When life didn’t go as planned—and it rarely does—these Gulls found the strength to pivot, persevere, and redefine what success looks like.
Let’s be honest: life doesn’t play out like a polished LinkedIn post. Behind every title, job offer, or highlight reel are the edits we don’t see—the doubts, the near-misses, the reroutes.
Soundings spoke with three Endicott alumni who learned this firsthand. None of their paths went exactly as planned. But in the curveballs and course corrections, they uncovered clarity, courage, and careers rooted in purpose.
Changing the Narrative: Tacy Cresson ’20
When both of her parents passed away during her childhood in small-town Delaware, Tacy Cresson’s world was upended.
Jim and Corinne Cresson were journalists and storytellers respected for their unwavering dedication to honest, impactful journalism, who once owned and operated their own local newspaper. “Our dinnertime conversations were about the local and national headlines of the day,” Cresson said. “To me, my parents were superheroes.”
When she wasn’t in school, Cresson tagged along with her dad as he covered stories, which meant attending political convenings, council meetings, and protests, then returning to the Cape Gazette newsroom to write stories for the next day’s press.
After their deaths, Cresson moved to New England to begin a new chapter. College seemed financially out of reach, but to her, it was the path to a better future. Although she was still young, the move sparked the belief that she could accomplish anything she set her mind to. “When I toured Endicott, I knew immediately that it was the right place,” she explained. “It felt like home, and I knew it could also open doors for me.”
To support herself, she juggled three part-time jobs: residential advisor, tutor, and Editor-in-Chief of The Endicott Observer. She didn’t have a safety net, but she had a vision and ambition. A journalism and digital media major from the start, Cresson found a mentor in Associate Professor of Broadcast and Digital Journalism Lara Salahi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist.
“The first time I met Professor Salahi was profound,” Cresson said. “I just looked at her and saw her as a reflection of exactly who I wanted to emulate and become after four years at Endicott. She believed in me from the get-go.”
Junior year, Cresson accepted an internship at the Cape Gazette, which brought a mix of emotions. Grief. Nostalgia. Uncertainty. When hesitation crept in, Salahi challenged her: “You know your purpose and exactly who you are. Don’t back down now.”
Cresson leaned into the opportunity and started breaking stories. After graduation, she returned to Delaware full-time as State Press Secretary for U.S. Senator Chris Coons. It was a demanding, high-stakes role, with the adrenaline of the newsroom, but with the power to shape policy.
Returning to Delaware had once been an emotionally complicated experience, but it ultimately became a turning point.
“For a long time, I associated Delaware with loss,” she said. “Delaware is not what took everything from me—it’s actually what gave everything to me.”
As a journalist, she knew that local news could drive change. Inspired by her father’s legacy of beat reporting on politics, she focused on the same: telling stories that mattered and holding power accountable.
“When I worked in the Senate, it felt like the stars aligned,” she said. Her deeper motivation was connecting constituents’ concerns to real policy work, seeing firsthand how public service, when done right, can make a difference.
“People do believe in helping others, and they believe in doing that by shaping policy. I was focused on that and didn’t let anything else get in the way.”
Eventually, Cresson shifted her focus—not to slow down, but to make a more tangible impact that felt personal and meaningful. Since 2022, she has worked in corporate communications at Sallie Mae, helping students and families navigate higher education financing—a challenge she once faced.
“The path isn’t always easy. I could’ve easily let my life get in the way of becoming who I wanted to be,” she said. “But I changed the narrative. I focused on the good, and hopefully, for the rest of my life, I can continue to do just that.”
Weathering the Future: Dan Slagen ’07
“Ask me anything except about outer space,” said Dan Slagen, Zooming in from his Boston Seaport office at Tomorrow.io. The Forbes Top 50 CMO is helping steward the weather company’s plans to predict natural disasters and help people brace for them using the latest space and AI technology.
To start, he wanted to talk about the messy, nonlinear path that led him there—and how Endicott served as the launchpad.
Growing up in Concord, Mass., Slagen was different—and not just as the Armenian-American kid on the block. “My whole life, I always found myself thinking the opposite way of the group,” he said. Teachers often labeled him a contrarian.
Luckily, Slagen’s parents—a nurse and a psychologist—encouraged him to lean into it. When, as a high school sophomore, he realized his grades weren’t strong enough to get into a four-year college, Slagen transformed overnight into a much more dedicated student.
During his campus tour, Slagen leveled with an Endicott admissions officer: “Look at me. I’ve been surging in the last two years. Don’t you want me to come here and just keep the rocket ship going?”
“College was everything to my story,” he added.
The first day of an introductory marketing class lit a fuse. “Within 30 seconds of the class, BAM! I knew that this guy was speaking my language. He was such a creative thinker—he was not mainstream,” Slagen said. Over the next four years, he took all of Viner’s courses.
“Marketing is my jam,” he quickly realized.
After graduating in 2007, right before the recession, Slagen was hired by CSN Stores, Wayfair’s predecessor. “The salary was like $29,000 a year. They literally just lined you up at a table with 100 other grads and gave you all the same assignments,” he said.
His first campaign was to market bathroom products. It wasn’t glamorous, but while pitching his idea to a packed room, he realized, “I’m showing up with something different from everyone else.” Finally, thinking differently had become his superpower.
Slagen’s career accelerated. He transitioned from a communal table to directing teams of 100 and managing substantial budgets at HubSpot. He began getting featured in prominent outlets such as The New York Times, NBC, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and BBC for his marketing expertise. In between, he founded and sold SpeechBooth, a visionary video-tech startup, and got married.
The journey wasn’t turbulence-free. “I’ve been fired before. I’ve failed many times,” he admitted. But he never let that stop him.
When Tomorrow.io called, he was intrigued, but also cautious. The role came with a fraction of the resources he was used to. At the same time, his wife was pregnant with their first child.
He hesitated. But the mission—to use AI and weather data to protect lives—hit home. He thought about the world he wanted to leave his kids, and wanted his work to matter.
Over six years, Slagen and his small team put Tomorrow.io on the map. “We got millions of people to use our app—including seven million farmers in Kenya,” he said. “The space stuff is part of it. As we’ve built out the software, we’ve also been building satellites in the background.”
Earlier this year, he stood at Cape Canaveral with his dad and kids, watching one of those satellites launch into orbit.
It wasn’t the path he planned, but it’s one he’s proud to have taken.
Reverse Dunk: Taylor Geas ’15
Taylor Geas never planned to be a writer.
She also never planned to be a copywriter and then senior writer for the Los Angeles Lakers, responsible for crafting the stories, video scripts, and deeply felt features that reach millions of fans on NBA.com. But seven seasons in, that’s exactly where she landed, writing pieces like “Why Kobe Bryant Stays With You Forever,” which stop readers mid-scroll and stay with them long after the final line.
To many people, including Geas, it’s a dream job. But like many dream jobs, the path there was anything but linear.
Aspiring college journalists constantly approach her for informational interviews, and while she’s not trying to be mean, she’s burst a bubble or two.
“There’s this expectation that college is supposed to be the best years of your life, and you’re going to have so much fun, and you’ll figure out exactly what you want to do when you leave,” she said.
Spoiler alert: For most people, “it doesn’t go like that at all,” she added.
In fact, Geas had no idea she even wanted to write when she was at Endicott. Growing up in a sports-worshipping household in Springfield, Mass., she saw herself on the field, not behind the scenes. Soccer was the dream. Endicott was the platform. And her mother—raising Geas and her brother on her own—“bent over backward to make it work financially because that was just her mentality for anything her kids ever needed,” she said.
Geas felt guilty even spending money on textbooks, so she cut corners by washing the football team’s grass-stained uniforms and saved her energy for the field, where she played with grit and ambition. But eventually, reality hit.
“I had put all my eggs in the soccer basket, even though I knew I wasn’t going to make it as a professional player,” she said, crediting Associate Athletic Director and longtime Head Coach Jodi Kenyon with preparing her for the real world.
“She pushed me to gain a competitive edge and a relentlessness. Without that, I would never have reached where I am in my career.”
She graduated with a degree in psychology, uncertain and adrift. What do I even like? The question haunted her.
Geas enrolled at Emerson for integrated marketing, still unsure, until a professor handed back an essay with a B and a blunt mandate: You have to be a writer. That sentence rerouted her life.
At his suggestion, she studied creative writing at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and worked at a prestigious advertising firm. It all clicked. Only she couldn’t get a work visa.
She was forced to start over again. This time, she reunited with her two best friends from Endicott in California, where she searched for writing jobs. It was rough. Most HR departments ghosted her.
“I’m a loser,” she once complained to her dad. But she built her own path: launched a blog, mailed handwritten notes to creative directors with a quarter taped to each and a note that read, Heads, you bring me in for an interview.
Then the unexpected happened. The Lakers called.
The job combined everything she loved: sports, storytelling, and connection. Geas had finally found her place—not through a master plan, but by staying open when everything else fell apart.
Her next goal? Writing a memoir—one that delves into the untold parts of her story. “Writing it would be healing,” she said, “and I hope it would be relatable and healing to a lot of other people, too.”
The rest, for now, remains off the record. But someday, she’ll tell it all—in her own words.