Originally published in Carroll Capital, the print publication of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Read the June 2025 issue here.
Nicole Robertson ’20 was restless. Confined at home during the pandemic, she signed up for an online wine course, hoping to recapture some of the magic she had felt exploring viniculture in Italy during her semester abroad. At the time, Robertson was working at an investment bank in New York. The relative freedom of remote work in an industry known for long hours in the office gave her breathing room to consider what she really wanted.
Taking the wine course changed her life. When she returned to Italy for a month during a work sabbatical to volunteer at a vineyard, Robertson fell in love with the country again. Then she went back to Tuscany for a second weeklong visit. She recalls telling herself: “Okay, relax. Reflect on yourself. You’re free to think about what you want to do with your life.” She began plotting to live in Italy as a finance professional.
Nicole Robertson '20 in Italy.
Her story turns a light on the unforseen pathways taken by members of the Carroll School of Management’s Class of 2020. They graduated into a world turned upside down by the Covid-19 pandemic. Five years on, alums are still feeling the impact. For many, the pandemic opened windows in ways they could not have imagined back then.
Robertson wound up taking a highly unconventional route. Last year, she left her job in mergers and acquisitions at UBS, where she had interned during college. On a six-month student visa to study the language, she went to work as an au pair in northern Italy. (For a time, several thousand TikTok fans followed her leap from investment banker to au pair.) Now, Robertson is closer than ever to her ultimate goal: She works 20 hours a week in finance with an Italian luxury hotel company.
Some graduates say the Covid-era disruptions made them question a straight-line career trajectory in favor of a path that felt more meaningful.
Karina Singhal ’20 is undergoing a career shift that traces back to feelings that welled up in her in the deepest throes of the pandemic. “We were all suffering. Suffering is always all around us,” she reflects. “So it just underscores the importance of taking care of one another.” At the Carroll School, her concentrations were marketing and entrepreneurship, which she parlayed into a consultant’s role in the applied design group at Deloitte in New York. While working on team projects to design delight-the-customer applications for clients, her thoughts turned to other ways of caring for the customer.
Karina Singhal '20.
After three years, she left Deloitte. Singhal had been accepted to Harvard Business School’s 2+2 Program, which offers delayed admission to gain two to four years of work experience. She spent a year studying and teaching yoga and meditation—“that has always been important to me personally”—and working in ground-floor hospitality jobs, including as a mixologist at a sake bar. “I loved having that face time with guests, picking up on the minutiae of the guest experience,” says Singhal, who sees the hospitality industry as an expression of care for customers and one’s self. Now, through her MBA coursework at Harvard, Singhal hopes to blend design thinking with the self-knowledge and practical experience she has gained to create memorable moments for customers.
Navigating unexpexted obstacles was no small task for those thrown into a world upended by Covid. In the pandemic economy, Sean Sullivan ’20, WCAS ’22, whose concentration was finance, had trouble landing a job in the industry. So, to pay the bills right after graduation, he began working as a concrete laborer on a Brooklyn high-rise project.
The job was a way to save for Plan B: return to Boston College for an additional year of eligibility as a track and field athlete while attending graduate school. He earned a master’s in project management at Woods College of Advancing Studies and is now an assistant superintendent at Suffolk Construction in Boston. “I had my share of uncomfortable decisions,” Sullivan says. “But five years later, I’m still living in a city that I love with close friends from my time at BC and with a career I have seen a lot of success in. To me that’s a better outcome than Plan A.”
Sean Sullivan '20
The turmoil all around Sullivan had instilled in him a greater sense of empathy and purpose. Across the street from the high-rise site where he worked as a laborer was a mobile morgue for Covid-19 casualties. In the streets below, marchers protested the George Floyd murder. At the time, Sullivan felt despair, but he says the struggles made him more sensitive to the needs of others. Today, he relishes his role as a servant-leader at work, ensuring safety on the construction site and removing hurdles for crews before they encounter them. “I hate getting asked, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’” Sullivan says. “It’s because five years ago I would have given you a completely different answer than where I am at now."
There was a time when that sort of unpredictability would have unsettled Ryan Sugrue ’20: One of his personal obstacles was a lifelong discomfort with uncertainty. Sugrue had studied business analytics and marketing, with an additional major in philosophy. He knew where he was headed after graduation—to a marketing job at Wayfair, where he had interned. He remained at Wayfair, but along the way, he embraced change and growth—for example, by stepping up when the company needed help creating inclusive marketing programs geared to diverse audiences.
“My life is so different now,” says Sugrue, who also came out as gay. “Covid taught me that you never know what’s going to change two, three, four, five months from now because life happens. Just live more in the present. That’s an important lesson I got from it.”
