Sabrina Pangione noticed this in her first year in finance.
“It was a strange feeling,” says the business student, now in her fifth year. “I felt like, 'Oh, I belong here because I like finance, like everyone else does, and we all want to work in the same industry.' But something was missing.”
Looking around, Pangione wasn't sure if anyone else in the room was a member of the queer community. Maximillian Rampulla also noticed this in the business ranks. “I didn't see myself reflected in my peers very often,” she says.
So in February 2020, Pangione, Rampulla, and two friends and fellow entrepreneurs at Northeastern teamed up to revive a dormant LGBTQA student organization at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business that could fill that void. The organization called Out on businessquickly gained membership and now, almost a year and a half later, has about 60 students in its classes.
“Having that space to talk about these kinds of things with business students is very beneficial because then you know you're not alone,” says Pangione, who was vice president of operations for Out in Business during its first year. “It's one thing to talk to a colleague who's an ally or to talk to another classmate,” she says. “But it's another thing to be able to talk to someone who has experienced firsthand exactly what you're going through.”
“In other clubs, the common experience is that we signed up,” says Michael Ambrozia, one of the co-founders who served as student body president for the first year. “Whereas at Out in Business, these shared experiences aren't just because we're all part of the same club. It is that we all share a unique identity. It's really this shared personal experience.”
Although the students were just starting Out in Business when the COVID-19 pandemic swept the US and forced everyone online, Ambrozia, Rampulla, Pangione and co-founder Brian Miller simply turned to the virtual space. Out in Business has an active Slack channel, hosts twice-weekly Zoom meetings, connects on Instagramand has found many other virtual ways of connecting them together.
The twice-weekly meetings alternate between what now club president Rampulla, who was vice president of marketing for Out in Business for the first year, calls “social meetings and business meetings.”
Sometimes the group hosts representatives from industry leaders for workshops and talks about the industry or how to stand out as a job candidate. Other gatherings are more informal, focused on connecting with each other, alumni or other queer industry professionals and sharing stories and strategies on how to deal with discrimination in the workplace. Out in Business also held their own case competition, in which members formed small teams to develop mock business plans.
For Rampulla, a fifth-grader, Out in Business has provided an important space for business students to talk about their LGBTQA identity in the workplace.
“I think it's easy for us as students in a North East bubble to think it's not that hard to be queer anymore, but once you talk to people who are actually in the workforce, it made me realize why we need this club and help me figure it out for myself,” he says.
Hearing a Northeastern graduate talk about microaggressions they'd experienced at work prompted Rampulla to think about an interaction he had with a colleague during a co-op.
“One colleague said, 'You remind me a lot of my gay friends,' and did a gay impersonation [stereotype]”, he remembers. “I didn't recognize it at first, but I thought it was kind of funny.” And after hearing a graduate talk about how her queer identity isn't supposed to be a point of discussion or judgment in the workplace, but is supposed to be judged by her work, “it made me understand why I was uncomfortable with it. “
Another topic that often comes up in the group is if (and when) you should reach out to colleagues or employers. Do you put the club on your resume? Bring it up in a job interview? Are you choosing to hide this part of your identity?
While the decision to share one's identity is a personal one, based in part on how safe a person feels in their environment (among other factors), Out in Business members say they felt empowered by the choice to be open about their jobs.
In a partnership two years ago, Ambrozia chose to keep his sexual orientation a secret. But when he returned to the same place after co-founding Out in Business, his perspective changed from “I don't really want anyone to know,” he says, to “I want people to know this about me. I want it to be a part of who I am. And if they don't like it, then I don't like the company.”
He took the same approach in a job interview this year, coming out during the interview to a potential boss, presenting his identity as part of what he would bring to the role (a marketing job). Of this experience he says, “I got the job.”
Pangione is proud of how far the organization has come in just a year and a half, from just four people connecting virtually.
“Our last meeting last semester” started as an organized small group discussion, he says. But the whole group ended up getting together and watching music videos, many of which were by LGBTQA artists.
“It was so much fun to see everyone come together as a community and listen and laugh together,” Pangione says. “It was at that moment that I said, 'OK, this works. People really enjoy this organization.”
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