Three words encapsulate your Northeastern University experience:
Supportive | transformative |collaborative
Why did you choose Northeastern?
I started working at Northeastern six months after getting my bachelor’s degree with no real idea of what industry I wanted to go into.
I liked the Northeastern brand (even though I knew very little about the university) and I liked the subjects it is known for. I also liked what the mascot represents (intelligent, energetic, hardworking). I was very much “trying out” higher education, and I’m so glad I did!
What kinds of challenges have you encountered in your journey here and how have you learned from them?
One challenge is trying to synthesize the avalanche of information you’re given in a short space of time. My advice is to block off time to just think (preferably, while walking). And read Build a Second Brain by Thiago Forte.
With challenges, come opportunities. Navigating an organization this complex gave me a headache by the end of every day for my first month or two. But the opportunity that came from that was the ability to work with likeminded colleagues who are looking to challenge assumptions and create positive impact.
Alessandro Zampi
Have you learned anything about yourself during your career at Northeastern?
I’ve learned that I can be more patient than I realized. In my former industry, hospitality, everything was always full speed, and I loved the adrenaline. Higher education is much more complex, and moves must be planned further ahead. I’ve grown to appreciate the longer game.
What advice do you have for someone considering higher education, either as a student or as a career?
Invest time learning whatever you can about the university. It is an unbelievably enormous, interdependent ecosystem, and the better you understand it beyond your role, department, and college, the better you’ll be at your job.
At the same time, Northeastern is no different from any other organization in that it is made up of people, so prioritize cultivating genuine relationships.
What inspires you every day?
Confronting intuition-based decision-making and “best practices” by bringing scholarship to the business environment.
Alessandro Zampi
Where do you see yourself in the near future?
Still at Northeastern! I love CPS. What and who we are is less obvious than the other colleges, but I think that is our superpower. We aren’t tied down to an identity, and this gives us the freedom to innovate.
We are all more than our jobs. What interests or passions do you have outside of work?
Other than food, travel, reading, watching movies/tv, hanging out with my partner, and seeing friends and family, I love any kind of board or word or card games. I’m unbelievably lucky that my partner works in travel and exploring the world is a core value of his. We went gorilla trekking in Rwanda in 2022, Japan in 2023, and now we’re going to Kenya and Tanzania in August of this year for some safari.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I’m just grateful for the folks I get to work with everyday.