Nicole Anderson

Senior Associate Director

As Senior Associate Director, I oversee three critical areas: Alumni Career Services, the Career Mentoring Initiative, and Tufts’ largest networking and mentoring community, The Herd. I work in two different departments in two different divisions: the Tufts Career Center in the Division of Student Life, as well as the Office of Alumni Engagement and Annual Giving in University Advancement. I bring three decades serving undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni across all disciplines. Many of the alumni I advise are people I met as students. It is gratifying to be a part of their lives as they transition through their careers.

While Tufts provides lifelong, free career advising for more than 80,000 alumni from Arts & Sciences, Engineering and SMFA, most of our programs are open to the 120K alumni from all of Tufts’ schools.  I partner closely with the Office of Alumni Engagement to connect with the alumni community around the globe.

I am excited to spearhead Tufts’ new Career Mentoring Initiative, piloting four programs that serve first-generation/low-income students, Africana Center peer leaders, early career attorneys, and computer engineering majors.

Before Tufts, I worked at Boston College, my alma mater, where I completed my undergraduate degree in Psychology, graduate work in Higher Education, and began my career in career development.  Over the years, I have committed to serving populations who have been underrepresented on college campuses: international, first-generation, low-income, and immigrant-origin.  I’ve served as co-chair of the International Student Services Committee with the National Career Development Association and Vice President of Research for the Alumni Career Services Network.  I research, write, publish, and present about international student career development.

I live with my son, husband, and puppy north of Boston, and I spend lots of time with my extended and boisterous Irish family.  A lifelong Massachusetts native, I follow the Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins, Celtics, and Eagles.

Most interesting/unusual job: Some of the interesting jobs that make up my career include my very first job in high school assisting a dental hygienist – which I fondly describe as “cleaning spit”; my shortest job (1 day) selling fire extinguishers over the phone; and the most interesting jobs (there are 2) supporting two scientists at different technology companies – a physicist who invented the sensor that assists in deploying the first car airbag and an engineer who invented the first digital camera.