This conversation is part of the BaccRag’s Alumni Project, an initiative to help BSGE students learn about life after high school by reaching out to our school’s alumni and talking to them about their experiences during and after their time at BSGE. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This is a conversation between the BaccRag and Amalia Carusone, who graciously accepted the BaccRag’s interview request. Amalia graduated BSGE in 2011 and earned her Bachelor’s in International Relations and Business from Boston University. She then began working in public relations, and is now the Senior Manager of Internal Communications at Chanel. Over the course of this interview, Amalia gives advice to current BSGE students and discusses her time at BSGE, her experiences at Boston University (including a study abroad experience), and her career.
I want to start by talking about your experience at BSGE. How was that? What was your experience like?
Amalia Carusone: Yeah, so I went to BSGE for middle school and high school, as I think most of the students there do and I had a really amazing experience there. I loved my time at the school, not only because of the teachers and classes, but also because I made some lifelong friends who I still talk to today. I know Jolijt [the founder of the BaccRag] is the one who introduced us and Jolijt and I met when we were in 7th grade so we’ve been friends ever since. So I’ve made a bunch of friends and I just have a lot of great memories. It was a really enjoyable time, a really great place to go to school.
So you were friends with Jolijt; were you also part of the BaccRag?
Amalia Carusone: I was not part of the BaccRag, no. I had a few friends who were part of the BaccRag…I was part of Helping Hands and I was part of Yearbook. I was the co-editor of the yearbook, which I guess would have been like junior or senior year, and then I probably was part of other things that I am forgetting of now because it was a while ago, but no, I wasn’t part of the BaccRag…I think everybody who went to BSGE always had some kind of extracurricular. I think at times, especially when you get to the older grades and start prepping for college, at times it was tough just to balance school workload and then all the extracurriculars, but it was really fun just to have another way to spend time with friends and do something that wasn’t school work. So for Yearbook, for example, I remember it was basically a group of other students in my grade who essentially were all already my friends and we kind of built it together. And then same with Helping Hands. It was a really good way to meet people in different grades and just do something outside of the regular classroom that was fulfilling and fun and you still learned a lot.
When you’re thinking back on your time at BSGE now that you’ve had a whole other world of experience outside of and after high school and you’ve met all these people from very different backgrounds, what do you think is kind of unique about BSGE as a high school or middle school experience? And what did you like most about it?
Amalia Carusone: Yeah, I mean I really think it was the culture. I think it’s a very unique thing to go to a school in New York City, where my graduating class, I think, had maybe 60 kids in it…so it’s like 60 people that you know for 6 years. You know everybody’s first and last name and where they’re from, and I think it just brings you closer, in a way, to your graduating class just because it is so small. And so I think that that’s what made it special. I think also, I remember the work was always really interesting, but it was also a lot of work and sometimes it was challenging. I think the IB program really did prepare us for college because then when I got to college, I was like, ‘oh, this isn’t so bad’. Like the classes weren’t as hard as I was expecting them to be. So I think in those ways it makes the school really special because you make lifelong friends, but then you also are actually prepared to take on the next step in college.
Were there no incoming ninth graders? Was that not really a thing?
Amalia Carusone: There were. There were like a handful of them, but it wasn’t a huge group of people. I remember a few people who I’m still friends with came in at the ninth grade and then also some people left at the ninth grade level or right before ninth grade started. So I think it evened out because we had some people going in and some people going out. I don’t remember exactly how many though.
So there are some teachers, actually, that I wanted to ask you about that are still here and were teaching when you were a student. There’s Mr. Wolov, Shantanu, Miss Kumar, and Peter Wilson, who just left. What was your experience with those guys?
Amalia Carusone: Yeah, you’re really testing my memory…I loved all of our teachers at BSGE, and I think we had relationships with all of them and different relationships with all of them, because they had different teaching styles and different personalities. I don’t remember like specific things for each of those that you mentioned, but I saw Mr. Wolov recently, because a couple friends of mine who also went to BSGE, we went and helped with the 7th grade admissions, and so we were just catching up, and I think we all had our own teachers that we were very, very close with. So I have good memories of all of them. I don’t remember specifically their classes because I think I had Shantanu in the 7th grade, which at this point is literally 20 years ago. So I don’t remember the specifics necessarily, but we were super close with a handful of the teachers and even the rest of the staff as well. So definitely good memories there.
Getting into a little more recent history, — hopefully it’ll be easier to remember — what was your experience like at Boston University? That’s where you were?
Amalia Carusone: Yes, that’s where I went. BU was amazing. I miss it all the time, just like I miss BSGE sometimes. It was a really, really fun 4 years and again, very similarly to BSGE, I made some lifelong friends there and just have really incredible memories. The school itself was also a very good school. I feel like I got to take some very cool classes. I majored in International Relations and Business so the classes and the teachers were all really interesting. I think the thing I remember most, just related to BSGE is that coming from BSGE, I thought I really wanted a small college because I wanted to maintain that feeling of going to a small school and knowing everybody and really having that sense of community, so when I got into BU, I was excited to go to college, but I wasn’t crazy about the thought of going to BU just because I knew how huge of a school it was. And then I got there and pretty much immediately changed my mind because, you know, I made my friends. You start classes and you find your own community even within the big school. So the transition was a lot better than I thought it would be. But yeah, Boston was a great school to go to, and it’s in the city so it’s not like other Boston schools where they’re a little bit on the outskirts. It’s right in Boston, so you get the best of both worlds of having the college experience, but then you’re also in a major city and you can go out into the city anytime you want.
So when you were in college, were you going off-campus a lot to do a lot of stuff?
Amalia Carusone: Yeah, I think it was like a mix. I think your…freshman year, you tend to stay more on campus because you’re there most. But the older we got, we would spend more time off campus, going to events and concerts and stuff and Boston’s a major city, but it’s also kind of a small city, so it was definitely easy to explore. Just going off campus like on Saturday if you wanted to. You just take the train downtown.
What are some of your favorite memories of your college life?
Amalia Carusone: That’s a really hard question. I think that’s a really hard question. I don’t think I have one that stands out. I met my 3 closest friends freshman year, and then I lived with them all throughout college, and all through senior year. So I think that was really special just to have consistent friends to live with and people that I really loved always around me. We were in Boston at kind of a weird time, I was there for the Boston Marathon bombing, not to get super dark, but we were there for that, so that was definitely a scary experience that we still think about sometimes, but then also we were there for really fun things, like I said, the best part about the school is being part of Boston and being in the city. So we were there when the Red Sox won the World Series and I was there when the Patriots won the Super Bowl and you get to celebrate with people and get to really see the city come alive for all of these different events that make you feel like you’re part of the city and not just on campus. But I would say all of my memories have to do with really just being around all of my friends and you kind of just have all your friends living next to you, which is really fun. And then I also studied abroad when I was in college. I went to London and so that would definitely be a huge highlight for me, because that was 4 months living in London with your friends, you’re in a new city and it was just like an incredible time. So I think about that very fondly as well.
Your experience in London, what was that, was that just a semester? What were you studying?
Amalia Carusone: Yeah, it was it was a semester. I would say BU has a really strong study abroad program. Most people study abroad their junior year. So I studied abroad spring junior year. I was in London from, I think, January to April or January to May. And where you go depends on what you’re studying, but the program in London was for pretty much any major. So we would go to class and I studied International Relations. The classes I took were more related to British history and European history. And then we also did an internship while we were there. So we got to get some work experience while we were there as well, and lived right in the city. So it was very fun.
What university did you do the study abroad experience at?
Amalia Carusone: It’s with BU. So BU has its own satellite campus in London. So all the students were BU, and there were all BU teachers, and they have housing just for BU students. So that’s what made it special too. It was like it was just being at BU, but in London.
Was it a lot of culture shock? How did you (if there was any), how did you deal with that?
Amalia Carusone: There was a little bit. I wouldn’t say it was culture shock. I would say it was things that we just had to learn, right, just from being in a new city, we had to do an orientation before we left as part of the program where they talked to us a little bit about what to expect when you live there, things to do and not to do, the culture of living in London, British culture, et cetera. So, they tried to help us a little bit, but I think there wasn’t a ton of culture shock because we all came from a big city going to another big city. So it wasn’t a huge adjustment for people.
Once you graduated college, what was your journey from graduation to your current job?
Amalia Carusone: Yeah so when I graduated, I got a job at a magazine publisher doing corporate communications, and that is really what started my career in communications. I started shortly after college, I moved back home to New York and then immediately started applying for jobs, and I started a few months after graduating and spent a little bit of time there for 3 or 4 years, and then I decided I wanted to continue in communications, but I wanted a different type of experience. So I went to a PR agency where I had clients, where I would consult on communications work for them. And then finally, 4 years ago, I moved to my current job. So I jumped around a little bit and got to try a bunch of different industries and different types of companies, which has been fun. But yeah, it was pretty much right after college.
What made you want to pursue a career in communications?
Amalia Carusone: I kind of just fell into it. I think when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I started looking at my transferable skills. Being an International Relations major, you have to do a lot of writing. It’s a lot of research and editing. It’s a lot of relationship building and working in teams and working with other people. And so I didn’t necessarily want to go into a government job, which I think is what a lot of people do with that kind of major. So I looked at what my transferable skills were and what could be applied to any other job, and I think communications lined up pretty well, and I enjoyed it. So that’s kind of where I stayed.
What do you do in your day to day? What does that look like in comms?
Amalia Carusone: I say no two days are the same. I think with comms it’s a lot of working with different teams around the company to help them announce certain things. So it really depends on the role, but right now I work in internal communications, which is communications internally for employees. So it’s not the same as PR. It’s a lot of meeting with different teams and trying to understand what they’re trying to announce. It’s a lot of writing, obviously editing, sending things for reviews and approvals and things like that. A lot of meetings and emails, I would say, but the biggest part of my job is meeting with different teams and helping them communicate things that they’re working on.
Do you have any cool stories from your professional career?
Amalia Carusone: Let me think. The first thing that comes to mind is that working in communications, depending on where you work and what kind of job you have, you can go to some really fun events. So when I was working at the magazine publisher, which was called Time Inc, I got to go to Aspen in Colorado for the food and wine festival because food and wine was one of the magazines that we worked on. So that was really fun. I would say the events and the travel can be a perk sometimes if you like that kind of stuf, just because it’s interesting and fun to see.
Are you a big travel person? Do you travel outside of work as well?
Amalia Carusone: I try to, yeah. I try to do a couple trips every year. I’ve been to, oh, God, I’ve seen most of Europe. I think next, where I would want to go is South America. I haven’t been to South America yet…or even Asia, Southeast Asia. I’ve only been to Thailand, but I haven’t seen the rest of Asia, so definitely would like to do bigger trips. I do a lot of weekend trips so definitely would need to plan a bigger trip.
What advice would you want to give to a BSGE student, could be about college, about career?
Amalia Carusone: I would say for the older kids who are applying to college, definitely make the most of your college experience when you get there. Take different types of classes, take classes that sound interesting to you, even if you wouldn’t normally take them, join different clubs, join different groups, try to meet as many people as you can, because like I said, with BSGE, but even college, the best things that I got from them was obviously a great education, but it really was the friendships that you make and the people that you meet that was always the most rewarding part for me. So I would say definitely try to take advantage of everything that you can when you get to college and study abroad if you can do it because it’s very fun.
How do you feel like the skills you learned in high school transferred to college afterwards? I know you mentioned college felt easy because of IB. If you could talk a little more to that or to something else.
Amalia Carusone: I think the writing was a huge thing. I got to college and would have to write these huge papers for my classes, especially junior and senior year, not a thesis, but thesis-style papers that were very long, and I remember people in my class kind of struggling with it, and I was like ‘oh, we always had to write really long essays in BSGE’, and it didn’t feel — not to say that it was easy; it was still very hard — but it didn’t feel brand new. And I would say the managing of the workload helped. The workload that we had at BSGE and the type of work that we had that was a lot of heavy reading and writing just helped [me] prepare for college because that’s a lot of what college classes are, especially if you’re in a humanities major like I was. It’s a lot of reading, writing, and memorizing. So I feel like everything we did in class for BSGE helped me prepare for college.
Is there anything else you’d like to address during this interview, anything you think would be noteworthy or anything you would have thought I should ask, but I didn’t?
Amalia Carusone: No, I think those are the main things. I would just say enjoy your time at BSGE, because we all loved it, and we always wish we could go back. So definitely don’t take that time for granted. And then enjoy college as well because that’s also a really special time that goes by really, really quickly. You’d be shocked at how fast it goes by. 4 years sounds like a lot, but it flies by.
We would like to thank Amalia Carusone so much for taking the time to speak with us. If you are a BSGE alumnus or you know a BSGE graduate and you would be interested in participating in this interview project, please contact the BaccRag at [email protected].
