see the team as her own, helping an award-winning coach become even better.

“You can tell how much she cares by the way she acts toward her daughter, toward her family as to us,” defenseman Megan Keller said. “She treats us as 23 of her next daughters, and it’s amazing how much she cares and she puts towards us and the amount of time she sacrifices.”

At the same time, her old head coach believes it helps Crowley keep things in perspective. Murphy has dealt with losses in the national championship game before.

Instead of thinking too much about it, Murphy said, her kids helped her remember

that life goes on.

But it’s even better when you get to celebrate with your kid. And Murphy doesn’t think it’s going to take long, especially when you’ve got a great coach like Katie Crowley.

“I think they have it,” Murphy said. “I think they’re going to win it all next year.”

K

atie Crowley’s office is lined with trophies. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some have the NCAA logo, others say Hockey East. They’re small enough to hold over your head while screaming in jubilation, but heavy enough to remember the weight of the grueling grind that is the collegiate women’s hockey season. Others can be worn around your neck. Those come in three different colors—gold, silver, and bronze—each with a hint of red, white, and blue.

The most impressive-looking is a large glass bowl with “2014-15 AHCA COACH OF THE YEAR” in big letters on its stand.

There’s a space right next to it for the one she received for her work this season. I’ve heard it just arrived, a week after we last spoke.

But it’s that picture of her three captains that she looks at with the fondest memories. And, as she stares at it, I ask her that question. Coach, with Carpenter, Skarupa, and Trivigno gone next year, what are your expectations for next season? Immediately, Crowley breaks her gaze at the past—the days of Kinger and Olympic medals and Stack, Carpenter, and all of her prior teams—and focuses on the future with determination, imagining the final trophy she needs to add to the shelf.

ARTHUR BAILIN / HEIGHTS SENIOR STAFF

THE HEIGHTS’ MOMENTUM AWARDS

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Carly Pariseau Tom Devoto

emotional he was the day that Carly dropped by his office. The associate athletic director recalls a lot of hugs, an abundance of offerings of support, and a time of honest conversation.

“We’ve all been affected by cancer—it’s not exactly good news that you want to hear,” Cameron said. “You’re obviously empathetic, and your first reaction is one of support. That’s what BC does best. If you fall, someone will be there to pick you up.”

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AMELIE TRIEU / HEIGHTS EDITOR

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f Carly Pariseau pays a visit to your office, it’s usually for a bad reason.

As the associate athletic director for compliance, it’s Pariseau’s job to understand and interpret the intricate web of NCAA eligibility rules. Those rules cover issues that range from academic eligibility, to the receipt of impermissible benefits, to offseason practice limitations. If you get a visit from compliance, it’s usually because one of those incredibly nuanced rules was broken, and you have a problem on your hands.

So on one early October afternoon this past fall, when Pariseau started making the rounds to the offices of all the members of the BC athletics senior staff, they were understandably horrified.

“Most people have a heart attack when they see me coming into their office because they think I’m there to tell them they have a violation and they’re in trouble,” Pariseau said.

But it wasn’t a violation this time around, she assured them. She had no rules violations to report, so she watched as the faces across the desk from her relaxed slightly, if only for a moment.

Then another terrible thought crossed their minds—after 10 years, Pariseau, a beloved member of the athletic department family, was leaving BC. Wasn’t that either, Pariseau would reply—she loved it at BC. Couldn’t imagine herself elsewhere.

Her response was met with perplexity.

What, then, could have brought Pariseau into each of these offices on this particular day?

“Well,” she recalls telling her colleagues, “I have breast cancer.”

Pariseau would need to spend at least

two months out of the office, the first of those consisting of minimal contact with the outside world. She planned to have surgery, scheduled for less than a month from the day she received the diagnosis. She was fully confident in her staff ’s ability to function normally in her absence.

Pariseau knew there was no real other way to tell them—she just laid it out there, unsure of how they would react. She wasn’t expecting the reactions that she got, though.

“Everybody was so concerned that they either had a violation or that I was leaving,” Pariseau said, “so when I told them that it was breast cancer, it was almost a bit of relief.”

It might sound selfish or insensitive— hearing that a coworker, a friend, a mentor has cancer, and feeling relieved? But those first-impression reactions are just about as far from selfish as possible. The fact that her bosses weren’t any more emotional than Pariseau speaks to her fighting spirit. It speaks to her methodic, calculated determination. It speaks to the confidence they had that Pariseau would challenge her foe head-on.

Her coworkers saw it differently.

Deputy Athletics Director Jaime Seguin has worked alongside Pariseau since coming to BC from the University of Massachusetts in May 2014, and the two have become close friends during that time. She, too, remembers the day that Pariseau dropped the bombshell on her coworkers. But when they came to talk to Seguin after those meetings, she saw a side of them that Pariseau didn’t.

“Some people were choked up and in tears after she informed them of her diagnosis,” Seguin said. “Quickly after, though, everyone started asking, ‘What can we do to help?’”

Chris Cameron, too, remembers how

or the first few months after Pariseau lost her hair, she wore a hat just about everywhere

she went.

Part of it was undoubtedly because of the cold winter weather, sure, but it was deeper than that. For a while, Pariseau had some difficulty coming to terms with her situation, and for good reason. She was a former collegiate volleyball player, a woman in good health who never smoked and had no family history of cancer. Why her?

“You can drive yourself crazy trying to answer that question,” Pariseau said. “So, I flipped the question and said, ‘Well, why not me?’ There are women that are much healthier than I am that get it. There are also women in much poorer health than I am and don’t get it. There’s really no rhyme or reason for it, and it’s hard.”

Instead of wallowing in sadness, Pariseau mobilized her army and prepared to fight. She researched everything she could about her symptoms and her courses of action. She attacked it just like she would an NCAA rule.

And attack it she did, even as she faced setbacks. Pariseau thought she would only have to undergo surgery for treatment, but found out shortly after she would need rounds of chemotherapy and radiation because the cancer had spread farther than expected.

But the setback was just that—a setback. It didn’t derail her. After surgery in November, Pariseau began chemotherapy treatments in December and finished in February. She started radiation shortly after in March, completing that round of treatment early in April.

Pariseau returned to the office after the end of Winter Break in January, and only missed work occasionally for her treatments. Yes, her hair was gone. Yes, her brain will occasionally take slightly longer to make connections with

Afua Laast taylor st. germain

I

was a little shocked when Afua Laast, LSOE ’16, told me to be selfish. Based on her track record as a Shaw House mentor, Undergraduate Government of Boston College vice president of diversity and inclusion, and a resident assistant, I never would have expected those words to come out of her mouth.

Laast went on to explain that when it comes to race and injustice issues on campus, everyone needs to be selfish, regardless of our race, gender, or sexuality, because these issues affect everyone walking across Stokes Lawn.

“Ultimately, stop being all about the selflessness and be like ‘how is this going to benefit me?” Laast said. “Once you change your mindset and it becomes more personal, then things can actually happen.”

This fall, Laast organized the “Blackout” on Stokes Lawn, where students rallied together to stand in solidarity with students at the University of Missouri.

The night before the Blackout was set to take place, Laast sent out a Facebook event inviting BC students to join her on the Quad.

She didn’t expect much response, as the planning of the Blackout was so last-minute. To her surprise, more than 770 students responded on Facebook that they would attend the peaceful protest.

I remember the day of the Blackout vividly. It was the first big story I covered for The Heights and I was nothing but nervous. I recall students, dressed head-to-toe in black, covered O’Neill Plaza while rain came down in buckets. Standing on the bench, overlooking a sea of umbrellas, Laast called upon students to share why they stand in solidarity with the University of Missouri.

Student after student came up to stand on the bench next to Laast. They spoke of the need for honest conversations about race issues at BC, the discrimination they face on campus, and the need for a change at universities across the country.

Students cheered and hollered whenever another volunteer would step up on the bench.

The crowd responded to each student’s testi-

mony by raising their fists in the air, a sign of solidarity. I could sense the respect that these students had for Laast and the power she had when she talked about these issues.

“We have to stand in solidarity to reach any kind of success,” Laast said while atop the crowd of students.

Change on campus begins with the students, the Board of Trustees, and the administration, Laast said. “[Inciting change on campus] has just been really hard and really long and a lot of conversations over the past few years,” Laast said. “The goal has just been to improve the quality of life for all students. The headline on these events is the AHANA student, but ultimately, every group of students on this campus will benefit.”

Laast was born in the United States, she lived in Ghana from the time she was three months old. Though until she was 7 years old. Her father, who originally comes from an impoverished family in Nigeria, moved to the U.S. and currently works as a fashion designer.

Laast’s mother moved from Ghana and earned two master’s degrees when she arrived in the U.S. She is also legally blind.

“My educational striving comes from that,” Laast said.

When I asked Laast’s older brother, Ousman, what she was like as a child, he could only laugh.

“I’ll say Afua’s always been independent and opinionated,” Ousman said.

He continued to describe Laast’s strongheaded nature as the strengths she has used to forge her own path.

As Laast will graduate this year, Ousman hopes that she continues to do what makes her happy. He hopes that she has the courage to follow her own path and the fortitude to keep adapting to what is most challenging and fulfilling.

Laast began her extensive involvement in the BC community before she even stepped on campus. Over the summer going into her freshman year, Laast applied to the Shaw Leadership Program, and lived in the Shaw House

throughout her first year at BC. “I wasn’t going to apply to Shaw because I thought it seemed like too much for just a place to live,” Laast said. “But then I was looking at it and saw a kitchen, and I love to cook.

I literally retyped ‘Shaw Program’ and went back to apply for it.”

Only 20 students are accepted to Shaw each year, and continue with the program throughout their four years. By attending leadership workshops and participating in community service, students develop the skills to be successful leaders in the world.

After seeing students in Shaw become so involved early on, Laast felt the need to immerse herself in extracurriculars, she said.

Moving into her sophomore year, Laast applied to be a resident assistant. She was placed on Newton Campus in Duchesne East, and instead of feeling isolated, Laast grew to love it.

She said that it was one of the best experiences she has had at BC. Laast still gets excited when she sees residents from her sophomore year, who are now juniors, because she loves seeing how they have grown and developed throughout their time at BC. In addition to working as an RA, Laast continued her involvement with UGBC under the AHANA Leadership Council. She also worked as an orientation leader and tour guide, and said that she gained inspiration from the parents of prospective students.

“I think that was also really cool just giving tours, and hearing where all the parents worked, and what they are doing,” Laast said.

“It just gives you new ideas of what you are doing with your life and where you want to go.”

Laast shared a story of one parent who asked what other schools Laast was looking at when she was applying to college. When Laast responded that, in the end, she was choosing between Cornell and BC, the parent suddenly became inquisitive. Why didn’t she pick Cornell?

Laast recalls the mother saying, “I just have never heard of someone that turned down Cornell.”

her memory—she calls those lapses “chemo brain moments.”

But Pariseau was there at work, and that’s more than a lot of people could have managed at the time. People took notice, too.

“My grandmother had breast cancer and I watched it take a lot out of her,” BC women’s hockey forward Dana Trivigno said. “Watching Carly, you couldn’t even know.”

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henever Pariseau found herself down after her diagnosis, she liked to try to accomplish two things: laughing and learning.

The laughing part was easy because she does it so often. Immediately after receiving her diagnosis, Pariseau went home and watched Frozen with her parents. She wanted to take a valuable chance to turn out the world and, in her words, “let it go”—pun presumably intended.

“I just needed something to sing along to,” Pariseau said with a smile.

The learning, on the other hand, came with a bit more effort. Pariseau, whose office is lined with books about sports, motivation, and empowerment, soaks up information like a sponge.

She recalls checking Google for inspirational women who have dealt with similar struggles. Pariseau quickly named Today Show co-host Hoda Kotb as an influential woman in her life, but she couldn’t remember the name of another inspiration.

“I’m trying to think of her name, but I’m drawing a blank on it,” Pariseau said. “She’s a correspondent for ESPN, she had breast cancer, the lady that does the NFL with the long, strawberry-blonde hair. Shelley… Smith?

I think it’s Shelley Smith.”

Excluding a few mental lapses here and there, Pariseau says her mind is now operating at close to full speed. Her body, however, will still occasionally impose limitations.

“What she wanted and what her body allowed were two very different things,” Seguin said. “Her mind wanted to work a full week, but her body would tell her no.”

Whenever she felt weak, Pariseau would look to her sources of inspiration—the Kotbs, the Smiths, the Robin Robertses in her life.

She watched their journeys with breast cancer unfold on television, and she watches them

Her response was typical Afua.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t like it.”

That is what makes Laast truly unique— she is not focused on prestige, recognition, or rankings. Laast does what she loves and loves what she does.

When the student tour was over, the mother, Dianne Renwick, handed Laast her business card and told her to call her if she was interested in taking on an internship.

Laast didn’t think much of it until she saw the woman’s position—“New York Supreme Court Justice.” With an interest in law at the time, Laast followed up and worked as an intern the following Winter Break.

After working with Renwick, Laast decided that law was no longer the route she wanted to pursue, as she wanted to focus more on policy reform. In her junior year, Laast applied to the five-year graduate school program through the School of Social Work.

With graduation less than a month away, Laast is planning on staying in Boston for one more year to complete her graduate degree.

She is currently taking classes in the School of Social Work, which also serve as elective classes for her B.A. Laast originally started on the clinical track, when she thought she wanted to pursue psychology.

“I thought I wanted to be a psychologist, but then I realized I couldn’t,” Laast said. “My first internship was at Brighton High, and I was like ‘One-on-one is cool, but you sitting here and talking to me is, like, not going to

now, their mere presence on screen a giant middle finger to the disease that nearly ravaged all of them. Pariseau watches them on television and feels hope—for herself, and for all women who are presently dealing with the same exact situation.

When you think about it, though, it’s a bit ironic that someone who relied so heavily on inspiration from others was such an inspirational figure herself.

And boy, does the BC community consider her an inspiration. When Pariseau was in the hospital, her first visitor was—to no one’s surprise—men’s hockey head coach Jerry York.

Football head coach Steve Addazio checked in on her a few times over the phone. Student-athletes from BC men’s track personally paid for her grocery delivery. She got enough flower bouquets, Edible Arrangements, and home-cooked meals to last a lifetime.

But Pariseau meant something special to women’s hockey, since, as the program’s administrator, that’s the one she spent the most time around.

“At the beginning of the year we heard about how sick she was, and we rallied around her, and she rallied around us,” sophomore goalie Katie Burt said. “I think we gave her a bit of hope too, but she gave us something to play for other than ourselves.”

F

or the first few months after Pariseau lost her hair, she wore a hat just about everywhere

she went.

But the day I first met her, a beautiful Thursday morning in the middle of April, when the sun radiated more energy than a machine ever could, Pariseau was not wearing a hat. She strolled down the hallway outside her Conte Forum office, grinning from ear to ear and chatting with those she passed by.

She took the better part of an hour that morning to chat with me about the things that bring her down, the things that lift her up, and the people who have been there every step of the way. Upon the completion of our meeting, I thanked her for her time and congratulated her on the recent end of her treatment. She smiled appreciatively and walked me out of her office.

Then she sat down at her desk and got back to work.

fix anything.’”

From there, Laast switched to the macro practice track in the School of Social Work and would now like to pursue social justice, possibly through a non-profit. She learned through her time in UGBC that she would like to work for policy change and eventually become the U.S. Secretary of Education.

I

showed up for my interview with Laast about 10 minutes early. It was the first time I had ever been in the UGBC office. Cubicles lined the perimeter of the room.

I sat at a giant table in the middle, feeling completely out of place. Students sat on top of tables, swapping stories from the past week.

While I waited for Laast, I began to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Did you hear Afua won another award?” one of them said in reference to my awkward presence in the UGBC office before interviewing her.

In 2015, Laast was named one of the King Scholarship finalists for her work within the African-American community. Just last week she was the recipient of the Alfred Feliciano and Valeria Lewis Award for her efforts in furthering the ideals of the AHANA community.

And now, Laast is being recognized as one of The Heights’ Momentum Award winners.

After sitting down with Laast for the better part of an hour, it became clear to me why she receives and deserves such ample attention.

AMELIE TRIEU / HEIGHTS EDITOR

THE HEIGHTS’ MOMENTUM AWARDS

Thursday, May 5, 2016

C5

Eradicate BC Racism sophie reardon

DREW HOO / HEIGHTS SENIOR STAFF

L

ast April, I met with three graduate students outside of Campion Hall under a warm, spring sun and budding cherry blossom trees. Shaun Glaze, LGSOE ’16, Chad Olle, LGSOE ’17, and Sriya Bhattacharyya, LGSOE ’16, had just created an infographic with the breakdown of AHANA students and faculty at BC, and I was writing an article about it. Little did any of us know that this would be our first of many interviews together, nor did I realized it would lead to the inception of Eradicate Boston College Racism.

Since our meeting, Eradicate managed to lead a wave of protests to oppose the lack of administrative initiative in addressing or even acknowledging institutional racism. At the same time, it created a supportive, inclusive, and tight-knit community for students who see and who face racism at BC. The group walks in stride with movements occurring at other college campuses across the nation, including Yale University, Brown University, and the University of Missouri. Eradicate aims to go against the grain, to make people feel uncomfortable, to hold a mirror up to BC community members and ask them to really look at themselves and evaluate the ways in which BC institutionalizes racism. They dare to speak out against the University, often without the administration’s approval.

Eradicate’s tactic is not to be subtle. From

flying a banner reading “Eradicate Boston College Racism” over the Commencement ceremony last May, to singing Christmas carols about white supremacy on BC’s campus, the group has become one of the most contentious, yet vocal and influential, student groups on campus.

G

laze, Olle, and Bhattacharyya met in Leigh Patel’s Critical Race Theory class last spring.

They decided to take what they had learned in Patel’s class about racial justice and apply it to the BC community in the form of the infographic on racial inequality.

“As a teacher, as an instructor, that’s amazing to see—that people interact with some of the things that happen in a course and then run with it, move well beyond the course,” Patel said.

In the fall, Eradicate was confronted with more constraints from the administration, which provided an opportunity for it to critique the University. Members of the group distributed fliers that read “BC SILENCES ANTIRACISM” after the administration did not allow them to distribute a flier that promoted an upcoming lecture on race. This bold accusation by the group did not go unnoticed—the fliers were immediately removed from campus.

As Eradicate began to speak out in more prominent ways against the University, BC students began to take notice and joined the

movement. The group currently has about 20 active participants and a broader scope of about 50 students who participate in its major events, such as protests.

Gloria McGillen, LGSOE ’17, who was classmates with Bhattacharyya, Olle, and Glaze, joined Eradicate because she believed in the importance of its message, and she wanted to support her friends of color who experienced racism on campus.

“I came to BC to be trained as a clinician ... and if I’m not seeing that reflected in the institution that’s teaching me, then I think I have a responsibility to help speak out against that,” McGillen said.

While Eradicate stirs the pot on campus, it also stirs the pot during its monthly potluck dinner. The dinner, which is open to any and all students interested, provides students a space to engage in dialogue with other students about the racism they see on campus and how they believe it can be combatted.

“It’s not just doing activist stuff together,” Bhattacharyya said, “It’s also recognizing that being a student on this campus is hard, and we’re here for each other for that.”

A real turning point for Bhattacharyya, she said, was when she attended Modstock last year to hold up posters in protest of institutional racism. She was asked by a BCPD officer to leave, and when she did not comply, he put his hand on her, she said. For the next six months, Bhattacharyya feared coming to

Jere Doyle& Kelsey kinton S A

connor murphy

lot of people used to say that Jere Doyle, BC ’87, didn’t have a real job. When he graduated and went to work for a five-person startup in Spain, his friends all said it. So did his parents.

Everybody thought he should go to an established company and work there forever.

But Jere Doyle likes a good, healthy dose of risk, so off he went to run marketing for a small tourism company based in Marbella, a resort city about an hour’s drive from Gibraltar. Within six months, he had expanded marketing efforts from English to Dutch, German, and French. Not bad for a 22-year-old kid from Philly.

Together with Kelsey Kinton, BC ’12, Doyle runs the Shea Center for Entrepreneurship, a new Boston College initiative that debuted last September to give some infrastructure and mentorship to students in BC’s budding startup scene. Doyle is the managing director of Sigma Prime Ventures, a major Boston venture capital firm, so he’s less worried about the logistics and more focused on his vision for the Center. Kinton is the assistant director, handling all the day-to-day stuff like organizing the Center’s packed slate of events and working with Start @ Shea, the Center’s 20-member student board.

They have this sort of mantra that they both told me separately: The Shea Center is like a startup in a 150-year-old company. With that comes a challenge—you have to build it the right way.

“Startups are much more likely to die of indigestion than starvation,” Doyle said. “They try to do too much, too early, and it just kills them. So we’re going to try to make sure we don’t do the same thing here.”

Sure, they won’t starve, but they’re still hungry.

D

oyle’s three great loves are literally—perfectly—his family, Boston College, and entrepreneurship, and the Shea Center is very much his baby. Through Sigma Prime Ventures, Doyle is plugged into the Boston startup ecosystem.

He also works with a lot of alumni, like Tom

Coburn, BC ’13, who founded the online marketing platform Jebbit, for which Doyle is a major investor and mentor.

“He’s a valuable adviser to the Center in the sense that he’s an entrepreneur, too,” said Claudio Quintana, a member of the Start @ Shea board and CSOM ’16. “He brings that passion and that experience, and it’s pretty valuable for students to have access to somebody who’s actively involved in a lot of companies.”

Doyle did some talks at BC about his experience, judged the BC Venture Competition a couple of times, and he felt like BC needed to be doing more to give students the types of opportunities that could be found at Harvard or MIT, with their centers and innovation labs and countless Cambridge tech startups.

When Doyle went to Dean of CSOM Andy Boynton and University President Rev. William P. Leahy, S.J., with the idea for the Center, they jumped on it. And last spring, following a donation from the late Bay Area venture capitalist Edmund H. Shea, Jr., the Center got up and running, though it was largely under wraps for a few months until its official announcement.

That’s about when Kinton came into the picture. She found out about the Center last year, right around when the donation was made, and took the opportunity. After graduation she spent three years at a nonprofit marketing firm for the city of Boston. The firm’s goal is to boost the local economy by promoting hotels and restaurants, and the job gave her a unique perspective on the booming Seaport District. Working at the Center would give her the chance to get BC more involved.

Plus, she’s a big fan of Shark Tank.

Doyle is a big ideas kind of guy, hugely ambitious but also pragmatic and results-focused.

As they’ve worked together over the past year, he’s become Kinton’s mentor. “[Jere’s] all over the place,” she said. “But he’s always available and very approachable.”

He pushes her to think bigger and smarter, to be more analytical. Kinton suggested that they start an internship program for this summer, for example, and before agreeing Doyle wanted to

know why, how, where, and who—thinking like an entrepreneur, basically. And it’s pretty clear that his thinking tends to be successful. pain was the beginning. Doyle left that small marketing company to get an M.B.A. at Harvard. Then Spain was the middle, too: when the company started struggling, he went back and turned it around. After the company sold in 1997, Doyle started Prospectiv, which helped connect retailers to customers online during the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s. Rather than go under when the bubble burst, as so many companies did, it found a niche and started Eversave.com, one of the largest online retailers at that time.

After that sold, too, he struck out on his own, launching Jere Doyle Enterprises and a couple of angel investment funds.

Still, it took about 20 years for Doyle’s mom to come around and decide that he had a real job. One of his companies was featured in The Wall Street Journal, and she figured that was as good a sign as any that he had made it.

Doyle always stuck to his guns, even when everybody questioned his career moves, and that drives his vision for the Shea Center. It’s about confidence and exploration.

“He knows just how much you can do and the potential that you have when you decide to work for a startup and experience the culture,” said Robbie Li, former co-chair of Start @ Shea and CSOM ’16. “He wants students to be curious enough to try that.”

Doyle and Kinton’s goal is for students to want to go to work for a startup, which they think is the best way to learn about business.

With the debut of an entrepreneurship co-concentration in CSOM, they want to combine classroom learning with co-curricular and experiential learning.

“I feel like a lot of BC students feel like they should go to the big consulting or the big finance firm at graduation,” Kinton said. “I think that working for a small business you get to do a lot more than you would at a bigger company.”

The Shea Center doesn’t really care about starting companies, though some great ones, like Jebbit, have come out of BC. Coburn left school early when the company took off, and Doyle made him promise he would come back and finish his degree. Getting a versatile liberal arts education and learning as much as possible about career possibilities is what matters most to Doyle and the Center.

Li said Start @ Shea is an opportunity to spend time around people who think like he does. He’s interested in the culture of the startup, the constant questioning of how

campus, especially when she saw a BCPD officer. While an investigation was ordered into the matter, the findings have yet to be released.

Although Eradicate was founded by graduate students, McGillen said, it now also has active undergraduate student members.

The undergraduates have more of a connection to other student groups on campus, which has allowed Eradicate to join together with several other groups, including Climate Justice at BC. “There is a really remarkable consistency of the issues and frustrations and pains that people have, which I think speaks to the fact that the institutional climate is very similar across the two groups,” McGillen said.

While the University, for the most part, chose to publicly address racism with silence, Eradicate continued to scream and shout about institutional racism at BC. In November, during the question-andanswer session following a talk given by the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, 30 members of Eradicate stood up in the crowd with signs that said “Eradicate #BostonCollegeRacism” and wore duct tape over their mouths in protest of the institutional racism at BC. One of the members also took the stage, talking for 10 minutes about the inherent racial hypocrisy at BC. In December, the group organized a protest during which members of the group began outside of the doors of a Board of Trustees meeting in Gasson Hall and then walked across campus, singing Christmas carols with altered lyrics, including “Leahy Baby” and “Walking in a White Man’s Wonderland.” This event was part of the group’s “12 Days of BC Racism” campaign, which was held over the 12 days before Winter Break. In addition to caroling, the group raised money from BC alumni, gave gifts to supportive faculty members, and distributed fliers that compared BC’s responses to racism to other universities’ responses.

Eradicate’s shouting has been heard across the country. It has been featured on NPR and in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside

Higher Education, and The Nation magazine.

This summer, members of Eradicate will host a workshop on combating institutional racism on college campuses at the annual convention of the American Psychologists Association in Denver, Col.. The group will present its six-point “Tool Kit,” which is a guide for students interested in creating a movement on their own campuses. There will be several thousand people from across the world at the convention, McGillen said, and many students who combat racism at other universities, including Missouri and the University of Kentucky, will be in attendance.

“It’ll be a good chance for us to continue deepening relationships with people like that and also helping bring new people into this movement,” McGillen said.

When I met with Eradicate last week, it was a bittersweet encounter. We convened in a lounge on the fourth floor of McGuinn.

As each member walked in, he or she sunk into the couch with a sigh of exhaustion, the end-of-the-semester crunch taking its toll on everyone.

When the conversation moved from papers and exams to Eradicate, however, smiling and animated faces replaced the sullen expressions of the over-worked students.

We reminisced about our first meeting under the cherry blossoms and laughed about the number of emails we have exchanged over the course of the year—scheduling interviews and discussing Eradicate’s upcoming events.

With some of the members of Eradicate graduating this year, we began to talk about the future of the group.

“Eradicate responds to what’s happening on campus in the moment, so it’s not necessarily like we’re planning on being around for forever,” Bhattacharyya said. “We’re not trying to institutionalize and become a body.

It’s important that student groups form in a moment where there’s an important need to fill and to resist against, and I think as the University continues to display things that we can actively resist against then that’s what our work will be.”

things work.

“For me, the learning experience has been that you can disrupt things,” he said. “You can always find problems with the current system and find ways to fix that problem.”

Before the Shea Center, there was always some uncertainty about the status of the entrepreneurial scene at BC. They never knew if the University was going to keep funding events, Li said. But Doyle and Kinton have added a formality to the movement, a vote of confidence from the school that it cares. The BC Venture Competition is now run by the Shea Center, as well as the Elevator Pitch Competition, in which students with business ideas are given one minute to sell their product or service to potential investors. Those programs have big prizes—$10,000 for first place in BCVC, which was awarded on Monday to Emocean, a musicstreaming service started by two alumni and two current students.

Another goal of theirs is to open up entrepreneurship to a wider audience, to make the Shea Center a focal point for innovation at BC. One thing that means is making the culture more inclusive by getting a wider range of students involved, particularly people with engineering and computer science interests who may not otherwise consider working for a startup. Quintana said that the Center is definitely moving in the direction of focusing on software, and Doyle said very few startups of any kind exist nowadays that don’t make some use of fairly advanced technology.

There’s a social aspect of this work, too: seeking out more female founders is one of

Doyle’s biggest goals.

Elyse Bush, MCAS ’16, is a co-founder of ModilMe, a clothes-sharing service that lets students rent out their unused clothes.

ModilMe won for Best Service at this year’s Elevator Pitch Competition and spent several weeks this spring in the Shea Center’s new accelerator program, which gave Bush and her coworkers access to funding and mentors.

The Center hosted a female founders panel this year, which Bush said was encouraging.

But she also thinks more needs to be done.

“Even in entrepreneurship, it can very much be male-dominated,” she said. “I had to become really comfortable with going to events full of BC men.”

So there’s work to be done. But who better to do it than Jere Doyle and Kelsey Kinton.

A

fter we talked, Doyle took me downstairs to see the actual center, a brightly lit room with giant whiteboards for walls and a big conference table. It’s easy to imagine as the office for a five-person startup.

Two people were in there working on laptops. One of them was probably an undergrad, the other looked a little older, maybe a grad student or a BC employee.

“What are we doing in here, innovating, studying?” Doyle joked. He’s a magnet, taking over the room, flipping it upside down, making us all think a little harder.

They laughed.

“A little of both,” the kid said.

Doyle smiled. Perfect.

JULIA HOPKINS / HEIGHTS EDITOR

THE HEIGHTS’ MOMENTUM AWARDS

C6

Thursday, May 5, 2016

“She has a certain draw to her. I don’t know what it is, but she does.“ - Alex Stanley, MCAS ’16

LIAM WIER / HEIGHTS STAFF

Cai Thomas alec greaney

T

here’s a certain energy that emanates from Cai Thomas.

It’s not something that’s easy to describe, if you recognize it at all in the first place. You can’t meet her without immediately knowing she’s different from the average college student, because right away she looks different, just based on her clothes.

She started out the first of her four years at Boston College wearing mostly athletic garb for a couple semesters, before eventually settling on the “uniform” you see her in today: a printed button-down shirt, black jeans or dress pants, and a baseball cap. Like her hair, her fashion, which comes from mostly the Gap, Grand Frank, and H&M these days, is distinctly her.

“I’m definitely nowhere near Obama, but I remember him saying having a uniform is one less decision he has to make in a day,” Thomas said in an email.

“It’s really simple and what I’m most comfortable in.”

But it’s not only her clothes—dressing like a hipster doesn’t automatically mean you can command a room the way she does. Yet the producer and filmmaker still has the natural ability to both stand out and then blend into the background when she needs to.

“She has a certain draw to her,” said Alex Stanley, an audio assistant on a few of her projects, a former sports staffer on The Heights, and MCAS ’16. “I’m not sure what it is. But she does … I’ve heard other people say that it’s somewhat intimidating. You kind of want to impress her.”

Stanley had a soft smile on his face as he said it, as he did for most of the time he spent talking about one of his best friends. After a few seconds, he added: “She’s super confident, too. That might have something to do with it.”

U

nlike many of the people I talked to about Thomas, I don’t have a clear recollection of the first time I met her.

Like me, she has worked as an undergraduate employee with Video Services, a department at BC that handles requests for filming classes and events. The office, buried in the dreary basement of Campion Hall, was where I first saw her around last winter. As a freshman new to the job, I just wanted to keep my head down and get through my three-hour shifts.

That’s not at all how Thomas works. Combine that with the fact that our shifts haven’t overlapped very often, and we didn’t talk much. But I distinctly remember the first time our interests really aligned in a conversation about a year later.

She had organized a digital media panel called “Black: We Are Here,” featuring writers Jamilah Lemieux and Rembert Browne, the latter of whom wrote some of my favorite all-time pieces for Grantland during its heyday. She was mediating the panel, a job that required her to research the finer points of their work. When I made an offhand compliment about Browne’s writing on Grantland, I suddenly had her undivided attention. We spoke a little about his work and then shared a laugh about the perfection of Browne’s analysis of a Nicki Minaj photo alongside several boys at a bar mitzvah. I then recommended she listen to an appearance he made on an episode of Longform, described on its Web site as a podcast with “a weekly conversation with a non-fiction writer or editor on craft and career.” By the time I’d finished telling her what it was about, she had already pulled it up and begun listening to it.

That might be the biggest difference between Thomas and everyone else: She doesn’t beat around the bush. There’s no fluff, no bulls—t. If she takes an interest in something, she’ll pursue it and ask about it, hungry to know more.

If she doesn’t think something’s important, she won’t entertain it.

At this point in her life, she has a pretty good sense of when she’ll find someone interesting—in her words, when she’ll “vibe” with them. If the signs are good, she won’t hesitate to go right up and ask them if they or someone they know have any good stories, if they’ve heard of a project she could collaborate on. That approach worked with Kirsten Johnson, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, who Thomas went up to with “a little spiel.” The pair clicked, ended up having dinner, and have kept in constant contact since.

It’s this part of Thomas that has allowed her to build up a vast network across the country—she says there are few metropolitan cities she could go to without a connection. It took a little more to make her latest project, an international endeavour, happen. Specifically, she needed the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which she entered as a graduating high school senior. The competitive program has provided Thomas with scholarship help and career support services for the past four and a half years. That Foundation, besides helping her out one time when she got stuck in Cleveland pursuing an opportunity to work on a movie set that fell through, allowed her to complete her latest film project: a trip down

to Brazil to work with Sonia Dias and WIEGO—Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing—on the Gender Waste Project.

The project was intended to empower women, who work at “cooperative sites” (a.k.a. trash pits) to sort out recyclable materials from garbage. For every kilogram of paper the women collect—that’s about 200 sheets of 8.5 x 11-inch paper, for reference—they make 12 cents of reais, which is just about 4 cents.

It’s extremely hard to support a family doing it, but many have no other choice.

In capturing their struggle, Thomas had to work around not only the foreign location to film, but also the language gap. She was forced to bring along a translator from BC and remain silent for many interviews, not wanting to reveal she only spoke English, which could make her subjects uncomfortable.

“As a filmmaker, especially as a camera person, you just want to blend in and sort of just tell the story,” she said.

The film, which took countless hours to edit over the course of the past couple of months, premiered at Arts Fest this past weekend. But that’s just one of the more recent trips she has made in pursuit of something that attracted her. She has been pretty much everywhere—Brooklyn for a summer internship at How to Tell You’re a Douchebag, a film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; Phoenix for Major League Baseball’s Diversity Business Summit in March; Telluride, Col., for an international film festival, at which she almost bought Rachel McAdams popcorn when the actress forgot her debit card.

Oh, those are just a few highlights from the past year.

She has been so many places in the last several semesters that she has trouble recalling them all.

Yet, she almost always has something new on the horizon. She is missing her last day of college classes today because she’s at the White House with 24 other student journalists as part of a program called Newsroom U. This will allow Thomas and the others to meet with the press secretary team (and hopefully, maybe, President Barack Obama) and then produce stories about the upcoming election.

After graduation, she’ll be off for 10 days to Northern Ireland, where college-age students from across the world will meet to discuss peace-building through economic development. Then she’s heading to Birmingham, Ala., telling environmental film stories.

And that’s as far as she knows, at least for now. Thomas almost always has a new project she wants to pursue, a new story that has piqued her interest and is therefore about to suck up sizable portions of her near-endless energy in the weeks to come. That’s just the way she likes it—after all, she puts in more effort to pursue them than just about anyone. Her projects are almost never a “random opportunity that just came up,” a phrase she used to describe her White House venture. They’re the result of putting in the time to build a resume and applying for everything.

That filming in Brazil? The costs were covered by a grant from BC, which allows film students to go abroad and make a social justice documentary. The internship on set in Brooklyn? Those high expenses like rent and food were covered by BC through the EAGLE Summer Internship Stipend. The Telluride Festival, the White House trip, the Jackie Robinson Foundation—all those opportunities were opened to her because she sat down and applied to them.

“A lot of people don’t want to put themselves out there all the time because they’re afraid to be rejected, or because they don’t really know in what way it’s going to tangibly manifest itself, they don’t know if they have the time,” said Molly Boigon, another one of her best friends and MCAS ’16. “There are a lot of things that hold people back from embracing opportunity, and Cai finds opportunity everywhere, and constantly.”

All of that could seem impossible at a school like BC, which isn’t rich in film resources. Thomas laments the general lack of access to equipment, but appreciates that the program is small enough that she can send out a few texts and usually borrow what she needs to shoot. Even if it were harder, Thomas would find a way to make things work—probably by applying somewhere to get more equipment.

“I bet you right now she’s applying for something online,” Boigon added.

Actually, she was filming in The Heights’ office, about which she had taken a sudden interest in doing a small project less than a week after our interview.

But close enough.

I

f there has been anything that put Thomas on the map at BC, it was her appearance on NESN Next Producer, a competition for which she produced a five-minute film on Blake Bolden, a former BC hockey player and the first African-American player in the CWHL as a member of the Boston Blades. Thomas was one of 10 finalists on the show, an especially impressive task considering she did much of the filming and editing on her own.

Sports in general have been her main focus at BC—including both her films on Bolden and Lou Montgomery, a highly talented running back for BC just before World War II and the first black football player at the University. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s not what Thomas is really about.

“I’m trying to move away from that,” Thomas said. “Do more news stories, do featurettes and things of that nature. I realized that I don’t want to be cutting highlights or working at a sports network, I want to do stories that are going to have an impact on people.”

She has sought to have as profound an effect as possible on her fellow students here. As a gay, black woman, she has been heavily involved with promoting on-campus events for both LGBTQ and AHANA students.

Just as she holds high expectations for the people she works with, she has them for both the student body and the administration. She was disappointed with the low turnout at her digital media panel, where just 25 people, mostly from Boston, came out to listen to two of the country’s best writers, in her eyes. She is disappointed that the University doesn’t have more AHANA faculty members.

But that’s why she tells her stories—she can’t change everything at once, but she can keep seeking out injustices where she finds them and present them to the world in her own way.

No one is exactly sure where Thomas will end up after she finishes up in Alabama this fall, but at the same time no one is particularly worried about her finding a good path to head down.

Like her Twitter and Instagram handles say, Thomas aspires for greatness.

She is well on her way.

LIAM WIER / HEIGHTS STAFF