Kerry Buglio

Assistant Dean of Advising & Academic Services, Lover of Bad Puns and Bad Jokes, Rollercoaster Mom

“Describe the most beautiful place you’ve ever been.”

“I would say Alaska. I went on an Alaskan cruise and just sailing one of the days to a glacier and just seeing all the gorgeous waterfalls and icebergs as we sailed through, and the colors... it felt like another planet, it was just absolutely stunning. I’ve been to beaches like the Caribbeans and the Grand Canyon, but Alaska just has such a unique quality to it.”

“What’s a struggle that you overcame in life?”

“I’m a problem solver by nature and that doesn’t sound like a struggle, except that sometimes people talking to you don’t want you to solve their problem - they just want you to listen. So as an academic advisor, you know, my inclination is to help solve problems, but sometimes students just like to have me hear them out. I just learn that through experience.”

“What are you most proud of or grateful of in life?”

“I’d say my education. I struggled as an undergrad and was not a great student, and didn’t have a lot of family support. So getting through college and then also going on to get my master’s degree... In a way, I didn’t pay for that master’s degree. I worked at the university I went to school at and I worked hard to get my education.”

“Tell me something that you enjoy doing.”

“I love rollercoasters. In fact, my favorite kind is freefall rides. I was just on a cruise that had water slides and one of the water slides was a freefall water slide. So you got in, you stand on this platform, and the pod closes over you, and they count down, then the floor drops out from under your feet. One of my favorite rides was a freefall ride in Busch Gardens in Tampa, FL. This one, when you get to the top, it tilts your chair 90 degrees forward so you are facing the ground and then they do the freefall. That’s my favorite.

David M. Carballo

Assistant Professor of Archaeology, Director of Graduate Studies, Mesoamerican Archaeology Specialist, Potential Boston Red Sox Left Fielder, Author, Proud Father

“Where were you, where are you now, and where do you want to be?”

“I was born in New York City, but I mostly grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. I’m an assistant professor of Archaeology with cross affiliations in the Latin American Studies program in Anthropology here in CAS. I’d like to continue at BU and continue in Archaeology. I work in Mexico; that’s where I do my research, I’m still very much interested in that. If anything changed in the future, I’m getting a little more interested in the period of Spanish conquest and colonialism and so that might have me moving through Latin America, but otherwise I just foresee myself as continuing in Mexico for the rest of my life...until I retire.” 

“What led you to this path?”

“I had a less traditional path. I was not a major in anthropology or archaeology, I was a political science major. And it wasn’t until my senior year where I had this class with a very dynamic professor named Anthony Aveni, who is sort of a founder of this field known as Archaeoastronomy. He’s a trained astronomer, and actually was a BU undergrad. who went out to Arizona to pursue his PhD. and became fascinated with the Puebloan cultures, Native American ways of knowing the calendar, and astronomy. He really got me into it. We went to a study abroad program in Teotihuacan, which is where I focus. It was really the mix of a dynamic professor and my study abroad experience that got me into this.”

“What is a struggle that you overcame in life?”

“The major one is the death of my father. He died when I was 10. So I was young and that was of course difficult to grow up without a Dad. But I have a really close family and I’m really close to my mom and sister and they are still here in the area so it’s wonderful to be able to come home. We’re close now geographically and emotionally.”

“What is your most treasured memory?”

“Well, now I’m a dad and I have two young boys. I don’t know if there is necessarily one point, but they come down now to Mexico with me and they are really into climbing the pyramids and into Aztec and Pre-Aztec gods and the feather serpents. They even have stuffed animals of the feather serpents. And we have photos of them experiencing the pyramids and just seeing things for the first time and getting to travel, you really can live vicariously through the eyes of the young.”

“If you could pick a hobby and do it for a living, what would you do?”

“Well, the best job other than being an archaeologist for me would be to play left field for the Boston Red Sox, but I wouldn’t say that baseball is a hobby. I play a little baseball for fun and I was a coach, but that would be another dream job, of course. I am working at least at one of the closest offices in the world to Fenway Park.”

“What are you most proud of in life?”

“As a father, I’m proud of my kids. But for my own specific life, I’m proud that I can balance doing something that I really love for a living. There’s a saying attributed to Confucius that if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life. I mean, that you feel like you are privileged to be doing something in your life and work doesn’t seem so much as work. Sometimes there are difficult parts to the job, but I really enjoy being able to couple something I love in making a living.”

"What would you say if you could give yourself advice from 10 years ago?”

Luke Walsh (CAS’16)

Psychology Major, Education Minor, Warren Towers RA, Admissions Ambassadors Coordinator, CAS Dean’s Host, Scarlet Key Recipient, Passionate Traveler, Kayaker, Avid Pizza Enthusiast 

“What’s your most memorable experience as a student leader?” 

“So two summers ago I worked for Orientation and we did a skit and ours was Scooby Doo themed, and there was this one scene where everyone danced to “My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard.” So, I was the milkshake. The whole Orientation experience, the whole process, was amazing and I loved opportunities to work with the students and see them when they came back to campus in September. But it was funny because people would be like, ‘Oh, you’re the milkshake!’ So it’s funny that out of that amazing leadership experience, people would recognize me as the milkshake, which is very funny. Just being able to unite with or connect with such a wide variety of people and to be able to be viewed as someone they could approach -- and say, ‘oh, you’re the milkshake’ -- I think that’s the tone of what that summer of working at Orientation set.”

“What do you love about CAS?”

“I really like how big CAS is. Everyone’s graduating from CAS, but the amount of degrees that they’re getting and the wide array of classes they offer is pretty incredible. I’m taking an American Families Sociology class that I never thought I would be able to fit in, but it’s very, very cool, and it’s cool to me to think that this is what my peers are studying for their entire four years. So just the huge variety of everything that CAS offers.” 

“What’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?”

“It’s either standing with scuba gear on, standing at the back of a boat overlooking the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, about to jump into the most famous reef in the entire world, or, Milford Sound in New Zealand, which is considered the eighth wonder of the world. It’s amazing. It’s basically like a body of water but it’s been carved by the mountains, so it’s literally a body of water with enormous mountains coming out of it. There’s no sand or shores, it’s literally water hits the mountain and it goes up.

I studied abroad in Sydney last spring, and it was probably one of my favorite experiences at BU. It was just such an incredible opportunity, and the people that I met there were amazing -- I had never met them before, and they’re some of my best friends now. As a graduating senior, I would say they’ve become my best friends. And I also got two international work experiences while I was there; I had two different internships that BU pretty much handed me. I just felt like while I was there I felt so much more free, because I could travel pretty much every other weekend, we went out during the week... It was just a lot of fun.” 

“What’s something you’ll never forget from your time at BU?”

“I think probably just the wide variety of people that I come in contact with every day. And not just in my job that I do every day and the stuff I do on campus. There’s such a wide variety of people in everything that you do. When I go home and talk to my friends over breaks who go to state schools or other schools that aren’t as international or anything as this, to them it’s weird that I know people from Tokyo or Saudi Arabia, but to us it’s commonplace. Which, I think, that global sense of BU that I didn’t expect -- I knew it was there but I wasn’t expecting to be that impacted by it. And I think that is probably my favorite part about BU.” 

“If you could do it all over, what advice would you give to current students?”