Biography | Bernadette Meehan — The Gothic Tower Hall Where She Took a Political Science Degree

People treat a future ambassador as someone who studied diplomacy from the start.

Bernadette Meehan left this Chestnut Hill campus as a political science major with a Wall Street job already signed.

Boston College lists her with the class of 1997.

The college's own magazine later named her as Bernadette Meehan '97 when she came back to talk to undergraduates.

Gasson Hall is the stone tower building that still marks the old campus on Commonwealth Avenue.

Charles Donagh Maginnis designed it. The tower opened in 1913 as the Recitation Building, later named for Thomas I. Gasson, S.J.

A visitor today sees the same Collegiate Gothic pile that framed her undergraduate years.

Meehan was born in the Bronx on 3 August 1975 and raised in Pleasantville, New York.

She finished Kennedy Catholic High School in Somers in 1993.

The year before that she spent a summer as an exchange student in Río Gallegos, Argentina, through a Pleasantville program.

At Boston College she took political science without a fixed plan for what came next.

In December of her senior year she accepted a financial-analyst post at J.P. Morgan.

That first job, and a later vice-presidency at Lehman Brothers, filled the seven years between this campus and the Foreign Service.

She joined the State Department in March 2004.

The building on this hill did not teach her Spanish or Arabic. It did give her the degree the later résumés all cite.

The campus is public. The hall is a working classroom building, not a private house.

Stand on the lawn and the tower is the thing you came to see.

Photo: John Phelan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons