Originally published in the inaugural edition of Carroll Capital, the print publication of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Read the full issue here.
Brenden Picioane ’23 loves to cook anyway. Why not take the hundred bucks on offer and cook for his favorite professor and closest Boston College friends? The Carroll School’s Take Home Prof program gives students a stipend to buy groceries and treat a faculty member to dinner.
From left: Ricardo Pereira, MCAS '23, prof. Thomas Wesner, Brenden Picioane '23, and Patrick Cadogan '23
“This is a cool opportunity to get to know a professor in a less formal setting,” said Picioane, a business analytics and computer science student, on an early spring evening in the Thomas More Apartments. Picioane invited Thomas Wesner, associate professor of the practice of Business Law and Society. “BC prides itself on the quality of its professors, and you can tell with ‘Wez,’” said Picioane. “His curiosity, his passion—he brings all that to cultivating the next generation.”
On the menu: duck legs, smoked sausage charcuterie, and egg noodles with mushrooms and onion. As Wesner dined with Picioane and his classmates Patrick Cadogan ’23 and Ricardo Pereira, MCAS ’23, a chorus of compliments on the meal turned to talk of the consumer trends on which Picioane’s family business rises and falls—his father is a butcher in Queens. After many summers selling meat in farmers markets, Picioane would soon start work as an associate at Maryville Consulting Group in Boston.
“I’m excited about post-graduation life,” said Cadogan, a finance student, as the seniors discussed their futures. “I’m just building the skeleton of what that’s going to look like,” he added, but “the whole-person education and broader perspective” he gained at Boston College was helping him figure out what companies he didn’t want to work for. “That moral framework I have now is so important.”
“We were taught to use our advantages to lift others up,” put in Pereira, a graduate of the Carroll School’s Summer Management Catalyst Program, run by Wesner. “Your business law class made me decide to major in philosophy for pre-law,” added Pereira, and now he was mulling law school offers. “You just made my day!” Wesner exclaimed, and the two high-fived.
“I’m so impressed with these students,” Wesner said after the dinner. “I’ve seen them grow so much in four years. It’s great to have a chance to hang out with students and see all the progress they’ve made. It brings people together and fosters community—that’s who we are and what we do.”
