Nearly ten years ago, Elizabeth Glina, BA ’23, visited Faneuil Hall during her first trip to Boston as a 16-year-old prospective college student from Texas. A lengthy exchange with one of the young National Park Service guides at the site planted a seed. The park ranger told her someday maybe she’d have his job.
“It was the first time I really thought seriously about what a career in history might look like,” says Glina.
A few years later, Glina walked into a history class at Suffolk and was stunned to find that the ranger, Shawn Quigley, BS ’14, was also her instructor. Later he became her colleague when she, too, joined the National Park Service.
Full-circle Suffolk moments like that are surprisingly common within the world of Boston history.
While researching her article for The Revere House Gazette last fall, Michele McCue, Class of 2026, came across a previous paper from another Suffolk alumna. Coincidences like these prompted her to create a department-wide database for tracking and spotlighting alumni doing exciting work in the field, so other students can see what’s possible.
Jennifer Steele, BA ’19, one of the first alumni featured by McCue in a departmental social media campaign, recently returned to campus to share career advice with students in Professor Madeline Williams’s Honors Public History in Practice class, describing how she and so many other alumni were finding rewarding and vital careers outside the default paths of a history major: teaching and law school.
Whenever she walks into an event or historic space in the city, Steele says she’s confident she’ll recognize a Ram. “I feel like we’re kind of dominating the historic sites in this general area,” she laughs.
Matthew Wilding, BA ’06—Revolutionary Space’s senior director of interpretation and future planning—and other alumni credit Suffolk professors with nurturing students who love history but might not see its practical application into the professional successes they are today.
“Suffolk does a better job than any other school I’m aware of in encouraging a network of both professors and students,” he says, remembering how Suffolk faculty helped him, a self-described “unrefined but enthusiastic kid” break into a field that isn’t traditionally known for welcoming newcomers.
“Suffolk is a school that gives you the opportunities that you’re willing to ask for,” says Wilding. It’s that self-starting quality, so often the mark of a Suffolk student, that Wilding now looks for when hiring his own employees at Revolutionary Spaces.
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spring 2026
National Park Service Ranger Shawn Quigley, BS ’14, is one of many Suffolk alumni now working at Boston historical institutions like Faneuil Hall. Photograph by Adam DeTour
By Andrea Grant
By Andrea Grant