Student Spotlight: Maddie Curley, Headed for Embassies and NCAA Finals
Growing up in Cohasset, Ma., there was one thing that motivated young Maddie Curley – lacrosse.
“Lacrosse is a huge part of people’s lives in Cohasset. If you don’t play, you’re crazy,” said Curley, Pardee’18 and a member of BU’s Division 1 lacrosse team. “As a young kid, I’d see the college lacrosse players come back to town and be treated like celebrities. I thought, I want to do that.”
Cohasset’s a small town on the South Shore, short on the opportunities for kids that some nearby communities boast. Lacrosse and its potential for scholarships to college gave Curley a path out, but she had bigger ideas, and they grew from a lifetime of discussing current events at the dinner table with her father, an alumnus of the BU Pardee School.
“My dad always expected me to be knowledgeable about what was going on in the world, and talking about global affairs was how we bonded,” Curley said. “He taught me that you solve problems by showing up, putting in the effort, and most importantly, leveraging relationships between individuals.”
It was these lessons that inspired Curley to work with the Cohasset school district in her junior year to develop its first international service program. Curley engineered collaborations between the science faculty, students and the school board to put together a program allowing students to travel to Costa Rica to study critically endangered leatherback sea turtles.
“In Costa Rica, sea turtle eggs are a delicacy, and laws against poaching are rarely enforced,” Curley said. “We spent nights patrolling the beach under armed guard, trying to protect the nest sites. Three weeks after we left, a group of volunteers doing the same work was kidnapped by poachers and held for ransom.”
Weaving together the threads that animated her – lacrosse, environmental justice and international studies – is what brought Curley to the Pardee School, finding time between studies to help the BU Women’s lacrosse team advance to the 2014 Patriot League championship.
“I’ve never played with such an amazing group of girls,” Curley said. “We’ve agreed that our motto for next year is, no excuses. We’re going to the NCAA finals.”
Though her lacrosse scholarship precludes traditional study abroad, Curley said she hopes to attend the London School of Economics for a summer session in 2016.
“I want to work in an environmental or financial policy organization, or maybe even an embassy. One of the big things I’ve learned here is to take chances, big ones,” Curley said. “I don’t want to leave this world without knowing I made a difference.”