Our Star Performers

Student employees have always played a vital role in helping UMass Boston IT perform to the level of excellence it always has, and the skills and experience these students gain while working for IT have helped many of them launch successful careers  after graduation. In our 2023 IT Outcomes we’d like to highlight three of our more recent Star Performers and share their remarkable success stories with you. While there are far too many stories of student employees who have gone on to bigger things for us to include here, we hope that these three can represent the pride UMass Boston IT has in all of them and thank them for all they’ve meant and done for us over the years.  

Ling Zhu

While “remarkable” can be used to describe so many of our student employees, there are things about Ling Zhu that make her story stand out even more. For starters, she had lived her entire life in China and never set foot in the US before coming to UMass Boston for her MBA in 2014. She researched graduate schools all over the US before deciding UMass Boston was the best school in the best location for her to live in the US and pursue her degree.  

She started her studies and began her student employee career as a computer labs consultant in September 2014. After completing year one of her graduate program, she decided she wanted her campus job to be more relevant to her career focus, and after meeting with now Assistant Vice Chancellor of Client Services John Mazzarella, she began a job as a marketing assistant in his department. Here she developed skills she said really helped her after graduating in 2016, especially her work in social media marketing.  

Ling said she didn’t expect to stay in the US long-term after completing her MBA degree, but shortly after graduation she got a job as a marketing associate at MIT (another fine local university) for MIT Press, where she’s still happily employed in 2023. Oh, and in case Ling Zhu’s journey at UMass Boston didn’t sound magical enough, she and another student employee she met here ended up getting married in 2016! Talk about a student success story! 

Shawn Reardon

 Shawn Reardon’s student employee career began auspiciously in the Fall of 2019 when he started with a management position. OK, maybe he wasn’t officially in management, but when he started the night shift in the McCormick AV office, he worked alone and unsupervised and was basically tasked with running the office after the rest of the staff left for the day at 4:00. Talk about starting a job, student or otherwise, with a lot of responsibility! “I was basically running the office alone at night and doing it without anyone overseeing what I was doing,” Shawn recalled.  This phase of his career ended when the pandemic shut down the campus in Spring 2020, but when he resumed his position in Fall 2021 Shawn found out that the office supervisor was on leave (and ultimately wouldn’t return to the position) and he was the only returning student who had worked in the office before. Eventually the permanent position was posted, Shawn applied for it, and the next thing anyone knew history was being made. Shawn was named the new McCormick AV office manager and classroom technology supervisor while he was still working on his degree program at UMass Boston. He is now a part-time student and full-time employee, and greatly appreciates that he no longer has to pay tuition to finish his degree. Congratulations, Shawn, for giving us a very different UMass Boston student employee success story! 

Allison Gross

Was Allison Gross a Star Performer? For those of us at IT Outcomes and anyone who has seen our 2021 and 2022 editions, that call is an easy one. While a student employee at UMass Boston part of her job was handling the graphic design for those two most recent editions, and the skill and artistry she displayed doing so proved that a graphic artist on staff or from the outside wouldn’t be needed to fill that role. And her talent was on display in much more than IT Outcomes. Allison was asked to do her thing on pamphlets, fliers, and on many other occasions when IT wanted graphic art attached to its communications, both in print and online.  

Why else would we call Allison a Star Performer? Well, not everyone gets hired at Harvard Business School (at another fine local university) so soon after completing her undergraduate degree, but the folks in Cambridge were clearly impressed with everything  Allison did at UMass Boston, both academically and as a student employee. She began her job as a faculty support specialist this past July and is quick to credit her experience working at UMass Boston in helping her get hired at HBS.  

We really missed Allison as we put together the IT Outcomes you’re reading right now, but we couldn’t be prouder of her for the work she did with us and for the fabulous career she’s begun just a few miles away. Thanks, Allison!