Students find success by making values-driven choices that positively impact those around them, according to Belle Liang, the opening speaker at the second Boston College Summit.
“It turns out that’s the research definition of ‘purpose,’” she said to the roughly 100 attendees in Gasson 100. “It’s living a life that’s personally meaningful in a way that’s intended to contribute to the world beyond yourself.”
Liang, a professor of counseling, developmental, and educational psychology, addressed the Summit with advice on how to navigate college—and life—with a purpose mindset. Her speech preceded speeches by Aziz Rana, the J. Donald Monan, S.J., university professor of law and government, and Rachel Spooner, an associate professor of the practice in business law.
The Summit is an annual event dedicated to topics of identity, action, and leadership, co-hosted by the Women’s Center, Office of Student Involvement, Career Center, and Thea Bowman AHANA and Intercultural Center.
Spanning two hours Wednesday evening, this year’s Summit featured a shorter, revamped format compared to its inaugural event last year. It also marked the second year since its rebranding, when it merged the themes of previous conferences, such as the Women’s Summit, the AHANA Summit, and Leadership Day, into a single program.
Liang’s opening speech laid the groundwork for the following two, which encompassed similar themes of leadership, success, and navigating life.
Liang said students often find themselves with either a mindset of “performance” or of “passion,” caught trying either to succeed for the sake of succeeding or to chase happiness and forgo all discomfort. But these mindsets often lead students to feel overwhelmed and unable to flourish.
“If both of those first mindsets that many of us have used in order to navigate our lives don’t work well—they don’t lead to success and happiness—is there an alternative?” she said.
She said her research has led her to the answer: a different mindset—one of purpose.
“The misconception that many people have is that purpose is like finding your one true love,” Liang said. “Actually, purpose is not something that is outside ourselves. It’s the story you tell yourself and others about why what you’re doing matters to you.”
When students face problems and seek answers only externally, it’s “like using someone else’s map to get to their home, not yours,” she added.
Liang said students should seek “meaningful relationships, formative experiences, and intentional reflection,” her three main ingredients for cultivating purpose.
Rana, an expert on constitutional governance, spoke next about leadership—not in the context of an institutional leadership position, but as an unspoken responsibility to the people around us—and how it interacts with intersectionality.
He discussed how each person is a combination of distinct identities, so everyone is both an insider and an outsider in each of their communities.
“We’re people with very particular experiences, but those experiences aren’t defined by single identities, but rather how those different identities interlock,” Rana said.
“One’s experiences are a manifestation of combinations that produce new and very different kinds of realities.”
Seeing from an outsider’s perspective can help individuals better understand others’ experiences and foster empathy within their communities, Rana said.
“No matter how comfortable one might feel or how excluded one might feel in a specific place, we’re always, in truth, a kind of stranger,” he said. “We’re a type of intimate stranger. This is something that we can take as a real gift.”
Taking advantage of that perspective, Rana said, will make people better leaders in every community they find themselves a part of.
“If you think about leadership as your behavior when in community, it strikes me that the most important thing is to operate with respect to others based on principles of inclusion, solidarity, and collaboration,” he said.
Finally, Spooner, the author of Tales from a Professor’s Office: An Insider’s Guide to Thriving in College, gave practical advice on maximizing the college experience.
She emphasized three attributes that make students thrive: reliability, curiosity, and relationships.
Reliability, she said, means actively seeking out ways to make others rely on you, like showing up to every class five minutes early or doing extra readings in case someone ever needs the supplemental information. This extra effort turns into “great opportunities,” she said.
“Reliability is what gets you into the room,” Spooner said. “Curiosity is what makes it worth being there.”
To foster curiosity, she recommended that students actively listen to others and develop consistent news-reading habits, among other things.
She ended her segment by emphasizing the importance of relationships as a foundation for success, citing a study which found that when students had “a professor who cares about them as a person,” their chances for success in life “nearly doubled.”
“That has nothing to do with your major, the classes you take, or your GPA,” Spooner said. “I’m here to encourage you to think less about those things and more about building meaningful relationships while you’re in college.”
To build these meaningful relationships, she recommended joining community-based classes, going to office hours, and spending time with people who share your values.
Flanking Spooner’s and Rana’s speeches were short roundtable discussions, mediated by volunteers. At the end of the event, emcee and organizer Liz Payne, MCAS ’26, led a short reflection, asking students to think about how they would apply the lessons to their own lives.
Payne, a senior who said she learned about Summit during her freshman year, said the event is an impactful, formative facet of BC.
“I am so proud of all of the work that the planning team, the speakers, the students, and especially the facilitators have put in tonight to making this all possible,” Payne said. “Summit, for me, has always been a chance to reflect and learn about myself and the leader I want to become, empowered by speakers who have instilled in all of us the power of possibility and purpose.”