By Michael Blanding
Growing up, Boston Emmanuel, Class of 2023, was no stranger to hard work. Her father, who emigrated from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, juggled multiple jobs—landscaping, delivering newspapers, cleaning houses—and Emmanuel would work alongside him.
“It was the way I got to spend time with my father,” she says. But he always emphasized that her real job was school: “He’d take me to the library and we’d get a stack of books. At night I would read to him until he fell asleep.” Her mother, who came from New York but grew up in Liberia, would get her own stack of books to learn computer programming, teaching herself skills to get jobs.
Life wasn’t always easy for the family. Living in Andover, Massachusetts, they moved more than a dozen times when landlords raised their rent. Still, there was no question that she would go to college. “I’ve always seen that I got to where I am today because of my parents—I never wanted for anything because of how hard they worked,” she says. At Suffolk, she started as a government major, but when she took her first accounting course, Professor John Driscoll recognized her natural talent for numbers and gave her a change of major form.
“I’m a rule follower, and I love the structure—it’s almost like solving a puzzle,” she enthuses. At the same time, she’s just as excited about the human side of accounting. “You are working in teams and you are meeting clients,” she says. “The whole world could run off algorithms, but that’s not who we are. Making those connections with people, that’s what’s important to me.”
Also important, she adds, is that her Sawyer Business School education included courses like Social Change, which gives students the chance to explore business solutions to challenging contemporary issues. “I’m an accounting major, but I still had the opportunity to research social problems,” she says. “The curriculum casts a wide net, and it makes us well-rounded students.”
This winter, she completed an internship at KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms; she’ll return there for a full-time position in 2024, after she completes her master’s degree. And she also hopes to find a way to use accounting to give back. “For me, business with purpose means going beyond the bottom line,” she says. “Yes, we are here to make money and live comfortably, but I think we would all be better off if we could focus more on the greater good.”
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Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
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