Meet Maarten Eenkema van Dijk, E’14, MS’15! Maarten has been making an impact in his field since his time at Northeastern—whether it’s by building structures in Hudson Yards, taking a co-op to design luxury villas on the island of Mauritius, or leading the largest recycling systems supplier in North America as they help New York City sort their waste. Additionally, he recounts his experiences at the four Global Leadership Summits that he has attended, and why members of the Northeastern community should consider attending GLS in London this June

Meet Chloe Gold, Khoury’22! Chloe is currently a product manager for an advertising firm in New York City, and credits her co-op experience with helping her begin her professional career. We’ll discuss the impact of being a well-rounded Northeastern student, helping students find the perfect co-op, and what makes a great resume.

Meet Peter McKay, DMSB’86! The CEO of the AI-powered security platform Snyk, Peter was recently named a Boston Globe Tech Power Player for 2025. In this episode, we’ll discuss his impactful co-op experience, the best management skills needed to be a CEO, and advice for those looking to start their own venture.

Learn more about Peter and Snyk

I believe in servant leadership,” says Marcy Reyes, MS’14, with a passion so fervent that it can be felt through the phone. “Living in my authenticity is supporting my students however I can. I want to guide them and encourage them more than anything. I want them to come out with a ton of expertise and knowledge that peers in their field aren’t going to have. As they say, the juice is worth the squeeze.”

Reyes has always been the type of person who strives for what she wants in life. After a successful undergraduate career where she thrived academically and found her passion for finance, she set her sights on one of the country’s most prestigious M.S. in Finance programs at Northeastern University.

While earning her degree, Reyes was able to combine her professional interest in finance with her selfless worldview by learning teaching techniques for financial strategy. She took her first plunge into the world of education after graduation through a Northeastern alumni mentorship program. “I mentored a handful of Northeastern undergraduate students,” she explains. “I believe in giving back. It was important to me to stay involved and help some of the students after concluding my master’s program.”

Reyes makes it very clear that her career goals are rooted in servant-based leadership—an approach to leadership that focuses on serving others and empowering them to achieve their own success. She credits Northeastern with providing the tools that helped her shape these goals. “Northeastern played a really important role in my servant leadership style,” she says. “It had a huge impact. It gave me the confidence to embrace very complicated concepts, pull them apart, and build from there.”

Upon graduation, she entered the workforce and climbed the ladder at Commonwealth Care Alliance, ascending to a senior director position. Additionally, she has held adjunct professor positions at both Rhode Island College and Providence College, teaching personal finance, financial analysis, and financial concepts to undergraduate students. However, her true passion for teaching shines at Financial Literacy Youth Initiative—colloquially known as FLY—a nonprofit she founded to teach financial strategies and empower youths in underserved communities.

“My education at Northeastern led me to teaching undergraduates. Through those experiences, I began to identify gaps in access to financial literacy, which is where FLY came from,” she says. “I don’t think it’s fair that because I could afford it, I could embrace the big opportunities.”

Founded in 2017, FLY has now expanded from 300 students per year to an average of 2,500—with as many as 7,500 participating at any given time, and programming becoming available across the Northeast. Despite these large numbers, FLY still curates financial literacy curricula to reflect individuals’ personal life experiences, whether in financial planning, investing, insurance, or other related areas.

It’s very clear that Reyes is on a trajectory that will not only make a positive impact on her professional career, but also on the lives of thousands of people—and she’s only just beginning. “My confidence came from Northeastern,” she says. “It played a very important role in where FLY is today and what it is going to be. Without my education there, I don’t know if I would have been able to set up a nonprofit on my own or get it to where it is now.”

Meet Samuel Akinin, E’16! An accomplished entrepreneur, Samuel’s businesses span across the country of Namibia, providing Namibians with everything from easy bank access to affordable housing. Hear how his Northeastern experience influenced him to become an entrepreneur and shaped his business acumen! 

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Bob Deacy, CJ’80, never imagined his Northeastern social sciences degree would eventually lead to a long career in the energy industry. “I remember standing on top of an oil rig as we were drilling, and thinking to myself, ‘How did I get on top of an oil rig when I studied criminal justice?’” he recalls. Reflecting on a successful life built on seizing unexpected opportunities, Deacy notes, “It was all very surreal.”

Deacy’s professional journey began at Medford Vocational-Technical High School in Medford, Massachusetts, where he learned the basics of drawing, diagrams, and schematics that support an electrical education. However, at Northeastern, he pivoted towards criminal justice , graduating with a degree in the program’s namesake in 1980.

Deacy’s co-op experiences exposed him to different professional environments and allowed him to develop his leadership skills. At the Middlesex County Sheriff’s Department, his first co-op, he participated in everything from working in corrections to transporting alleged offenders to court. Deacy’s second co-op at First Security, a leading Boston security company, introduced him to business orientation, business development, and personnel management , which laid the foundation for his burgeoning leadership skills. “I attribute some of the jobs that I had with progressing me within my career,” he says.

Deacy developed the framework for his first postgraduate position at Stone & Webster, one of the country’s largest engineering firms, by leveraging his experience in guard service and security systems analysis. In this new role, he helped with security programs for large-scale nuclear plants—not realizing that he was beginning to transition into his next career phase. After moving to Michigan, Deacy began developing the security system for a nuclear plant, where he learned about the industry while applying his background in criminal justice and electronics. From this foundation, he hopped from plant to plant and state to state, working in a number of capacities, from fire protection systems to plant operations, before settling into a role with the Carolina Power and Light Company.

Deacy applied these accrued experiences to new projects at Carolina Power and Light, including constructing natural gas power plants and the pipelines that fed them. “I went into heavy construction for these power plants and pipelines, and then another opportunity arose, where the company wanted to get into natural gas drilling,” he says. “A couple weeks of that turned into a couple years, and the next thing you know, I found myself as the president of a company called Winchester Energy in East Texas.”

At Winchester Energy, Deacy leaned on his Northeastern curriculum and experiences to help guide the company through a buyout from legendary oilmen T. Boone Pickens and Doug Miller. “A lot of the curriculum that I recalled from the criminal justice program dealt with constitutional law, contracts, and things of that nature,” he says. “When you deal in oil and gas, you deal with a lot of leases and overall contract law. My Northeastern degree would always come into play and match up perfectly.” Even his electives in geology proved useful—specifically looking at the formations of mountain ranges to find where the highest levels of oil and gas was being produced naturally.

Now, as senior vice president of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Clinch River Project, Deacy has started building new gas turbines in the pursuit of decarbonization, overseen teams that have helped execute major destruction and demolition projects, and currently leads the development of a new small modular nuclear reactor for the nation’s largest public energy provider. Reflecting on his journey, he credits his Northeastern education for shaping the path that ultimately brought him back to nuclear energy. “I started my career with nuclear reactors, and 45 years later, I’m back working with them. Life always seems to come full circle, and a lot of it I attribute to my education at Northeastern.”

I started my career with nuclear reactors, and 45 years later, I’m back working with them. Life always seems to come full circle, and a lot of it I attribute to my education at Northeastern.”

Meet Adrianne Ohnemus, BHS’20! A doctor of physical therapy, Adrianne utilized her Northeastern experience to its full potential—from her engaging co-op experience to curating her skills in Bouvé’s simulation lab. We’ll discuss her co-op experience, Bouvé’s innovative approach to teaching, and her favorite charity, In My Running Shoes.

Give to Adrianne’s Boston Marathon Fundraiser for In My Running Shoes: https://www.givengain.com/project/adrianne-raising-funds-for-in-my-running-shoes-86039

In My Running Shoes

Boston Marathon Fundraiser

Meet Bill Brown, CJ’93! Currently working as a history teacher and special education case manager at Timberlane Regional High School in Plaistow, New Hampshire, Brown has a long history with working with at-risk youths in Massachusetts and making a difference in their lives. We’ll discuss his interest in Northeastern’s criminal justice program, his experience working with programs like the DMH and DCF, and transitioning into a career in education.

“If I could have told myself in high school that I was going to work for the mayor of Boston, who is the first female mayor of Boston [and]….a mom whose kids go to the same school as mine…I don’t think I would have believed you. I try to remember that, and it does put a lot of things in perspective because I feel very lucky that I have the job that I have,” says Ellen Quinn ‘SSH’13, MPA’18, who serves as director of state relations for the city of Boston aside Mayor Michelle Wu. 

As a high school student in Quincy, Massachusetts, Quinn participated in local political campaigns. When it was time to apply for colleges, she had her sights on Northeastern. Aside from the campus being close to her family, the university’s co-op program and the resources the College of Social Science and Humanities offered to its students—including having former governor Michael Dukakis as a professor—prompted Quinn to apply early decision, knowing she could fully explore her interest in politics. 

Majoring in political science, Quinn quickly built her resume by taking advantage of numerous influential experiences. After completing her first co-op working at the Massachusetts State House for State Senator Michael Morrissey, she packed her bags to live in London for 12 weeks as a part of the Hansard Society Scholars program. She split her time between taking courses at the London School of Economics and interning at the United Kingdom’s Parliament, where she got assigned to Shabana Mahmood, one of the first three Muslim women elected to serve as Members of Parliament. “It was fun because, at least [in the United States], with politicians, their staffs are like 15 or 20 people. But [Mahmood] had one staffer and then me.” This meant getting to frequently interact with Mahmood while learning the administrative operations of a government office and conducting research to support the MP’s efforts of opposing budget cuts and communicating with her district at a town hall in Birmingham.  

After her experience across the pond, Quinn did not settle in Boston for too long. For her second co-op, she worked in the Chief of Staff office in The White House during President Barack Obama’s first term. Some memorable moments include giving official White House tours to visitors, attending the official welcoming ceremony for then-UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and connecting with White House senior staff. This experience helped Quinn narrow down her post-graduate career aspirations as she learned that she preferred state politics over serving in a federal institution. In her experience, “national politics didn’t feel quite as tangential…I couldn’t really feel the impact [we] were making…I liked state and local [politics] because you were a bit closer to the work you were doing.” 

With this understanding, Quinn believed working at the Massachusetts State House would be the ideal landing spot after she graduated stating that she “basically sent [her] cover letter to every single legislator [she] could think of.” Among those recipients was Speaker Robert DeLeo—whose son also happened to be Quinn’s teaching assistant in one of her American Studies courses. “In my cover letter, I was like ‘Oh, I loved my time at Northeastern. If you can do anything for a fellow Husky, that would be great,’” she recalls. That one line caught the attention of Speaker DeLeo, a proud Northeastern alumnus and University Fellow for Public Life, that he called Quinn inviting her to interview—and later be hired—for an open position. 

Quinn would spend the next nine years working in the Office of House Speaker Robert DeLeo, serving as special events coordinator and director of operations. During that time, she would plan various ceremonies in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and staff Speaker DeLeo for events across the Commonwealth. Simultaneously, Quinn obtained her master’s degree in public administration through Northeastern’s part-time program. Looking back at that time, Quinn explains, “[It] was a really great experience. I met a lot of people from across Massachusetts, and I love doing that and learning more about the state…I feel lucky that I got there, especially through a Northeastern connection.”    

When Speaker DeLeo stepped down at the end of 2020, Quinn had to figure out her next move. Acting on an interest in working for the City of Boston she developed in her urban studies courses at Northeastern, Quinn became involved with the Boston mayoral election to replace Mayor Marty Walsh. Admiring Michelle Wu’s work as a city councilor, Quinn volunteered for Wu’s campaign. She can remember her excitement when mayor Michelle Wu was elected and credits a few statehouse connections for helping her land an interview for the new administration, for which she was hired as the director of state relations. Approaching her fourth anniversary in this position, Quinn recalls some significant wins. From securing the city of Boston a seat on the MBTA board to stopping a loud Department of Transportation noise that was disturbing a school in West Roxbury, she shares that her ability to enact real change for Bostonians every day in her role is fulfilling and keeps her optimistic when facing challenges in her field. 

As Quinn expresses her gratitude for her current role, it is clear that her determination was the ultimate catalyst in achieving her professional goals throughout her career. Her advice to students interested in getting involved in politics? Quinn says, “Be willing to try anything because there are so many different aspects of the job. You could be more interested in campaigning, you could be working at a legislative [or] do executive…[Being] open and willing to try everything and do all the groundwork is important.” The next generation of policy changemakers at Northeastern should take comfort in knowing that just two short miles from Huntington Avenue, they have a fellow Husky serving as a strong role model in Boston City Hall. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellen-quinn-3b64b441/ 

Tracy Fink, MBA’90 is a business coach, teacher and speaker who is passionate about showing people how to treat themselves as they would their best friend or client. She is the founder of The Tortoise Institute where she consults with companies and organizations to build awareness and leadership practices to boost individual and team effectiveness. 

Tracy holds an MBA from Northeastern University and a BA in Psychology from Boston University. She completed a year-long Teacher Certification Program at Search Inside Yourself, the global evidence-based emotional intelligence program engineered at Google. She is a mentor/advisor for the Women’s Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship (WISE) at Northeastern University.

Tracy enjoys collaborative cooking, adventurous travel, walking in nature, and college football. She is co-host of the podcast “Our Dead Mothers”.  She and her husband live outside of Boston, MA.